The Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills is bustling with activity. As wildfires sweep through Los Angeles, the Hollywood Hills residents seek refuge here. A constant stream of cars lines up at the entrance, while a diverse array of people fills the lobby, creating a surreal scene as the hotel staff attends to their needs.
The bar at the Peninsula is a popular spot during this crisis, attracting a mix of glamorous women and distinguished men that epitomize the essence of Hollywood. Amidst the chaos, patrons indulge in drinks, creating a setting reminiscent of glitz and glamour coated with the smell of aged cocktails.
Amidst the chaos and uncertainty, a room at the Peninsula Hotel offers a semblance of comfort, albeit at a steep price of $1,550 per night for a basic double room. Forced to hastily pack and leave due to the encroaching wildfires, finding solace in the luxurious confines of the hotel seems like a fitting refuge amidst the unfolding apocalypse.
I had travelled to LA to visit my brother Phillip and his wife Christina for the Christmas holidays, as I do every year. Phillip and Christina live in the Hollywood Hills (just around the corner from Keanu Reeves and Leonardo DiCaprio as it happens) and, as news came in on Tuesday of fires devastating the Pacific Palisades (just under 13 miles away), we stood on their deck and gazed out over the LA skyline, hoping that things wouldn’t get too bad for the city.
Fires have never reached anywhere close to my brother’s place before and we felt safe. But we shouldn’t have done, not least because when I stepped onto the deck yesterday morning at around 9am I looked up into grey darkness. The sky was so thick with smoke that it was as if a furious god had smudged black ink across it.
There are now at least six fires blazing across Los Angeles and its neighbouring Ventura county. The fires began on Tuesday in the Pacific Palisades, an affluent residential neighbourhood on the coast 20 miles west of downtown LA.
It has already become the most destructive in the history of the city of Los Angeles, surpassing the 2018 Woolsey fire, which burned 1,121 structures. It could soon become the most destructive in the history of California.
Videos of the Palisades remind me of the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, from which I have reported for The Mail. The aesthetic is Mad Max meets the Russian army – an endless horizon of charred, grey destruction.
David Patrikarakos with his brother Philip inside The Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills
Flames overtake the intersection of Temescal Canyon and Pacific Coast Highway Fire at the Palisades Fire in Pacific Palisades
A bird’s-eye view reveals the sheer scale of the Pacific Palisades fire, leaving an entire neighborhood in ruins
Cars line up as people evacuate due to a wildfire near Pacific Palisades, on the west side of Los Angeles
And the vibe here is increasingly dystopian. News footage shows municipal workers driving bulldozers down Sunset Boulevard clearing the road of cars abandoned by drivers who decided it was safer to flee from the fires on foot than remain in traffic any longer.
And still the fires continue to spread.
In fact, apart from one fire in Woodley Park near Studio City, which has decreased in size, all the other blazes are what firefighters call ‘zero per cent contained’, meaning no part of the fire’s perimeter is covered by a control line such as a river or a man-made fireline.
The locals here are understandably terrified. More than 100,000 people are under mandatory evacuation orders and another 100,000 have been warned that they may soon be forced to flee. Five people are reported dead so far, but that will surely rise over the coming days. The city has never seen anything like this before.
The blaze that sent me and my family running was the ‘Sunset Fire’, which triggered mandatory evacuations when it broke out in the Hollywood Hills.
I had switched off the alerts function on my regular phone a long time ago as I got sick of the cacophony of air raid alerts every time I visited Ukraine. But my local phone began to screech on Tuesday morning when the fires first broke out and hasn’t stopped since.
Wednesday was punctuated by yet more so-called ‘amber alerts’ about the fires, only this time, as they began creeping toward us, I had to start taking note.
At first, they had a tone of polite helpfulness. ‘BE AWARE of your surroundings and MONITOR the situation closely. Follow all instructions from first responders in the field,’ read one I received at around lunchtime.
Smokes and flames overwhelms a commercial area during the Eaton fire in the Altadena area of Los Angeles County
People evacuate along Sunset Boulevard as the Palisades Fire burns amid a powerful windstorm
People stuck in a gridlock traffic as they try to evacuate a neighborhood being threatened by the Palisades wildfire
By mid-afternoon, a note of greater urgency had crept in: ‘LAFD: Evacuation warning for Sunset Fire at Sunset Fire burning area. Prepare to evacuate by gathering supplies, pets and loved ones.’
A few hours later, at around 6.30 in the evening, we finally received the order to get out. ‘FAST MOVING WILDFIRE IN YOUR AREA. AN EVACUATION ORDER HAS BEEN ISSUED FOR YOUR AREA. LEAVE NOW,’ the phone bellowed at me.
We started to pack. Running around your house with about 45 minutes to choose just exactly what to take with you is an instructive exercise in understanding what really matters in life.
