January 13, 2025 • 47 mins
A solo #marksremarks first hand experience of his first 3 days covering the devestation of the LA fires. Thank you to all fireheros and first responders for saving all they could in this disaster!
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome everybody to the Paparazzi Podcast and welcome to another
solo podcast. Mark's remarks, Jedi is off on an adventure,
and there has been a lot going on here in LA,
and I figured I just need to address what's been
happening here and my experiences in the fires here in La,
(00:22):
the wildfires and everything that's been going on. It's been
weighing on my mind. Got up early this morning drinking
my coffee. When you see it on TV and you
see it on social media, it's just not the same.
Last week or the week before last, we started getting
(00:44):
these news reports of high winds that we're going to
be record breaking winds, that were calling it a wind
event around here. And when you think of wins around here,
especially these days, you just think of fires. Every time
it gets windy for some reason, there's fires, whether they're
set by people or set by nature, or they're set
(01:07):
by power lines or something like that, there's just always
a fire. So anytime you hear wins, especially something like
high winds, record breaking winds eighty one hundred hurricane force winds,
you start to worry a little bit. But no one
was really treating it too crazy. The news was saying
(01:27):
life threatening winds, but the news always likes to hype
up the weather, and you know, I guess better safe
than sorry. But Tuesday came around, woke up in the morning.
I had a choice of going south and going to
a movie set or going up to Palisades and working
like I was the day before and the day before that.
(01:49):
So about nine o'clock in the morning, I start seeing
on social media that there is a small fire up
in Palisades, and my first thought was small fire. If
there's any fire, it's gonna get big. I saw that
there was a little bit of smoke coming from the
Venice paparazzi social media from their rooftop.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
They did a video of.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
What it looked like, and it was a little bigger
than just a little puff smoke up there. So I immediately
jumped to my car and headed up to Palisades. When
I got there, they were already shutting down streets. Everybody
was in a panic. There was a huge evacuation effort
and there was residents trying to get out. I started
(02:38):
going up into Palisades, but then I saw the line
of cars that was coming out of Palisades just bumper
to bumper, And first of all, I wasn't prepared for
what was going on up there gear wise, but I
saw the line of cars and I thought to myself,
I don't want to get stuck in this later and
not be able to get pictures out or you know,
(03:00):
anything like that. So I stayed kind of on the
outskirts in Santa Monica where you could see views of
the fires, and I kind of just shot what I shot,
you know. I pulled up to an overlook at the
end of Fourth Street and you can look up into
Palisades and the fire was just already, you know, on
(03:22):
my drive from sam Pedro to Palisades, the fire had
already doubled in size. And I pulled up there and
there was a large group of people that were just
sitting there watching. But the weird thing was everybody was
so calm. I kept hearing evacuation alerts on everybody's phone.
They kept going off every ten seconds, and everybody was
(03:45):
just so calm talking about the fire. You know, I mean,
big deal, another Palisades fire up in the hills. But
to me looking at it, it was not the same.
It didn't look the same. The winds were blowing the
smoke sideways, and my first thought was, this fire is
going to get really, really bad. Honestly, my first thought
(04:06):
was Maui and the way that fire was, because I
remember hearing the stories from the locals there talking about
how it just came up so fast and the winds
were so strong and there was just nothing anybody can
do about it. To the length of they were just
jumping into the ocean to get away from the fire,
and that's what it looked like. I got my shots,
(04:28):
got them out, just moved on, went home for the
day because I spent pretty much, you know, the rest
of the day up there, just kind of shooting what
I can get without getting too close. So I went
home for the day, did what everybody else did, watched
over the night, you know. But there was no aerial
coverage of the fire because they weren't allowing helicopters up
(04:50):
in the air. They were dropping helicopters, but no news helicopters.
So when you can't see aerial footage of what's going
on up there, here ring what the news is saying.
But I figured what was going on up there, and
I thought everything was burning. I was talking to a
couple of other photographers, and I was telling them, this is
(05:12):
going to be the worst disaster anyone's ever seen around here,
maybe even the worst disaster in US history. When this
is said and done, everybody thought I was crazy. So
the next day, my thought is to get up as
close as I can.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Now.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
All the roads are closed to the west. I think
twenty sixth Street in Sunset is where they had the
roads closed. But the fire was moving so fast to
the west that I thought I can get over to
maybe the Kenter area or something like that, and start
moving my way west from there to get some shots
of something. So when I got up to Kenter, my
(05:50):
thought was to get Fergie's house. I go up the
far west side of Kenter or the far east side
of Kenter. I passed by Jim Carrey's house and a
couple other celebrities houses, but the fire is still pretty
far away at this point. It's about three ridges away
over in Sullivan Canyon. So I get up to a
(06:10):
view where I can check out Fergie's house from across
a canyon. And as I get up there and I
look across the canyon, I see Fergie's house. There's a
ridge across on the other side that's burning, and it's
burning heavily, and it's a great picture. It shows you
know how close the fire is to her house, even
though it was two ridges away. The perspective I was at,
(06:32):
it looked like it was the next ridge away, and
it looked like it was going to burn her house soon.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
So snapped a few frames.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
I thought this would be a good frame to show
how close these things are to some celebrities homes. Talked
to some neighbors up there. Everybody was kind of an ade,
but still people very calm about what was going on,
and me obviously thinking to myself, you know this is
this is so bad.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
You guys need to be packed up.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
You guys need to be getting out of here if
you guys are residents around here, even though there was
no evacuation warning at that time. So I saw that
the ridge on Fergie's house was okay, and I saw
some people standing at the top of that ridge. So
I hopped in my car, went over to the top
of Kenter and hiked up to the top of the
(07:20):
ridge that looks out.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Over Mandeville Canyon.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
From this view, I could see all of Mandeville canyon
up to Arnold Schwarzenegger's and doctor Dre's gated neighborhood, and
the fire was just on the other side of West
Ridge and they had started their aerial plane assault on
this fire. So took some shots of Drey's house, took
(07:45):
some videos just showing how close it was to Dre
and Schwarzenegger, and then another photographer joined me up there
and we just kind of coordinated what we were going
to do and whose celebrities homes we were going to shoot.
Got some shots of the helicopter's dropping. And there's a
famous house on top of Pacific Palisades at the top
(08:06):
of Capri and Amalfi that just sits on the tippy
top of the hill up there, and forget what the
name of the house is, but it's a very famous house.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Everybody knows that.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
You can see it from every direction in La and
that house was immediately threatened. The fire was coming up
the canyon, coming up the ridge line to burn that house,
and there was about two or three houses that are
just below it that we watched, you know, slowly the
fire creep on it and then eventually start burning the houses. Luckily,
(08:34):
the firefighters got a handle on it, and they ended
up saving one of the houses. I've got some pictures
of it. We'll put it up on the on the
social media. So the other photographer and I decided to
go down and get as close as we can over
on west Ridge so we can watch and get some
footage of the aerials on Sullivan Canyon. And Sullivan Canyon
is where Ben Affleck just bought his Palisades, his new
(08:58):
Palisades home, and I think he was still building it,
putting some stuff into it. And there's a few other
celebrities that live up in there. So Mandeville's still open.
We head up Mandeville, we head up west Ridge and
out to the left side, we see how close this
fire is and how big this fire is. So we
take some side streets. We get down into the canyon
(09:19):
and we're about two hundred yards away from where the
front lines of this fire is and where there we've
got the jets, the aerial tankers that are dropping the
fire retardant on Sullivan Canyon. So we hike up onto
this hillside and we watch them drop over and over
(09:40):
and over again on Sullivan Canyon trying to save these
homes that are down deep underneath trees.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
I mean, this.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Street in Sullivan Canyon. You can't even see the homes
from the air. All you see is trees, and it
is directly threatened. A couple of firemen come down and
they tell because we're up there with a couple other people,
and they tell us they're about to start dropping on
the homes that are on the edge of West Ridge
right there to try and save them. So we had
(10:11):
to move as we're going up the street. As we're
going up west Ridge, we just start looking at these
homes and you know, there's these you know, huge five
ten million dollar homes that are just sitting there with
their gates open. They're all evacuated, they're empty, and I
just start thinking about looters and how easy it would
(10:32):
be for anybody to get up in these homes right
now and start stealing crap out of them. The residents
leave their gates open because they leave it for the
firefighters to be able to get in and fight fires
if they need to. So I eventually think that that's
going to start happening unless they start closing down some
of these streets where people are evacuated. So we head
(10:53):
up to the top of West Ridge and we look
out over the next ridge and it looks like the
fire fighters we're getting a handle on protecting the actual
property part of the hillside and kind of just leaving
the top of the hillside to burn, kind of redirecting.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
The fire upwards.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
So we get a few shots of some of the
other celebrities homes that are around in the Brentwood area,
and we head back over to the Kenter Ridge and
now there's a huge group of people up at the
top of Kenter watching this fire, all residents, people on motorcycles,
people up there just trying to get a view of it,
and there's just this huge influx. It seems like there's
(11:34):
this huge influx of people that are coming up there
to just take pictures for their social medias. And I
get it this day and age, when people are so
into their social medias that they have to get as
close as they can to the fire lines to get
footage just so they can post it. It starts to
get a little unsafe, I think. But there was a
(11:54):
huge group of people up there, they're all filming. There's
hardly anywhere to park, but yet all these people are
still being allowed into these neighborhoods and up to around
these houses where people were being evacuated. So when we
get to the bottom of Mandeville, they're closing off Mandeville finally,
So we got out of there and we got up there.
