Residents in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles are coming back to devastation in their community, with thousands of homes, businesses, schools, and places of worship burned by raging wildfires.
As of Thursday, the Palisades fire had reached 15,000 acres, spreading to Malibu and Topanga and torching homes and restaurants along the Pacific Coast Highway. One resident told the Washington Examiner’s video producer Natasha Sweatte that his community is coming together in this time of crisis.
“This is the most amazing neighborhood I’ve ever been a part of, and everyone’s sharing information and videos,” said Pacific Palisades resident Mark Landry.
He said neighbors sent him videos of his street, which showed evidence that every house, including his own, had been burned to the ground.
When the fires broke out Tuesday, Landry said he was driving in his neighborhood when he noticed smoke coming from the hills nearby. He went home and told his family to begin packing for evacuation. Once his family was in the car leaving the neighborhood, he said he was stuck in traffic congestion from other residents also fleeing their homes.
Many homes in Los Angeles’s cliffs have just one entrance in or out, with narrow, steep roads. Some people, at police orders, abandoned their cars on the road for fear of losing their lives while stuck in evacuation traffic.
“Thousands of people were trying to get out,” Landry said, noting it took him and his family an hour and a half to get down the road before eventually evacuating to Orange County, where he is currently staying with family.
“We have two small children … we were just making sure we were doing the right things to get them to safety, and just kind of keeping them calm by presenting that we’re calm,” Landry said. “Sure enough, everything was OK, thankfully.”
Landry said he grew up in Louisiana and was used to evacuating for hurricanes, but his home was never claimed by a hurricane then. Now that it is confirmed that his house was burnt down by the Palisades fire, he’s “just grateful that we have each other.”
“Some of the things that we lost were photos and memories that we won’t be able to recover, but you know, we’ll make new ones,” Landry said. “We’re just trying to keep a positive attitude for the kids.”
His account mirrors that of hundreds of other families in the area who have lost their homes along with all of their belongings.
“It’s surreal to have this community physically devastated, and the idea of ever returning to that sense of normalcy there is probably really remote, but it has been heartwarming to see the best of humanity come out,” Landry said.
He noted that the neighborhood WhatsApp group has been active in aiding each other in the disaster, connecting one another to lost pets or other entities of personal value.
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“I’m grateful that people can come together in a crisis and just try to help each other out,” he said. “It’s important to remember that, especially if you have children and you’re going through something like this, just to make sure that they know that home is wherever you are together, and it’s not a place, but it’s just a feeling of connection with loved ones. That was something that I needed to remind myself about.”
“We’re resilient as humans, and we’ll get through this together, too,” he noted.