Comments on: 47 Years Later, The Palisades Disappeared Overnight

By: T.H. PLATT

T.H. PLATT — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 19:30:25 +0000

I wrote a novel, The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain, set in timber country and Chapter 1 is entitled, Wildfire! Several scenes are set in Pacific Palisades, where I lived on Bestor Blvd. I too recall being evacuated and remember driving down Chautauqua Blvd and seeing a man on a roof with a garden hose fending off a tsunami of flame. I was evacuated a few more times in Los Angeles and San Diego. On hardening a target against fire, I’d add that fire breaks–wide ones from meadows and agriculture or just land cleared of weeds–are a necessity. Also, learn how to reverse your pool pump so you can use that water, separate from the community supply. Wood shake roofs absolutely do not belong in fire zones and whenever you smell smoke, investigate the source! I hope Pacific Palisades will manage to rebuild with some of its original charm intact but I fear the Powers That Be want high density buildings, like Hong-Kong, Vancouver and Miami. The state seems intent on owning the land which means the taxpayers will overpay for the construction. God save California! I hope you’ll read my novel, The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain, https://thedarksideofhungermountain.substack.com and I look forward to your comments.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 20:31:20 +0000

In reply to Mike Montgomery.

@Mike: Yep. This NYT article about people’s visions for rebuilding feels so gross and depressing across so many dimensions:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/magazine/palisades-fire-rebuild.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

So much Monday Morning quarterbacking by uber rich developers, and even the visions for rebuilding don’t sound attractive to me at all. A even more expensive neighborhood that doesn’t even sound like a fun place to live.

By: Mike Montgomery

Mike Montgomery — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 20:26:22 +0000

What i can’t grasp is that Caruso made such little effort to protect the neighborhood that supports his Village. I know he couldn’t save everyone, but he didn’t even have his private crew try to help his direct neighbors. I find that unforgivable.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 19:56:51 +0000

In reply to Elizabeth Kay. @Elizabeth: So sorry for your loss. The Village is approximately the size of a single block of the alphabet streets, and the alphabet streets are just a fraction of the Palisades. When you are a billionaire trying to protect a single investment, it's a lot easier to employ such a strategy. When you are thousands of families who would have had to independently agree to fund such a thing for the entire Palisades, you can imagine how those meetings would have gone. The concept isn't impossible though. Perhaps the future Palisades is a covenant community where in order to even live there, you *have* to pay dues for thousands of private firefighters who may only be called into action once every 20 years. Anything is possible, but it comes at a cost.

By: Elizabeth Kay

Elizabeth Kay — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 05:59:51 +0000

Our house burned to the ground on January 7th in the Alphabet Streets on Hartzell Street. Not one firefighter came. They sacrificed the Alphabet Streets. We will never know if your dad’s theory is correct, because no one was there to try to fight the fire. However, it should be noted that all the shops at the Village, just three blocks from my house, are still perfectly in place because there were private “fire fighters” there fighting the embers and the winds and they won…

By: Ann Smith

Ann Smith — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 07:07:41 +0000

Such a very good article on our recent fire. As to smog in LA, in the late fifties and early 60ties, I can say that the smog was so awful that it was painful to inhale and tears would come roaring down your face in a nano second. When I married, we came to the Palisades because it was such a lovely Village. I remember my sons going to the Hobby Shop on Via de la Paz. They also liked the Hot Dog show because the train was so much fun. Little did we know the owner was a drug dealer.
I also remember the Bel Air Fire in 1961? So many of the professors book collections were lost forever. We lost our house at 8pm on Jan. 7th and every house in that block burned down.

By: Flora Fung

Flora Fung — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 18:35:40 +0000

Thank you for this inspiring article.
This is so unimaginable!
We really think about fire and wind in a new way now.
In the future, we need to think about how to build to resist fire……..
Wishing everyone be positive and optimistic…

By: Judith Freed

Judith Freed — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 17:40:40 +0000