(12:15):
It was perfect timing. So I head back over to
the east ridge of Kenter, got a few more shots
of Fergie's house with these huge plumes of smoke behind it.
Just another good shot, and then we head down into
Santa Monica just to see what kind of traffic and chaos.
And on our way out the next day, obviously my
(12:42):
first thought is to go and get aerials of the
celebrity homes at the same time. You know, us here
on the PPC, we respect and we give props to
all the first responders in any of these situations, the
fire crews, the police officers, everybody that's involved that's up
there fighting for us. We give the utmost respect too,
(13:03):
and we take our hats off to and we will
mention anytime that these heroes are more important than anything
any celebrity and we should treat them with a lot
more respect than we do. I'd organize with another photographer
that he would be on the ground and I would
be going up to do aerials. I figured I wasn't
(13:25):
going to be able to drive my car in because
I didn't have my valid press pass to get in there.
So I have an electric bike, but it's too big
to fit in the back of my car. So I
grabbed my twelve year old son's electric jets and bike,
you know, the one from Costco, and I loaded that
into the back of my car, thinking that I could
(13:47):
just ride that thing in because I heard on the
news that people were riding bikes in. They weren't letting
cars in, but people were walking in or riding bikes in.
So I got up as close as I can around
Fourth Street, same place I was the day before, and
I saw that there was blockades everywhere, and I saw
the the Santa Monica police were talking to anybody that
(14:10):
was pulling over trying to get in and explaining to
them that they're not letting anybody in. So I parked up,
grabbed as much gear as I can, two drones and
my camera. When I pulled my camera out because I
had charged my drones, I had charged everything. When you
when you're on a mission like this, you make sure
everything is charged to the fullest. When I pulled out
my camera, my regular disslar camera, I realized that was
(14:33):
the one thing I forgot to charge that night, so
I was down to one bar on that thing. But
I also wasn't planning on using it too much. You know,
I had my iPhone that does everything close and wide
that I need, and I wasn't planning on getting too
many far shots. And if I could, I can get
that on my one percent. So hopped on the bike.
Two hundred pounds on this thing. It's a little bike.
(14:55):
It doesn't hold a charge very well. It's not meant
for guys like me to be riding around, especially with
gear on my back. You know, that adds an extra
twenty pounds, thirty pounds. So I'm riding past each blockade,
just trying to find a way to get around the
blockades and not have to go and talk to them,
because if I had to explain to them that I
(15:15):
was pressed show them my camera. I had my camera
out on my shoulder so they could see that I
had a camera. But I still needed to find a
different way in. So I rode down the street. I
saw a parking garage that went through to an alleyway,
took that route, rode past a couple of cops and
realized that they weren't really bothering with anybody on a bike,
(15:38):
So had it down past the Santa Monica stairs. If
anybody knows where that is, you know where it is.
And I headed down to Entrada and then up the
backside of a Moufie that didn't know which celebrities' homes
had been hit or not. I saw the burn areas
on maps, and I kind of studied where where they
(16:00):
had reported the burn areas were. So I had a
game plan of where I was going to go, and
I was going to first go by Kate Hudson's house,
She's got two houses up there on a Malfi, and
then continue up a Malfi to Steven Spielberg's house, Tom
Hanks house, and check all the houses around a Malfi
Goldie and Kurt Adam Sandler and others. But I have
(16:22):
to get up a big hill on the back side
of Malfi. So I'm on this bike. I'm pumping my
way up this hill. Even though it's an electric bike,
someone as big as me, it doesn't it doesn't go fast,
And I still have to peddle a lot. It's not
and plus I needed to save power so that I
can get around for the rest of the day, or
(16:44):
as much of the day as I could. Right through
Kate Hudson's neighborhood, there's smoke all around. I'm wearing a
double mask because I tried to stop off at a
couple of CVS's on the way up and Target to
get an N ninety five mask and they were all out, obviously.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
So I double masked.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
And I'm pumping up this hill and like I said,
there's smoke everywhere, so I'm kind of breathing smoke and
it's just not.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
For me.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
It's not good to be breathed smoke. I don't like it.
So I go past Kate Hudson's. Her house is fine.
I continue up a Malfi, pomping up the hill, practically
dying at this point, and I get to a spot
where I can drone and check out Steven Spielberg's and
Tom Hanks's house. As I kind of pull over and
(17:32):
start getting my gear out, one of the one of
the patrol police that are up there patrolling the neighborhoods,
they pull up to me.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
They card me.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
They asked what I'm doing there, and I kind of
do it, and they let me do what I was
doing and they move on. So I start droning the
neighborhood and I get over to Tom Hanks's house. I
go to his house first, and Tom Hanks's house is perfect.
It doesn't look like it's even seen a fire anywhere
around it.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
It's pristine.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
The grass is perfect, the walls on the outside of
the house are perfect. And this is a house that
took the brunt of the fire at the worst time,
at you know, its peak windy times. It was the
first house to come across, and it was just amazing
that it was just untouched. But the house next to his,
(18:23):
which I think had just been built a couple of
years before, just a badass mansion that was just tech
looking and you know, futuristic looking and just a great
design gone completely melted completely to the ground. And I
remember seeing aerials of this guy's house before when I
did aerials of Tom Hanks's house, and he had a
(18:45):
bunch of really nice cars that were always parked out
on the driveway. So I'm hoping he got those out,
because I didn't see any that were sitting in the
driveway still burned or in the garage. So I flew
back over towards Steven Spielberg's house, and as I'm going
down the ridge, I see it was pretty much every
other house that had been burned. And then I get
to Steven Spielberg's plantation. You know, Steven Spielberg owns probably
(19:07):
four lots that are along that ridge line right there,
and once again, completely pristine, untouched, not even a mark
on it, not even debris from his trees that had
fallen in his yard.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Nothing.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
But yet all the houses around him were burned. So
I brought the drone down, continued on, went over to
check Adam Sandler's house. At this point, the charge on
my bike is getting you know, it's about halfway down,
So I figured I didn't have much left, and I
was gonna have a choice of whether I was gonna
start walking around Palisades or if I was just gonna,
(19:44):
you know, head back to the car and call it
a day. So I ride down through Ben Affleck's old neighborhood,
through the Palisades Riviera area, and I'm going past, you know,
Michael Keaton's house, and you know some other celebrities around,
but that whole area is fine, just some down trees
and some debris from the winds and stuff like that.
(20:07):
I start heading down into the Rustic Canyon area where
Barbara Hershey lives and Bradley Cooper lives, Ali Larder Angelica, Houston.
It's just a real thick, smoky area where the smoke
is kind of settled down in there because it's just
(20:30):
that kind of an area. It's really deep into the canyon.
There's a lot of trees, a lot of vegetation, and
smoke just kind of settles down in there. So I'm
riding through that, and as I'm riding through there, these
four guys pull up to me in a prius and
they look like they're younger, maybe in their teens, you know,
maybe sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and they and they go, hey,
you know, are you pressed?
Speaker 2 (20:50):
And I said yeah. They go, do you have a
press pass?
Speaker 1 (20:52):
And I said no, And they're like, well, do you
think you can maybe get us in by saying you're press?
We want to go and check on our home because
you know, they're not letting anybody in. And I told
them I don't think I'm gonna be able to. They've
been turning everybody away, even people that say they were press,
so you.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Know, they were kind of bummed about that.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
They had a look on their face like they you know,
they were going to find out that they've lost everything,
and they were kind of scared. But I also wanted
to ride in as well, so you know, I probably
should have just tried and taken the ride, you know,
knowing what was going to not knowing what was going
to happen next. But as I'm riding through the neighborhood,
I get over by Angelica Houston's. Her house is fine,
(21:31):
Ali Lardas is fine, Bradley Cooper's is fine. But my
bike ends up dying at that point. So I actually
parked the bike in Angelica Houston's driveway because I figured,
you know, no One's gonna mess with Angelica Houston's bike
if it was sitting there. So as I'm going down
the street, I see the four guys are pulled over.
(21:55):
They're gearing up, and they're just gonna They're gonna walk in,
just like me. So you know, I had the choice
of whether or not I was going to walk in
or not, but I was just way too curious to
see what was going on up there. I had seen
the footage from the news. I'd seen this, but I
had to go in and see for myself because that's
my office. You know, it's kind of a home away
(22:16):
from home. I spend so much time up there. Even
though I don't live there, it is still, you know,
it still means something to me to see what's going
on up there. So I grab all my gear and
I start walking up Sunset and there's barely anybody going
up and down Sunset, so you can kind of walk
on the on the side of the road. But you know,
along that road right there, there's a lot of eucalyptus trees,
(22:39):
and the debris from the trees is just everywhere, and
you're walking alongside the road. You're trying to avoid you know,
fire crews going past you, stuff like that, and you're
just you know, walking over these huge branches and leaves
and debris everywhere, and it's actually kind of tough to
walk through. So I get up to the Chautauqua, which
(23:02):
is the street that pretty much is the gateway to Palisades,
and I start seeing the neighborhood that's like, you know,
the main neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
When you come into.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Palisades, there's this huge puddle water that was you know,
gathered at the entrance there that I had to actually
walk around because it was, you know, two feet deep.
