‘Completely Overwhelming’: L.A. Fire Victims Describe Their Devastating Losses

After living in the Pacific Palisades for three generations, Chad Comey’s family was not scared of fire.

“I’d always imagined that the earthquake would do us in,” says Comey, who lives with and cares for his disabled parents. “There was a fire in 2019 in the Palisades. My parents did not evacuate for that fire. There was a fire in 1978 that came within an eighth of a mile of our property. My parents lived through that one.”

On the morning of Jan. 7, when Comey, 31, looked through a pair of binoculars and saw the Palisades Fire, which had already torn through 200 acres, leaping across the hillside toward his parents home, he wasn’t panicking yet. “We’ve had worse,” he thought to himself.

By that night, their home was gone.

“You just spend your whole life accumulating certain things that mean something to you, and in 12 hours, it’s all gone,” he says.

A number of factors have made the wildfires spreading through Los Angeles among the most destructive in the state’s history. California’s wildfire season has stretched on later than usual, and dry vegetation and strong Santa Ana winds have caused the fire to spread rapidly. As of Jan. 14, the Palisades Fire which so far burned through nearly 24,000 acres, was 17% contained, while the Eaton Fire, which has torn through 14,000 acres, was 35% contained, according to CAL FIRE. Over 12,000 structures have been destroyed, and thousands of people have been displaced, forced to evacuate with little warning. The fires have killed at least 24 people—16 related to the Eaton Fire —making it one of the deadliest in California’s history.

Heather McAlpine, a volunteer with Altadena Mountain Rescue, saw the devastation first-hand on the evening of Jan. 7 when the Eaton Fire broke out. She began aiding with evacuations, knocking on doors until 2 a.m. and helping those who might need assistance leaving. She has helped with evacuations in the past, but she says she’s never seen anything like this: “It was just completely overwhelming.”

McAlpine recalls knocking on doors that night near Eaton Canyon, where the Eaton Fire began. “I remember seeing the entire Canyon lit up and feeling very sad for the wildlands and people in the vicinity,” she says. “I just didn’t think that it was going to affect me.”

Later in the evening, McAlpine, who lives in Altadena, was called to do a wellness check near her home. She could see the fire getting closer, but an evacuation order had not yet been called. She decided to go home and pick up her cat, along with a few essentials.

The next day, she went back to confirm what she already knew. The entire block was gone.

“It was such a special place, and I’m so sad for the community,”

McAlpline was living in a cottage, and while she had renters insurance, she’s unsure just how much it will do.

For many victims, fire insurance is not only unaffordable—it’s unavailable. Just months before the fires, insurers dropped nearly 70% of policyholders in Pacific Palisades, deeming them too much of a fire risk to insure. Now, many are left without coverage in what is expected to be one of the most costly wildfires in U.S. history. While government agencies have yet to provide preliminary damage estimates, analysts at Accuweather estimate losses could reach $52 to $57 billion.

Comey says that fire insurance was too expensive to even consider. “There’s no money in the budget to cover insurance,” he says. “There’s barely enough money for them to get groceries.”

Mourning the loss of a community

After evacuating from the Palisades on Jan. 7, another pair of residents, Alex Hill and her mother Kristen Van Vlack, didn’t know where to go. “Everyone that we know lived in the Palisades,” says Hill.

The two drove to Santa Monica and sat in a park until Van Vlack found an Airbnb there for the night. But once they settled in, it became clear they couldn’t stay. “We heard lots of sirens going by, and one fire truck was just driving really slowly near where we were,” says Hill. “And just looking in the sky, like it was glowing red.”

The winds were picking up, and they were worried they’d need to evacuate again, so they packed up again and drove a few miles south to Marina Del Rey, where they parked their car in a Ralph’s grocery store parking lot and tried to sleep. When they woke, another fire had broken out, and the sky was red in every direction.

Ashley Pomeroy, who also lives in the Palisades, had driven six hours north to Mammoth Mountain with her dad on Jan. 7 when her mom called to tell them they had less than three minutes to evacuate their home.

“We were on the freeway driving home, speeding, trying to see if we could get back home before the fire hit it,” she says. “But on the way there, we heard all our alarms go off and our sprinklers go off. We knew that it was over.”

Pomeroy, a student at Colorado University in Boulder, is mourning the Palisades community she grew up in and wondering what it might now become. “My friends and I talk about it all the time, like we can’t imagine growing up somewhere else. It was just picture perfect,” she says. Her family expects to rebuild, she says, though the process could take years.

Starting over

For now, in the areas razed by fires, little is left. On Thursday, Hill went with a friend to her grandparents’ old home, which the family had just sold in December. She grabbed a few bricks from the driveway, took a photo of the 200 year-old eucalyptus tree the late actor Will Rogers had planted, still standing.

They drove to the Palisades Village, a shopping center at the heart of the town. The windows were still intact, and music was still playing. Rick Caruso, a billionaire and unsuccessful Los Angeles mayoral candidate who developed the center, hired private firefighters—a practice that some have criticized—to protect the  property as emergency responders have been overwhelmed.

It was a shock for Hill, who had worked at a restaurant in the Village, but quit after the fire. “My job is still there when they open,” she says. “I’d have a job, but not a home.”

Though they lost all of their possessions, Hill’s mother Van Vlack says they were luckier than most. For years Van Vlack had been thinking of leaving Los Angeles, and at the end of 2024, she ended up visiting a friend in Meridian, Idaho, and closed on a house there on December 30, eight days before the fire came. Van Vlack and Hill drove there over the weekend and are there now, in an empty home with their two dogs.

Still, Van Vlack can’t help but mourn the things that cannot be replaced: hundred year-old Dutch doors that were once on the commercial property her grandparents owned, Mother’s Day cards collected over the years.

Hill is waiting to return to the Palisades, where she thinks their condo’s storage unit, located below ground, might still be intact. It doesn’t contain much—mostly holiday decor in big plastic tubs, she says—but it’s the only thing left from their home. 

“I want to go back,” Hill says. “It might be silly decorations, but it’s from our home, and it has memories for us.”

If you would like to donate to the victims of the California wildfires, donate here.