I was here for the 78 Mandeville fire. I lived then where my house burned to ashes Jan 8 this year. I can affirm that if there had not been a sudden drastic change in the weather that day we might have had the same devastation we face now. That day in 1978 I stood on my neighbors roof with my car packed with everything including pets and facing downhill watching The houses on Las Lomas place catch on fire one by one and pop like popcorn spreading burning embers everywhere in the terrible wind. Hot ashes dropped on us on the roof. Friends had come to help stand on my roof watering everything down. I had my child in the car as well. Ready to go but hoping my husband would make it home first to drive his car away. The walls of flame were at least 50 ft high, maybe higher. The heat was so intense that it burned you standing the two and a half blocks away where we were on the roof just as we were preparing to abandon and leave a sudden breeze came in from the ocean and brought with it a cooling fog. As it rushed past us and up into the flames, they dramatically dropped to separate houses, burning and a grass fire. There wasn’t a fireman in site. There were no firemen at all in the Palisades. They were all in Mandeville and a few in the highlands because everything connects at the top but Las Lomas in every fire has always been forgotten. No fire engines ever get there until the place is already on fire. In this fire this tire my Gardener saved our house on January 7th but on January 8th because the wind never stopped blowing and most of my block of last night and all of the rebuilt houses at the top at last loma’s place, we’re also burned out

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 04:05:03 +0000

In reply to Greg Chasen.

Oh wow, is this the house on the left side of the street as you approach Albright from the south? To what do you attribute the survival? It’s quite amazing… looks like a conventional house from all of the videos.

(Edit, I just read the articles. Different house! (And very beautiful… nice work). This is the one I was talking about though. 1:54 into the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il7sdK3OB1M&t=110s

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 04:03:49 +0000

In reply to Thomas Vander Wal. Ha! Didn't know we grew up so close to each other! Susie Kerr was our main babysitter for a long while, and Steve used to sub in for her every now and then. Love telling that story :)

By: Christopher Park

Christopher Park — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 08:28:20 +0000

But no one is talking about the unprecedented wind speed this time. It seems no one has ever heard of Santa Ana winds reaching anywhere near 80, let alone 100mph. That’s a hurricane type storm. Didn’t weather media know this was coming? I’m not buying this whole thing. Everyone seems to be an expert, but very few answer this question. Or others. All I know is thank God the magnificent SRF Lake Shrine was basically untouched. That is one of California’s greatest gems, and a Palisades historical landmark.

By: Karen Leitner

Karen Leitner — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 21:38:03 +0000

I left LA in 1978 and moved to Hayden Lake, ID
We left largely because we didn’t like seeing the air we were breathing.
I’m so sorry to see what has happened since I left.

By: Jeremy Laws

Jeremy Laws — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:09:56 +0000

Hey Mike — I really enjoyed reading your thoughtful piece on the Palisades fire, which I found through a link on the ‘Palisades – Remember’ When user group on Facebook. It was refreshing to hear your ideas on a path forward as a distinct counterpoint to blamers and as a welcome complement to the many appropriately sentimental pieces about what has been lost. Like you, I grew up in the alphabet streets and also worked at Microsoft (Business Development) in the Seattle area until I retired just last month. I’m also a Planning Commissioner in a small town in King County and have been spending some time thinking about how this tragedy should inform how we can be better prepared for inevitable natural disasters… you have provided some valuable food for thought in that regard.

By: Rob Tourtelot

Rob Tourtelot — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 15:37:46 +0000

Such evocative remembrances. It was a really special place back in the day, wasn’t it? I lived on Toyopa in the early to mid-seventies, then Tahquitz, then we moved to Mandeville Canyon just before the 1978 fires. We evacuated to my uncle’s house during those fires, and somehow our house survived while many of our neighbors’ homes didn’t. Like you, I have so many memories of what the Palisades was then, how special that village was. I loved going to the Hot Dog Show, Bay Theater, the Dime Store. I’ve been on the east coast for decades, and looking at the footage and photos, hearing from friends who’ve lost houses… it’s all just unfathomably sad. So many homes, and the actual community itself feel gone in a way that’s hard to imagine ever being replaced.

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 06:19:24 +0000

Hi Mike,

That was a thoughtful, lovely, and powerful read and I shared it with my friends and beyond in a rare public FB post (where it was also appreciated!).

And some bits of your reminiscing I remember firsthand from growing up in Southern California. Specifically, I remember the thick smelly haze that often made me cough or even wheeze when my parents and I would visit my grandma in LA, and I think at the time I just assumed this was just how things are and always would be in big cities.

And then when I visited back again years later, I recall marveling at… the blue skies! In LA!

I look back on this as an example of how we humans can actually fix things, big things when we prioritize civic good over sometimes petty yet often deep political and philosophical differences. I wish I broadly had the same sense of optimism now (though in fairness, the relatively speedy development of COVID vaccines was, in hindsight, pretty incredible!)