But I go into the neighborhood there, and it's the
neighborhood that's just south west of Sunset, on the west
(23:33):
side of Chautauqua, big, huge neighborhood. But as I walk
into the neighborhood, I realized there's just no there's no
houses left. Everything is gone, every structure, every house. The
only thing that's standing is maybe one or two houses
out of every fifty and maybe some chimneys. I'm sure
(23:53):
people who have been in you know, war torn areas,
or photographers or journalists who have walked through is where
after a hurricane has gone through or you know, some
sort of crazy disaster. I haven't been done that yet.
And the sound that you hear in there is just
it's a haunting sound, even though it's a silence, it's
(24:14):
just a haunting silence. And I'm the only one walking around.
So I'm walking through the neighborhood and I go to
check just a couple of places that I know I've
shot in the past some movies. I go down the
street where I shot Kristen Bell and Jamie Lee Curtis
in You Again, the house gone. So if you ever
(24:34):
see that movie and you see the house that they
live in, that house is gone. I did some work
recently on Freaky Friday too with Jamie Lee Curtis also
and Lindsay Lohan. The house they use in that movie,
which I believe should be their house. I'm not sure,
but you'll see it in that movie. That house was gone,
(24:57):
and every single house on that block. But at the
same time, as I'm looking for the house, because you
can't even see I'm looking because I'm trying to remember
where the house was, exactly what the gate looked like,
if there was any trees out front, and it was
so burned that I couldn't even.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Figure out which house it was. Exactly.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
As I'm looking for the house, I noticed that there's
a red VW bug that's just sitting alongside the road,
and it was in such good shape that I thought, maybe,
you know, a resident had got in and come to
check out the damage and just parked it there and
(25:39):
then just kind of is walking around. Maybe the neighborhood
or something like that, but there was still tons of
dust on it, and it was.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
In such good condition. But it survived.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Every single house on this neighborhood, every single tree, every
single thing on this neighborhood was burned to rubble except
for this one class sick red VW bug that looked
like it hadn't even been touched or burned or you know,
marked or anything, just a little bit of dust on it.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
I took pictures of it.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
You could check it out on the Instagram. But I
thought that was pretty amazing. My next house was to
try and go look at Julia Restreife's house. It was
only a couple of blocks away. Walking over to her house,
one of the things I found interesting was the glass
that was out on the streets, out on the sidewalk,
(26:32):
and there was the glass from the homes, like the
windows of the homes, and the glass was black, obviously,
but the glass was you know, twenty feet from the home.
So the only thing I could think was, you know,
the glass had blown out from the inside and blown
the glass all over the street. And that was kind
(26:55):
of crazy to me. And this smells because every house
had you know, gas lines, still burning. They were all smoldering.
There was some little fires that were still burning inside
the homes, homes that had underground parking. You know, there
were just big holes in the ground. You know, nothing left.
Nothing that you can see in any of these homes
that that could have survived. You know, any kind of
(27:17):
a you know, a trophy or like a you know, a.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
License plate or anything like that.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
You thought maybe an owner can come and find and
find a momento or something like that. Nothing that I
can see survived. The smells were crazy too. They were
making me sick. You know, it was burnt plastic, burnt materials.
So I get over to Juliuis Stravis's house and I
realized her house is gone as well. You know, I'd
(27:46):
worked here a lot in the past, and you know,
I'd been to that house a lot. I think it
was a fifteen million dollar house, brick classic old Palisades
home burned a rebel. So I did some aerials of that,
got some shots and wanted to head into downtown Palisades
(28:09):
just to see what that looked like. So on my
walk back, I decided to cut through the community center
area and check out the Little League field and stuff.
Like that where you know, I used to take my
kids when they were little, where I would go and
try and spot celebrities out there and play around. And
(28:31):
I had shot other celebrities who've taken their kids to
you know, basketball or baseball, or taking the kids to
the park there, stuff like that. And I walked through
the community center, I see that the basketball court area,
the roof of the basketball court is still smoking, you know,
like there's a fire still inside. The benches of the
(28:52):
little league field were just melted gone, the fences all black.
The tennis courts there, the tennis club where I shot
Kate Hudson and Lance Armstrong playing tennis together. The building
there was gone. Tennis courts were still intact though they
hadn't really been touched. All the trees around gone. And
(29:15):
as I came out the front, it was kind of
a staging area for a bunch of firemen, and the
firemen were all just laid out on the grass, just exhausted,
just trying to take a nap before they had to
start another shift to go up and fight the fires.
And as I came out of the Community Center, I
passed by the Palisades Library where I post up every
(29:40):
year when or every time people are voting. There's a
box out in front of there. But that's a very
iconic building as well for Palisades as the library completely gutted,
but the voter box perfectly intact, perfectly pristine. Next to
(30:00):
that was a doctor's office where a lot of celebrities
go for their doctor visits, and completely leveled. And at
this point, I'm trying to get word out to another
photographer that I know is in the area because I
don't want to walk out of there. You know, I've
already walked a few miles. I don't want to have
(30:20):
to walk back to the bike and then walk the
bike out to my car. That would have just been
a nightmare. So there's no cell phone reception service at
this point. Trying to get the satellite working on the
iPhone was ridiculous. I don't even know how that works,
but it wasn't working. But I was trying to get
a message out to him to say that I would
(30:41):
be downtown and to just look for me. As I'm
going through downtown, I see that Palisades Village had been spared,
but basically everything around it was gone. The homes on
the east side and that entire neighborhood gone. A couple
of businesses on the north side of Palisades Ville, We're gone.
(31:01):
Everything across Sunset on the other side except for a
little strip of boutique shops were all gone. The Chase
Bank building, legendary building, and a couple of restaurants there
were gone. There's a little strip of boutique shops that
were behind that that I had shot. You know, endless people,
(31:23):
Hillary Swank, Alessandro and Brosio, Jennifer Garner, Kate Beckinzel, they
all would go to those shops all the time.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Gone.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
There was another shop there was in It was in
this is forty. It was this shop that Megan Fox
worked in.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
It was gone. So as I'm walking down.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
The street, I see the other photographer. It's the mighty
Giles Harrison. And if you want to know who Giles is,
go back and listen to the Mighty mofo. You get
to know Giles. He's one of the legendary photographers in
the business, good friend and one of the best photographers
you'll ever see. So I see him coming down Sunset,
and for some reason, he never sees me when I'm
in my car and we're passing by or I'm on
(32:05):
the foot, and he never sees me. He's a great spotter.
He sees every celebrity that's out there, you know, from
a mile away, doesn't see me. He drives right past me.
I kind of wave to him. I run out in
the street. I'm running after his car down sunset, the
middle of sunset, waving, hoping that he looks in his
review mirror doesn't see me. That was my only ride
out of there, So I'm completely bummed at this point
(32:27):
that I have to walk out and pissed off because
he didn't see me. I just start walking out. I
was done seeing what I can see. Halfway down sunset.
On my way out, I looked and I'm standing in
the middle of both neighborhoods on the north and south
side that there's absolutely nothing left, zero houses. And I
decide to fly and get some aerials of you know,
(32:51):
this huge bit. From the air, you can see a
lot more than you can see from the ground, and
it's just as far as the eye can see in
every direction, and every house is gone. So I posted
some of those pictures up on the Instagram. You can
go check those out. You've seen it a million times though,
everybody's been getting those shots. So as I'm flying, I
(33:11):
get a message from Giles. I got your message, where
are you? So I told him where I was. He
finally gets to me and he picks me up, Thank
the Lord. So we decided to team up because he
needs aerials done and he's going to do ground shots.
We go by Jennifer love Hewitt's house and everything around
(33:36):
her house within one block has been spared, but everything
outside of her block, on that entire neighborhood was gone
and leveled. She got so lucky. You go down to
her neighborhood, it looks like nothing really happened, just a
little bit of debris. You go one block to the east,
(33:57):
one block to the south, one block to the west,
and it's just as far as the eye can see,
completely burned homes. We head up to Chris Pratt's and
it's pretty much every other home in the bottom of
this neighborhood was gone. He's up a steep hill at
the very top. I thought for sure his neighborhood was
(34:19):
gone because it's all the way up the top and
it's closest to the brush. We get up to his
neighborhood perfectly intact, doesn't look like anything even happened in
his neighborhood. It's a little gated neighborhood of about ten houses,
and it was perfectly fine. Everything around it scorched or
partially scorched. So we head down and we decided to
(34:41):
go into Malibu. And at this point I had heard
about what was going on in Malibu, but I had
no idea. So we head down to PCCh and start
heading north. Luckily, Giles has a couple of press passes,
so heading north on PCH, we get to the Sunset
area and we start looking up on the hillsides and
(35:03):
we see, you know, kind of spotty. Every other house
had been burned down on the hillsides on the east
side of PCH and on the west side of PCH.