I think everyone should have to do it at least once. For me it was easy: I could just throw all my stuff into the single suitcase that I had arrived with.
But for Phillip and Christina it was different. A whole life had to be mentally catalogued and prioritised within an hour. I could see the physical manifestation of this mental process as the five Hermes and two Louis Vuitton bags that were immediately piled onto the bed ready for packing were eventually jettisoned in favour of items such as property deeds and several family photo albums.
Finally, it was time to go, Phillip – clutching their two dogs, who were panting with excitement at all the drama – ran to the car. Christina, meanwhile, pulled out of the garage and waited for me. A neighbour walked past carrying furniture out of their house. ‘Be safe!’ they called out.
There was just one more thing to take: the cremated remains of our recently deceased mother. It fell to me to do it. I picked up the box in which her urn resides, tucked it under my arm and shut the door behind me.
It was a poignant moment – wondering if I (and indeed she) would ever return to the house. Though I comforted myself with the thought that it was not as if fire could do her any more damage.
Firefighters douse hot spots from a house reduced to ashes in the Palisades Fire, along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu
The sequence of alerts David received on his mobile phone about the status of the wildfires
The last 48 hours here have been emotional but also instructive. It’s as if I am being given a practical lesson on the intricacies (and vagaries) of the American psyche, and of the manifold political and infrastructure problems of this country.
In natural disasters, as in war, people reveal themselves, not least because rumour becomes the widespread currency on the ground. And rumour is always a telling guide to national preoccupations.
In America, conspiracy theory is never far from the public discourse and now it has gone into overdrive.
‘I think this is a conspiracy and these recent drone attacks are behind the fires,’ says one friend. Another is convinced that it’s arson and that ‘hobos’ are behind it. A theory reinforced, they argue, by the fact it is ‘rich areas’ like the Palisades, Studio City, and the Hollywood Hills that are burning.
Yet another wonders if Russia is stirring things up, using misinformation to cause divisions in American society, while one more wonders if Russia is paying the hobos to light the fires.
Then there is the scandal of the fire hydrants, which were supposedly low on water – though others are now saying this is not true. Either way, firefighters are so desperate that they are resorting to taking water from swimming pools and ponds.
The people here believe – correctly in my opinion – that the authorities have been unforgivably negligent.
And it’s clear who most blame for the devastation: LA mayor Karen Bass. Not least because she is reported to have cut over $17million from the fire department’s budget last summer.
A fire service helicopter drops a huge stream of water on to the Sunset Fire above LA’s Hollywood Hills
Bass’s cause wasn’t helped by the fact that she was 7,500 miles away in Ghana as part of a delegation attending the inauguration of the country’s new president when the fires broke.
This despite the fact that the National Weather Service began ratcheting up its warnings about the coming windstorm in the run up to her departure on Saturday.
My LA friends spent much of Tuesday in a state of apoplexy over her absence. They were even more furious when she got back.
I first set eyes on her when US TV reported her return. As Bass got off the plane, she was accosted by a reporter from Sky News who pressed her on whether she needed to apologise to her voters for being in Africa — and whether she regretted making that $17million budget cut.
‘Madam Mayor, have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today who are dealing with this disaster?’ the reporter asked.
In response she merely looked awkward and remained mute. It was extraordinary – she just stood there, refusing to respond. It was as if she had never heard even of the principle of crisis communications.
And that was the high point. Later, at her press conference, I understood why, on balance, it was probably best that she say nothing.
Smiling away and with a tone of infuriating condescension, she declared that everything would be fine because she believed in Angelenos and that it was time to stick together.
Nothing resembling a plan or much that could be described as granular in its detail was forthcoming. I have rarely seen such a tone-deaf performance from a professional politician.
Her social media is now awash with angry Angelenos saying Bass, who is black, must be either a ‘DEI hire’ – a reference to the corporate practice of taking into account ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ during the recruitment process – malign, corrupt or just plain thick.
But amid all the anger and rumour and hysteria is the genuine tragedy. Five people at Christina’s workplace alone have lost their houses. I heard one weeping down the phone to her on Wednesday morning. These are people with families, many with young children.
And there are (yet more) problems, not least because last summer, State Farm, one of California’s largest insurance companies, cancelled hundreds of Pacific Palisades homeowners’ policies. The company defended its decision by citing the increasing risk of ‘financial failure’ due to the rising frequency and intensity of wildfires there.
Now we sit in the hotel room and use TV and social media to track the fires’ spread across the city, their progress accelerated by winds speeds throughout Wednesday evening that ranged from 40 to 60mph, with isolated gusts over the hills reaching 85mph.
It’s like watching a sword of Damocles hover over an entire city.
As night falls, we face the prospect of waking up to news that the house is gone. What makes it worse is not that we are nowhere near the end of this, but there is no sense that we are not even near the beginning of the end of it.