You know, all these little structures that we that are
along there past Gladstone's were burned.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
We go by through the Getty Villa.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
The hillside is burned there, and the neighborhood where Matthew
Perry's house is closed.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
We tried to get up there. We looked up, we
saw there.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Was still a lot of fire going on up there,
but they wouldn't let us up, so we continued north
past Mastros, and once you get past Mastros, that's where
all the Malibu devastations started. The antique furniture store that's
at the bottom of Tapanga PCH gone, The real Inn,
(35:55):
the legendary old seafood place that's on the right side
as you're going was gone. The wine tasting place that's
right along there, Rosenthal was gone. A lot of burn
out over the beach at Tapanga right there. As we
start getting onto the main stretch of PCH where all
(36:16):
the beachfront homes start. There was a few in the
beginning that were still intact. But then once you get
to basically the Malibu sign that says welcome to Scenic Malibu,
next seventeen miles of scenic beauty, every single house, ninety
five percent of the houses that were along there were
burned completely to the ground, just miles and miles and
(36:41):
miles and miles of just now ocean front view. There
was a couple of spots here and there where we
came across the house that was still intact, or one
or two houses that were still intact. But we get
by Edwin Castro's house that he had just bought that.
Obviously we talked about in many podcasts. His house was
completely gone. He lives just south of Moonshadows, which is
(37:04):
a legendary Malibu restaurant waterfront restaurant that was completely gone.
Another little stretch of homes were still intact along there,
along that private beach below Dukes, but as we got
to Carbon Beach and the Beach Club Beach, all those
houses were completely gone. Charlie's Tharren's old house that was
(37:25):
along there gone. And then up into the hills where
Adam Carolla lives and.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
A few other celebrities up there.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
The Big Rock area too, where Mark Hamill lives, completely gone.
We head up to mel Gibson's house, we realized that
was gone. We're talking I would say eighty percent of
the homes along Malibu shoreline from the Malibu Pier to
(37:53):
Tapanga Canyon that were either on the hillside or on
the beach were gone. It was dev stating to see
all the years of driving up there, all those views
that you see are now going to be completely changed. Forever,
It'll always be a constant reminder of what was happening.
(38:14):
So we headed home for the day. After that, we
pretty much had enough of what we were going to do.
But we headed out the next day and pretty much
carbon copied what we did the day before, got a
few more celebrity homes, checked on a few celebrity homes
that were still intact, that survived. But what got to
(38:36):
me was the end of the day was the end
of the day. Yesterday, Giles got a call from one
of his friends saying, you know, hey, they're not letting
us in. I know you're in there. Can you go
check on my house? It's in the Palisades. So we
kind of went out of our way to go check
(38:56):
on it. So we go up sunset, We go up
into the neighborhood where like James Woods lives and John
Goodman like around that area. Hillary Swank used to live
in that neighborhood. We go up this steep hill and
we get into this neighborhood where you know, there's a
few houses that had burned along the way. You know,
at this point, we're just we've seen so many burn
(39:17):
houses and you know, we're so numb to it that
when we see a group of houses that are intact,
you get excited. You get excited and you're like, wow,
this is, you know, it didn't touch this place.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
And we get to the street that we're looking for,
you know, we're following the map up there, and we
get to the street and it opens up and it's
just one of those neighborhoods where you're like, Wow, nothing's
been touched up here.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
So we're going down the street and we're thinking, oh
my gosh, this is great. You know, we finally get
to give somebody like who someone's been waiting to hear
about their house for three days, four days maybe and
they haven't heard anything, and they finally have an inside
person that can check on their house. So we're going
down the stree. Nothing's been touched.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
There's a couple of.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Burn marks and some bushes here and there, but nothing's
been touched. Everybody's house is intact, and it's kind of
a tucked in house that's between two other houses. And
we see a little bit of burn on a tree
out in front. So as we get around the corner,
we look and his friend's house is the only house
in the entire neighborhood that had been burned. It was
very chilling to see. It was heartbreaking.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
To see.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
You know, out of all the things that I had
seen over the past two days, three days, that is
the thing that kind of gutted me the most. And
across the street there was, you know, down the street,
there was two houses that had been burned that were
on the ridge. But this house was in the middle
of the neighborhood. It wasn't on the edge, you know,
it wasn't it wasn't on the outside where fire can
(40:48):
get to it. We even went in to look at it,
and we couldn't figure out where the fire came from.
It didn't come from the side, it didn't come from
a house behind it. It's like an ember had just
floated over to it, landed on the roof maybe, and
took it. There was a few houses around that it
had had burnt bushes that looked like it actually got
pretty big, but didn't take the house. And this one
(41:11):
house in the middle of it was the only thing
that was gone. We made one last trip through Palisades
because we were pretty much done. We could we couldn't
subject our brains to this kind of grief anymore, So
we made one last drive through Palisades.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
We went by.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Where the people had left their cars in the middle
of sunset, you know, and the bultozer had to move
the cars out of the way.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
Half those cars.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Were burned, the others were just sitting there, just smashed
and banged up. Lake Shrine, which is a place that
you know, I had visited with my kids a lot
and shot a lot of people there. That was fine,
it was intact. But driving through our one last drive
through Palisades, you know, from end to end we got
to see just kind of look out and just kind
(41:57):
of soak it all in. It was one of the
worst drives I've ever been on. Later that day, when
we got home, we saw that there was a news
report about a drone that had hit one of the
Super Scoopers. Now, we went back at one point to
try and get Steven Spielberg, Steven Spielberg's house and Tom
(42:19):
Hanks's house just a little extra footage for one of
the news agencies. And my drones wouldn't fly under restricted areas.
You know, when you have a legit drone that's not
hacked and that's not unlocked, you have restrictions. Now, these
(42:40):
Super Scoopers were coming in at super low altitudes, super
low angles, and really fast, and they were flying right
over Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg's house, so my drones
wouldn't even take off, so we couldn't even get footage
at that point. But later on the day we saw
the news report that one of the super scoopers and
had been hit by a drone. Now, the only reason
(43:03):
that those drones would have been in those areas is
that they were flying trying to get those maybe those
two houses. So my thoughts are that it was a
PAPS drone because news agencies would have legit drones. Most
of the news agencies that are there, even small agencies,
would have legit drones that were restricted and they couldn't fly,
and the only person that would be able to get
(43:27):
their drone up would be someone who was doing it illegally,
didn't care about the rules, and that sounds like a
dirty savage pat The most recent information was the FBI
was doing an investigation into whose drone it was because
it's a federal offense to do that and it's punishable
(43:47):
by up to a year. Well, I would say one
of the agencies that still continues to take footage from
savages like that would be Backgrid Well I would suggest
that investigators should check out the photographers that did aerials
(44:08):
for Backgrid and maybe look into their backgrounds and look
into their drone activity to find out maybe if it
was one of them. If it wasn't, fine, no problem.
But if it was, those savages need to understand what
they did. So to wrap it up, it was a
(44:29):
rough couple of days emotionally and obviously nowhere near the
people that are actually affected by this thing. But the
fires are still going, the wind still keeps changing direction.
Then containment on these fires are not over, and we've
got some pretty severe winds coming up here, you know,
(44:49):
Monday or Tuesday, and it's going to be interesting how
this thing turns.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
But our thoughts and prayers, I know I hate saying.
Speaker 1 (44:58):
Thoughts and prayers, but our thoughts are with all the
families and all the people that lost everything in this fire.
We hope that everybody bounces back as best they can.
I know our precious celebrities will bounce back just fine.
But I did do a little bit of math the
(45:19):
other day on the celebrities whose homes did survive, and
I think my count was up to over ten billion
dollars that their net worth was, So maybe you know,
those celebrities, business owners, everybody with all that money can
kind of ban together and maybe give up a little
(45:41):
bit more than they normally do for charities, for their
neighbors and their community. So this community could bounce back quicker,
because if that place stays a wasteland like it is
right now for any length of time, I feel like
things are going to get bad up there.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
I feel like, you know, looters will get in.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
I feel like it'll you know, become a little bit
of a crime ridden area that just has just weird
activity going on. Who knows, homeless might move in there,
We might get some squatters that kind of take over
some of these houses that have been abandoned or something
like that. I you know, even though we have the
National Guard there right now, I'm not sure how it's
(46:24):
going to end up. But everything I predicted about this
fire has come true, and I see that area becoming
kind of a weird zone unless we could bounce it
back really quick.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
You know.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Number one starts with voting in and hiring officials, leaders
that know what they're doing and that can help with
the rebuilding process rather than delay it or slow it
or actually completely reject it, and our current leaders aren't
doing that at all. I'm not getting political, but we
(47:01):
know what we know at this point, and in order
to bounce back, there.
Speaker 2 (47:06):
Needs to be a pathway to do it.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
So let's get Palisades back to normal as soon as
we can. Let's hope that these families can bounce back
as soon as they can, and let's get our celebrities
to chip in and help as much as they can.
And if any of these celebrities are listening to this podcast,
(47:31):
let's do this. Okay, It's time out of all the
disasters and stuff that you donate your little one percent,
two percent, ten percent, two something like that. Let's step
it up a little bit. Okay, But if I have
offended anybody on this episode, I do apologize to Palisades,
to Malibu, to Altadena, to all the fires that are
(47:51):
out there, all the people affected by this. Take care
and be well.
Welcome everybody to the Paparazzi Podcast and welcome to another
solo podcast. Mark's remarks, Jedi is off on an adventure,
and there has been a lot going on here in LA,
and I figured I just need to address what's been
happening here and my experiences in the fires here in La,
(00:22):
the wildfires and everything that's been going on. It's been
weighing on my mind. Got up early this morning drinking
my coffee. When you see it on TV and you
see it on social media, it's just not the same.
Last week or the week before last, we started getting
(00:44):
these news reports of high winds that we're going to
be record breaking winds, that were calling it a wind
event around here. And when you think of wins around here,
especially these days, you just think of fires. Every time
it gets windy for some reason, there's fires, whether they're
set by people or set by nature, or they're set
(01:07):
by power lines or something like that, there's just always
a fire. So anytime you hear wins, especially something like
high winds, record breaking winds eighty one hundred hurricane force winds,
you start to worry a little bit. But no one
was really treating it too crazy. The news was saying
(01:27):
life threatening winds, but the news always likes to hype
up the weather, and you know, I guess better safe
than sorry. But Tuesday came around, woke up in the morning.
I had a choice of going south and going to
a movie set or going up to Palisades and working
like I was the day before and the day before that.
(01:49):
So about nine o'clock in the morning, I start seeing
on social media that there is a small fire up
in Palisades, and my first thought was small fire. If
there's any fire, it's gonna get big. I saw that
there was a little bit of smoke coming from the
Venice paparazzi social media from their rooftop.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
They did a video of.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
What it looked like, and it was a little bigger
than just a little puff smoke up there. So I immediately
jumped to my car and headed up to Palisades. When
I got there, they were already shutting down streets. Everybody
was in a panic. There was a huge evacuation effort
and there was residents trying to get out. I started
(02:38):
going up into Palisades, but then I saw the line
of cars that was coming out of Palisades just bumper
to bumper, And first of all, I wasn't prepared for
what was going on up there gear wise, but I
saw the line of cars and I thought to myself,
I don't want to get stuck in this later and
not be able to get pictures out or you know,
(03:00):
anything like that. So I stayed kind of on the
outskirts in Santa Monica where you could see views of
the fires, and I kind of just shot what I shot,
you know. I pulled up to an overlook at the
end of Fourth Street and you can look up into
Palisades and the fire was just already, you know, on
(03:22):
my drive from sam Pedro to Palisades, the fire had
already doubled in size. And I pulled up there and
there was a large group of people that were just
sitting there watching. But the weird thing was everybody was
so calm. I kept hearing evacuation alerts on everybody's phone.
They kept going off every ten seconds, and everybody was
(03:45):
just so calm talking about the fire. You know, I mean,
big deal, another Palisades fire up in the hills. But
to me looking at it, it was not the same.
It didn't look the same. The winds were blowing the
smoke sideways, and my first thought was, this fire is
going to get really, really bad. Honestly, my first thought
(04:06):
was Maui and the way that fire was, because I
remember hearing the stories from the locals there talking about
how it just came up so fast and the winds
were so strong and there was just nothing anybody can
do about it. To the length of they were just
jumping into the ocean to get away from the fire,
and that's what it looked like. I got my shots,
(04:28):
got them out, just moved on, went home for the
day because I spent pretty much, you know, the rest
of the day up there, just kind of shooting what
I can get without getting too close. So I went
home for the day, did what everybody else did, watched
over the night, you know. But there was no aerial
coverage of the fire because they weren't allowing helicopters up
(04:50):
in the air. They were dropping helicopters, but no news helicopters.
So when you can't see aerial footage of what's going
on up there, here ring what the news is saying.
But I figured what was going on up there, and
I thought everything was burning. I was talking to a
couple of other photographers, and I was telling them, this is
(05:12):
going to be the worst disaster anyone's ever seen around here,
maybe even the worst disaster in US history. When this
is said and done, everybody thought I was crazy. So
the next day, my thought is to get up as
close as I can.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Now.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
All the roads are closed to the west. I think
twenty sixth Street in Sunset is where they had the
roads closed. But the fire was moving so fast to
the west that I thought I can get over to
maybe the Kenter area or something like that, and start
moving my way west from there to get some shots
of something. So when I got up to Kenter, my
(05:50):
thought was to get Fergie's house. I go up the
far west side of Kenter or the far east side
of Kenter. I passed by Jim Carrey's house and a
couple other celebrities houses, but the fire is still pretty
far away at this point. It's about three ridges away
over in Sullivan Canyon. So I get up to a
(06:10):
view where I can check out Fergie's house from across
a canyon. And as I get up there and I
look across the canyon, I see Fergie's house. There's a
ridge across on the other side that's burning, and it's
burning heavily, and it's a great picture. It shows you
know how close the fire is to her house, even
though it was two ridges away. The perspective I was at,
(06:32):
it looked like it was the next ridge away, and
it looked like it was going to burn her house soon.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
So snapped a few frames.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
I thought this would be a good frame to show
how close these things are to some celebrities homes. Talked
to some neighbors up there. Everybody was kind of an ade,
but still people very calm about what was going on,
and me obviously thinking to myself, you know this is
this is so bad.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
You guys need to be packed up.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
You guys need to be getting out of here if
you guys are residents around here, even though there was
no evacuation warning at that time. So I saw that
the ridge on Fergie's house was okay, and I saw
some people standing at the top of that ridge. So
I hopped in my car, went over to the top
of Kenter and hiked up to the top of the
(07:20):
ridge that looks out.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Over Mandeville Canyon.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
From this view, I could see all of Mandeville canyon
up to Arnold Schwarzenegger's and doctor Dre's gated neighborhood, and
the fire was just on the other side of West
Ridge and they had started their aerial plane assault on
this fire. So took some shots of Drey's house, took
(07:45):
some videos just showing how close it was to Dre
and Schwarzenegger, and then another photographer joined me up there
and we just kind of coordinated what we were going
to do and whose celebrities homes we were going to shoot.
Got some shots of the helicopter's dropping. And there's a
famous house on top of Pacific Palisades at the top
(08:06):
of Capri and Amalfi that just sits on the tippy
top of the hill up there, and forget what the
name of the house is, but it's a very famous house.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Everybody knows that.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
You can see it from every direction in La and
that house was immediately threatened. The fire was coming up
the canyon, coming up the ridge line to burn that house,
and there was about two or three houses that are
just below it that we watched, you know, slowly the
fire creep on it and then eventually start burning the houses. Luckily,
(08:34):
the firefighters got a handle on it, and they ended
up saving one of the houses. I've got some pictures
of it. We'll put it up on the on the
social media. So the other photographer and I decided to
go down and get as close as we can over
on west Ridge so we can watch and get some
footage of the aerials on Sullivan Canyon. And Sullivan Canyon
is where Ben Affleck just bought his Palisades, his new
(08:58):
Palisades home, and I think he was still building it,
putting some stuff into it. And there's a few other
celebrities that live up in there. So Mandeville's still open.
We head up Mandeville, we head up west Ridge and
out to the left side, we see how close this
fire is and how big this fire is. So we
take some side streets. We get down into the canyon
(09:19):
and we're about two hundred yards away from where the
front lines of this fire is and where there we've
got the jets, the aerial tankers that are dropping the
fire retardant on Sullivan Canyon. So we hike up onto
this hillside and we watch them drop over and over
(09:40):
and over again on Sullivan Canyon trying to save these
homes that are down deep underneath trees.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
I mean, this.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Street in Sullivan Canyon. You can't even see the homes
from the air. All you see is trees, and it
is directly threatened. A couple of firemen come down and
they tell because we're up there with a couple other people,
and they tell us they're about to start dropping on
the homes that are on the edge of West Ridge
right there to try and save them. So we had
(10:11):
to move as we're going up the street. As we're
going up west Ridge, we just start looking at these
homes and you know, there's these you know, huge five
ten million dollar homes that are just sitting there with
their gates open. They're all evacuated, they're empty, and I
just start thinking about looters and how easy it would
(10:32):
be for anybody to get up in these homes right
now and start stealing crap out of them. The residents
leave their gates open because they leave it for the
firefighters to be able to get in and fight fires
if they need to. So I eventually think that that's
going to start happening unless they start closing down some
of these streets where people are evacuated. So we head
(10:53):
up to the top of West Ridge and we look
out over the next ridge and it looks like the
fire fighters we're getting a handle on protecting the actual
property part of the hillside and kind of just leaving
the top of the hillside to burn, kind of redirecting.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
The fire upwards.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
So we get a few shots of some of the
other celebrities homes that are around in the Brentwood area,
and we head back over to the Kenter Ridge and
now there's a huge group of people up at the
top of Kenter watching this fire, all residents, people on motorcycles,
people up there just trying to get a view of it,
and there's just this huge influx. It seems like there's
(11:34):
this huge influx of people that are coming up there
to just take pictures for their social medias. And I
get it this day and age, when people are so
into their social medias that they have to get as
close as they can to the fire lines to get
footage just so they can post it. It starts to
get a little unsafe, I think. But there was a
(11:54):
huge group of people up there, they're all filming. There's
hardly anywhere to park, but yet all these people are
still being allowed into these neighborhoods and up to around
these houses where people were being evacuated. So when we
get to the bottom of Mandeville, they're closing off Mandeville finally,
So we got out of there and we got up there.
(12:15):
It was perfect timing. So I head back over to
the east ridge of Kenter, got a few more shots
of Fergie's house with these huge plumes of smoke behind it.
Just another good shot, and then we head down into
Santa Monica just to see what kind of traffic and chaos.
And on our way out the next day, obviously my
(12:42):
first thought is to go and get aerials of the
celebrity homes at the same time. You know, us here
on the PPC, we respect and we give props to
all the first responders in any of these situations, the
fire crews, the police officers, everybody that's involved that's up
there fighting for us. We give the utmost respect too,
(13:03):
and we take our hats off to and we will
mention anytime that these heroes are more important than anything
any celebrity and we should treat them with a lot
more respect than we do. I'd organize with another photographer
that he would be on the ground and I would
be going up to do aerials. I figured I wasn't
(13:25):
going to be able to drive my car in because
I didn't have my valid press pass to get in there.
So I have an electric bike, but it's too big
to fit in the back of my car. So I
grabbed my twelve year old son's electric jets and bike,
you know, the one from Costco, and I loaded that
into the back of my car, thinking that I could
(13:47):
just ride that thing in because I heard on the
news that people were riding bikes in. They weren't letting
cars in, but people were walking in or riding bikes in.
So I got up as close as I can around
Fourth Street, same place I was the day before, and
I saw that there was blockades everywhere, and I saw
the the Santa Monica police were talking to anybody that
(14:10):
was pulling over trying to get in and explaining to
them that they're not letting anybody in. So I parked up,
grabbed as much gear as I can, two drones and
my camera. When I pulled my camera out because I
had charged my drones, I had charged everything. When you
when you're on a mission like this, you make sure
everything is charged to the fullest. When I pulled out
my camera, my regular disslar camera, I realized that was
(14:33):
the one thing I forgot to charge that night, so
I was down to one bar on that thing. But
I also wasn't planning on using it too much. You know,
I had my iPhone that does everything close and wide
that I need, and I wasn't planning on getting too
many far shots. And if I could, I can get
that on my one percent. So hopped on the bike.
Two hundred pounds on this thing. It's a little bike.
(14:55):
It doesn't hold a charge very well. It's not meant
for guys like me to be riding around, especially with
gear on my back. You know, that adds an extra
twenty pounds, thirty pounds. So I'm riding past each blockade,
just trying to find a way to get around the
blockades and not have to go and talk to them,
because if I had to explain to them that I
(15:15):
was pressed show them my camera. I had my camera
out on my shoulder so they could see that I
had a camera. But I still needed to find a
different way in. So I rode down the street. I
saw a parking garage that went through to an alleyway,
took that route, rode past a couple of cops and
realized that they weren't really bothering with anybody on a bike,
(15:38):
So had it down past the Santa Monica stairs. If
anybody knows where that is, you know where it is.
And I headed down to Entrada and then up the
backside of a Moufie that didn't know which celebrities' homes
had been hit or not. I saw the burn areas
on maps, and I kind of studied where where they
(16:00):
had reported the burn areas were. So I had a
game plan of where I was going to go, and
I was going to first go by Kate Hudson's house,
She's got two houses up there on a Malfi, and
then continue up a Malfi to Steven Spielberg's house, Tom
Hanks house, and check all the houses around a Malfi
Goldie and Kurt Adam Sandler and others. But I have
(16:22):
to get up a big hill on the back side
of Malfi. So I'm on this bike. I'm pumping my
way up this hill. Even though it's an electric bike,
someone as big as me, it doesn't it doesn't go fast,
And I still have to peddle a lot. It's not
and plus I needed to save power so that I
can get around for the rest of the day, or
(16:44):
as much of the day as I could. Right through
Kate Hudson's neighborhood, there's smoke all around. I'm wearing a
double mask because I tried to stop off at a
couple of CVS's on the way up and Target to
get an N ninety five mask and they were all out, obviously.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
So I double masked.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
And I'm pumping up this hill and like I said,
there's smoke everywhere, so I'm kind of breathing smoke and
it's just not.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
For me.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
It's not good to be breathed smoke. I don't like it.
So I go past Kate Hudson's. Her house is fine.
I continue up a Malfi, pomping up the hill, practically
dying at this point, and I get to a spot
where I can drone and check out Steven Spielberg's and
Tom Hanks's house. As I kind of pull over and
(17:32):
start getting my gear out, one of the one of
the patrol police that are up there patrolling the neighborhoods,
they pull up to me.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
They card me.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
They asked what I'm doing there, and I kind of
do it, and they let me do what I was
doing and they move on. So I start droning the
neighborhood and I get over to Tom Hanks's house. I
go to his house first, and Tom Hanks's house is perfect.
It doesn't look like it's even seen a fire anywhere
around it.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
It's pristine.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
The grass is perfect, the walls on the outside of
the house are perfect. And this is a house that
took the brunt of the fire at the worst time,
at you know, its peak windy times. It was the
first house to come across, and it was just amazing
that it was just untouched. But the house next to his,
(18:23):
which I think had just been built a couple of
years before, just a badass mansion that was just tech
looking and you know, futuristic looking and just a great
design gone completely melted completely to the ground. And I
remember seeing aerials of this guy's house before when I
did aerials of Tom Hanks's house, and he had a
(18:45):
bunch of really nice cars that were always parked out
on the driveway. So I'm hoping he got those out,
because I didn't see any that were sitting in the
driveway still burned or in the garage. So I flew
back over towards Steven Spielberg's house, and as I'm going
down the ridge, I see it was pretty much every
other house that had been burned. And then I get
to Steven Spielberg's plantation. You know, Steven Spielberg owns probably
(19:07):
four lots that are along that ridge line right there,
and once again, completely pristine, untouched, not even a mark
on it, not even debris from his trees that had
fallen in his yard.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Nothing.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
But yet all the houses around him were burned. So
I brought the drone down, continued on, went over to
check Adam Sandler's house. At this point, the charge on
my bike is getting you know, it's about halfway down,
So I figured I didn't have much left, and I
was gonna have a choice of whether I was gonna
start walking around Palisades or if I was just gonna,
(19:44):
you know, head back to the car and call it
a day. So I ride down through Ben Affleck's old neighborhood,
through the Palisades Riviera area, and I'm going past, you know,
Michael Keaton's house, and you know some other celebrities around,
but that whole area is fine, just some down trees
and some debris from the winds and stuff like that.
(20:07):
I start heading down into the Rustic Canyon area where
Barbara Hershey lives and Bradley Cooper lives, Ali Larder Angelica, Houston.
It's just a real thick, smoky area where the smoke
is kind of settled down in there because it's just
(20:30):
that kind of an area. It's really deep into the canyon.
There's a lot of trees, a lot of vegetation, and
smoke just kind of settles down in there. So I'm
riding through that, and as I'm riding through there, these
four guys pull up to me in a prius and
they look like they're younger, maybe in their teens, you know,
maybe sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and they and they go, hey,
you know, are you pressed?
Speaker 2 (20:50):
And I said yeah. They go, do you have a
press pass?
Speaker 1 (20:52):
And I said no, And they're like, well, do you
think you can maybe get us in by saying you're press?
We want to go and check on our home because
you know, they're not letting anybody in. And I told
them I don't think I'm gonna be able to. They've
been turning everybody away, even people that say they were press,
so you.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Know, they were kind of bummed about that.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
They had a look on their face like they you know,
they were going to find out that they've lost everything,
and they were kind of scared. But I also wanted
to ride in as well, so you know, I probably
should have just tried and taken the ride, you know,
knowing what was going to not knowing what was going
to happen next. But as I'm riding through the neighborhood,
I get over by Angelica Houston's. Her house is fine,
(21:31):
Ali Lardas is fine, Bradley Cooper's is fine. But my
bike ends up dying at that point. So I actually
parked the bike in Angelica Houston's driveway because I figured,
you know, no One's gonna mess with Angelica Houston's bike
if it was sitting there. So as I'm going down
the street, I see the four guys are pulled over.
(21:55):
They're gearing up, and they're just gonna They're gonna walk in,
just like me. So you know, I had the choice
of whether or not I was going to walk in
or not, but I was just way too curious to
see what was going on up there. I had seen
the footage from the news. I'd seen this, but I
had to go in and see for myself because that's
my office. You know, it's kind of a home away
(22:16):
from home. I spend so much time up there. Even
though I don't live there, it is still, you know,
it still means something to me to see what's going
on up there. So I grab all my gear and
I start walking up Sunset and there's barely anybody going
up and down Sunset, so you can kind of walk
on the on the side of the road. But you know,
along that road right there, there's a lot of eucalyptus trees,
(22:39):
and the debris from the trees is just everywhere, and
you're walking alongside the road. You're trying to avoid you know,
fire crews going past you, stuff like that, and you're
just you know, walking over these huge branches and leaves
and debris everywhere, and it's actually kind of tough to
walk through. So I get up to the Chautauqua, which
(23:02):
is the street that pretty much is the gateway to Palisades,
and I start seeing the neighborhood that's like, you know,
the main neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
When you come into.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Palisades, there's this huge puddle water that was you know,
gathered at the entrance there that I had to actually
walk around because it was, you know, two feet deep.
But I go into the neighborhood there, and it's the
neighborhood that's just south west of Sunset, on the west
(23:33):
side of Chautauqua, big, huge neighborhood. But as I walk
into the neighborhood, I realized there's just no there's no
houses left. Everything is gone, every structure, every house. The
only thing that's standing is maybe one or two houses
out of every fifty and maybe some chimneys. I'm sure
(23:53):
people who have been in you know, war torn areas,
or photographers or journalists who have walked through is where
after a hurricane has gone through or you know, some
sort of crazy disaster. I haven't been done that yet.
And the sound that you hear in there is just
it's a haunting sound, even though it's a silence, it's
(24:14):
just a haunting silence. And I'm the only one walking around.
So I'm walking through the neighborhood and I go to
check just a couple of places that I know I've
shot in the past some movies. I go down the
street where I shot Kristen Bell and Jamie Lee Curtis
in You Again, the house gone. So if you ever
(24:34):
see that movie and you see the house that they
live in, that house is gone. I did some work
recently on Freaky Friday too with Jamie Lee Curtis also
and Lindsay Lohan. The house they use in that movie,
which I believe should be their house. I'm not sure,
but you'll see it in that movie. That house was gone,
(24:57):
and every single house on that block. But at the
same time, as I'm looking for the house, because you
can't even see I'm looking because I'm trying to remember
where the house was, exactly what the gate looked like,
if there was any trees out front, and it was
so burned that I couldn't even.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Figure out which house it was. Exactly.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
As I'm looking for the house, I noticed that there's
a red VW bug that's just sitting alongside the road,
and it was in such good shape that I thought, maybe,
you know, a resident had got in and come to
check out the damage and just parked it there and
(25:39):
then just kind of is walking around. Maybe the neighborhood
or something like that, but there was still tons of
dust on it, and it was.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
In such good condition. But it survived.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Every single house on this neighborhood, every single tree, every
single thing on this neighborhood was burned to rubble except
for this one class sick red VW bug that looked
like it hadn't even been touched or burned or you know,
marked or anything, just a little bit of dust on it.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
I took pictures of it.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
You could check it out on the Instagram. But I
thought that was pretty amazing. My next house was to
try and go look at Julia Restreife's house. It was
only a couple of blocks away. Walking over to her house,
one of the things I found interesting was the glass
that was out on the streets, out on the sidewalk,
(26:32):
and there was the glass from the homes, like the
windows of the homes, and the glass was black, obviously,
but the glass was you know, twenty feet from the home.
So the only thing I could think was, you know,
the glass had blown out from the inside and blown
the glass all over the street. And that was kind
(26:55):
of crazy to me. And this smells because every house
had you know, gas lines, still burning. They were all smoldering.
There was some little fires that were still burning inside
the homes, homes that had underground parking. You know, there
were just big holes in the ground. You know, nothing left.
Nothing that you can see in any of these homes
that that could have survived. You know, any kind of
(27:17):
a you know, a trophy or like a you know, a.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
License plate or anything like that.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
You thought maybe an owner can come and find and
find a momento or something like that. Nothing that I
can see survived. The smells were crazy too. They were
making me sick. You know, it was burnt plastic, burnt materials.
So I get over to Juliuis Stravis's house and I
realized her house is gone as well. You know, I'd
(27:46):
worked here a lot in the past, and you know,
I'd been to that house a lot. I think it
was a fifteen million dollar house, brick classic old Palisades
home burned a rebel. So I did some aerials of that,
got some shots and wanted to head into downtown Palisades
(28:09):
just to see what that looked like. So on my
walk back, I decided to cut through the community center
area and check out the Little League field and stuff.
Like that where you know, I used to take my
kids when they were little, where I would go and
try and spot celebrities out there and play around. And
(28:31):
I had shot other celebrities who've taken their kids to
you know, basketball or baseball, or taking the kids to
the park there, stuff like that. And I walked through
the community center, I see that the basketball court area,
the roof of the basketball court is still smoking, you know,
like there's a fire still inside. The benches of the
(28:52):
little league field were just melted gone, the fences all black.
The tennis courts there, the tennis club where I shot
Kate Hudson and Lance Armstrong playing tennis together. The building
there was gone. Tennis courts were still intact though they
hadn't really been touched. All the trees around gone. And
(29:15):
as I came out the front, it was kind of
a staging area for a bunch of firemen, and the
firemen were all just laid out on the grass, just exhausted,
just trying to take a nap before they had to
start another shift to go up and fight the fires.
And as I came out of the Community Center, I
passed by the Palisades Library where I post up every
(29:40):
year when or every time people are voting. There's a
box out in front of there. But that's a very
iconic building as well for Palisades as the library completely gutted,
but the voter box perfectly intact, perfectly pristine. Next to
(30:00):
that was a doctor's office where a lot of celebrities
go for their doctor visits, and completely leveled. And at
this point, I'm trying to get word out to another
photographer that I know is in the area because I
don't want to walk out of there. You know, I've
already walked a few miles. I don't want to have
(30:20):
to walk back to the bike and then walk the
bike out to my car. That would have just been
a nightmare. So there's no cell phone reception service at
this point. Trying to get the satellite working on the
iPhone was ridiculous. I don't even know how that works,
but it wasn't working. But I was trying to get
a message out to him to say that I would
(30:41):
be downtown and to just look for me. As I'm
going through downtown, I see that Palisades Village had been spared,
but basically everything around it was gone. The homes on
the east side and that entire neighborhood gone. A couple
of businesses on the north side of Palisades Ville, We're gone.
(31:01):
Everything across Sunset on the other side except for a
little strip of boutique shops were all gone. The Chase
Bank building, legendary building, and a couple of restaurants there
were gone. There's a little strip of boutique shops that
were behind that that I had shot. You know, endless people,
(31:23):
Hillary Swank, Alessandro and Brosio, Jennifer Garner, Kate Beckinzel, they
all would go to those shops all the time.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Gone.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
There was another shop there was in It was in
this is forty. It was this shop that Megan Fox
worked in.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
It was gone. So as I'm walking down.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
The street, I see the other photographer. It's the mighty
Giles Harrison. And if you want to know who Giles is,
go back and listen to the Mighty mofo. You get
to know Giles. He's one of the legendary photographers in
the business, good friend and one of the best photographers
you'll ever see. So I see him coming down Sunset,
and for some reason, he never sees me when I'm
in my car and we're passing by or I'm on
(32:05):
the foot, and he never sees me. He's a great spotter.
He sees every celebrity that's out there, you know, from
a mile away, doesn't see me. He drives right past me.
I kind of wave to him. I run out in
the street. I'm running after his car down sunset, the
middle of sunset, waving, hoping that he looks in his
review mirror doesn't see me. That was my only ride
out of there, So I'm completely bummed at this point
(32:27):
that I have to walk out and pissed off because
he didn't see me. I just start walking out. I
was done seeing what I can see. Halfway down sunset.
On my way out, I looked and I'm standing in
the middle of both neighborhoods on the north and south
side that there's absolutely nothing left, zero houses. And I
decide to fly and get some aerials of you know,
(32:51):
this huge bit. From the air, you can see a
lot more than you can see from the ground, and
it's just as far as the eye can see in
every direction, and every house is gone. So I posted
some of those pictures up on the Instagram. You can
go check those out. You've seen it a million times though,
everybody's been getting those shots. So as I'm flying, I
(33:11):
get a message from Giles. I got your message, where
are you? So I told him where I was. He
finally gets to me and he picks me up, Thank
the Lord. So we decided to team up because he
needs aerials done and he's going to do ground shots.
We go by Jennifer love Hewitt's house and everything around
(33:36):
her house within one block has been spared, but everything
outside of her block, on that entire neighborhood was gone
and leveled. She got so lucky. You go down to
her neighborhood, it looks like nothing really happened, just a
little bit of debris. You go one block to the east,
(33:57):
one block to the south, one block to the west,
and it's just as far as the eye can see,
completely burned homes. We head up to Chris Pratt's and
it's pretty much every other home in the bottom of
this neighborhood was gone. He's up a steep hill at
the very top. I thought for sure his neighborhood was
(34:19):
gone because it's all the way up the top and
it's closest to the brush. We get up to his
neighborhood perfectly intact, doesn't look like anything even happened in
his neighborhood. It's a little gated neighborhood of about ten houses,
and it was perfectly fine. Everything around it scorched or
partially scorched. So we head down and we decided to
(34:41):
go into Malibu. And at this point I had heard
about what was going on in Malibu, but I had
no idea. So we head down to PCCh and start
heading north. Luckily, Giles has a couple of press passes,
so heading north on PCH, we get to the Sunset
area and we start looking up on the hillsides and
(35:03):
we see, you know, kind of spotty. Every other house
had been burned down on the hillsides on the east
side of PCH and on the west side of PCH.
You know, all these little structures that we that are
along there past Gladstone's were burned.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
We go by through the Getty Villa.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
The hillside is burned there, and the neighborhood where Matthew
Perry's house is closed.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
We tried to get up there. We looked up, we
saw there.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Was still a lot of fire going on up there,
but they wouldn't let us up, so we continued north
past Mastros, and once you get past Mastros, that's where
all the Malibu devastations started. The antique furniture store that's
at the bottom of Tapanga PCH gone, The real Inn,
(35:55):
the legendary old seafood place that's on the right side
as you're going was gone. The wine tasting place that's
right along there, Rosenthal was gone. A lot of burn
out over the beach at Tapanga right there. As we
start getting onto the main stretch of PCH where all
(36:16):
the beachfront homes start. There was a few in the
beginning that were still intact. But then once you get
to basically the Malibu sign that says welcome to Scenic Malibu,
next seventeen miles of scenic beauty, every single house, ninety
five percent of the houses that were along there were
burned completely to the ground, just miles and miles and
(36:41):
miles and miles of just now ocean front view. There
was a couple of spots here and there where we
came across the house that was still intact, or one
or two houses that were still intact. But we get
by Edwin Castro's house that he had just bought that.
Obviously we talked about in many podcasts. His house was
completely gone. He lives just south of Moonshadows, which is
(37:04):
a legendary Malibu restaurant waterfront restaurant that was completely gone.
Another little stretch of homes were still intact along there,
along that private beach below Dukes, but as we got
to Carbon Beach and the Beach Club Beach, all those
houses were completely gone. Charlie's Tharren's old house that was
(37:25):
along there gone. And then up into the hills where
Adam Carolla lives and.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
A few other celebrities up there.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
The Big Rock area too, where Mark Hamill lives, completely gone.
We head up to mel Gibson's house, we realized that
was gone. We're talking I would say eighty percent of
the homes along Malibu shoreline from the Malibu Pier to
(37:53):
Tapanga Canyon that were either on the hillside or on
the beach were gone. It was dev stating to see
all the years of driving up there, all those views
that you see are now going to be completely changed. Forever,
It'll always be a constant reminder of what was happening.
(38:14):
So we headed home for the day. After that, we
pretty much had enough of what we were going to do.
But we headed out the next day and pretty much
carbon copied what we did the day before, got a
few more celebrity homes, checked on a few celebrity homes
that were still intact, that survived. But what got to
(38:36):
me was the end of the day was the end
of the day. Yesterday, Giles got a call from one
of his friends saying, you know, hey, they're not letting
us in. I know you're in there. Can you go
check on my house? It's in the Palisades. So we
kind of went out of our way to go check
(38:56):
on it. So we go up sunset, We go up
into the neighborhood where like James Woods lives and John
Goodman like around that area. Hillary Swank used to live
in that neighborhood. We go up this steep hill and
we get into this neighborhood where you know, there's a
few houses that had burned along the way. You know,
at this point, we're just we've seen so many burn
(39:17):
houses and you know, we're so numb to it that
when we see a group of houses that are intact,
you get excited. You get excited and you're like, wow,
this is, you know, it didn't touch this place.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
It's amazing.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
And we get to the street that we're looking for,
you know, we're following the map up there, and we
get to the street and it opens up and it's
just one of those neighborhoods where you're like, Wow, nothing's
been touched up here.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
So we're going down the street and we're thinking, oh
my gosh, this is great. You know, we finally get
to give somebody like who someone's been waiting to hear
about their house for three days, four days maybe and
they haven't heard anything, and they finally have an inside
person that can check on their house. So we're going
down the stree. Nothing's been touched.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
There's a couple of.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Burn marks and some bushes here and there, but nothing's
been touched. Everybody's house is intact, and it's kind of
a tucked in house that's between two other houses. And
we see a little bit of burn on a tree
out in front. So as we get around the corner,
we look and his friend's house is the only house
in the entire neighborhood that had been burned. It was
very chilling to see. It was heartbreaking.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
To see.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
You know, out of all the things that I had
seen over the past two days, three days, that is
the thing that kind of gutted me the most. And
across the street there was, you know, down the street,
there was two houses that had been burned that were
on the ridge. But this house was in the middle
of the neighborhood. It wasn't on the edge, you know,
it wasn't it wasn't on the outside where fire can
(40:48):
get to it. We even went in to look at it,
and we couldn't figure out where the fire came from.
It didn't come from the side, it didn't come from
a house behind it. It's like an ember had just
floated over to it, landed on the roof maybe, and
took it. There was a few houses around that it
had had burnt bushes that looked like it actually got
pretty big, but didn't take the house. And this one
(41:11):
house in the middle of it was the only thing
that was gone. We made one last trip through Palisades
because we were pretty much done. We could we couldn't
subject our brains to this kind of grief anymore, So
we made one last drive through Palisades.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
We went by.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Where the people had left their cars in the middle
of sunset, you know, and the bultozer had to move
the cars out of the way.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
Half those cars.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Were burned, the others were just sitting there, just smashed
and banged up. Lake Shrine, which is a place that
you know, I had visited with my kids a lot
and shot a lot of people there. That was fine,
it was intact. But driving through our one last drive
through Palisades, you know, from end to end we got
to see just kind of look out and just kind
(41:57):
of soak it all in. It was one of the
worst drives I've ever been on. Later that day, when
we got home, we saw that there was a news
report about a drone that had hit one of the
Super Scoopers. Now, we went back at one point to
try and get Steven Spielberg, Steven Spielberg's house and Tom
(42:19):
Hanks's house just a little extra footage for one of
the news agencies. And my drones wouldn't fly under restricted areas.
You know, when you have a legit drone that's not
hacked and that's not unlocked, you have restrictions. Now, these
(42:40):
Super Scoopers were coming in at super low altitudes, super
low angles, and really fast, and they were flying right
over Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg's house, so my drones
wouldn't even take off, so we couldn't even get footage
at that point. But later on the day we saw
the news report that one of the super scoopers and
had been hit by a drone. Now, the only reason
(43:03):
that those drones would have been in those areas is
that they were flying trying to get those maybe those
two houses. So my thoughts are that it was a
PAPS drone because news agencies would have legit drones. Most
of the news agencies that are there, even small agencies,
would have legit drones that were restricted and they couldn't fly,
and the only person that would be able to get
(43:27):
their drone up would be someone who was doing it illegally,
didn't care about the rules, and that sounds like a
dirty savage pat The most recent information was the FBI
was doing an investigation into whose drone it was because
it's a federal offense to do that and it's punishable
(43:47):
by up to a year. Well, I would say one
of the agencies that still continues to take footage from
savages like that would be Backgrid Well I would suggest
that investigators should check out the photographers that did aerials
(44:08):
for Backgrid and maybe look into their backgrounds and look
into their drone activity to find out maybe if it
was one of them. If it wasn't, fine, no problem.
But if it was, those savages need to understand what
they did. So to wrap it up, it was a
(44:29):
rough couple of days emotionally and obviously nowhere near the
people that are actually affected by this thing. But the
fires are still going, the wind still keeps changing direction.
Then containment on these fires are not over, and we've
got some pretty severe winds coming up here, you know,
(44:49):
Monday or Tuesday, and it's going to be interesting how
this thing turns.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
But our thoughts and prayers, I know I hate saying.
Speaker 1 (44:58):
Thoughts and prayers, but our thoughts are with all the
families and all the people that lost everything in this fire.
We hope that everybody bounces back as best they can.
I know our precious celebrities will bounce back just fine.
But I did do a little bit of math the
(45:19):
other day on the celebrities whose homes did survive, and
I think my count was up to over ten billion
dollars that their net worth was, So maybe you know,
those celebrities, business owners, everybody with all that money can
kind of ban together and maybe give up a little
(45:41):
bit more than they normally do for charities, for their
neighbors and their community. So this community could bounce back quicker,
because if that place stays a wasteland like it is
right now for any length of time, I feel like
things are going to get bad up there.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
I feel like, you know, looters will get in.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
I feel like it'll you know, become a little bit
of a crime ridden area that just has just weird
activity going on. Who knows, homeless might move in there,
We might get some squatters that kind of take over
some of these houses that have been abandoned or something
like that. I you know, even though we have the
National Guard there right now, I'm not sure how it's
(46:24):
going to end up. But everything I predicted about this
fire has come true, and I see that area becoming
kind of a weird zone unless we could bounce it
back really quick.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
You know.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Number one starts with voting in and hiring officials, leaders
that know what they're doing and that can help with
the rebuilding process rather than delay it or slow it
or actually completely reject it, and our current leaders aren't
doing that at all. I'm not getting political, but we
(47:01):
know what we know at this point, and in order
to bounce back, there.
Speaker 2 (47:06):
Needs to be a pathway to do it.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
So let's get Palisades back to normal as soon as
we can. Let's hope that these families can bounce back
as soon as they can, and let's get our celebrities
to chip in and help as much as they can.
And if any of these celebrities are listening to this podcast,
(47:31):
let's do this. Okay, It's time out of all the
disasters and stuff that you donate your little one percent,
two percent, ten percent, two something like that. Let's step
it up a little bit. Okay, But if I have
offended anybody on this episode, I do apologize to Palisades,
to Malibu, to Altadena, to all the fires that are
(47:51):
out there, all the people affected by this. Take care
and be well.
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