Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said Thursday that her brother was among the thousands of people who lost their homes in the Palisades fire.
“The loss that you’re going through, I share indirectly. It’s hit my family too,” Bass said at a meeting of the Pacific Palisades Community Council. “My brother, who has lived in Malibu for 40 years, been through many fires, evacuated many times — this time didn’t get away.”
Bass and other elected officials spoke to about 1,000 people who attended the meeting of the volunteer organization on Zoom.
The mayor — who was attending an embassy cocktail party in Ghana when the fire started — said her brother’s house “was my family home where we went on the holidays.”
The loss of the home, she said, is “a type of shock and grief that is trauma that will be with us for a long time.”
Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman said he, too, had a sibling who lost a home in Pacific Palisades.
His sister lived on Swarthmore Avenue, he said. Her house was destroyed.
“It was truly an apocalyptic scene as the winds were blowing, the fires were still going on,” he said. “It’s a disaster. I thought I saw disasters back in the ’90s when we got hit with fires, floods, an earthquake and riots, and that pales in comparison to what I was seeing.”
Bass and other officials told residents — who have been growing increasingly frustrated about their inability to access their homes in mandatory evacuation zones — that they hoped to increase access next week.
The forecast calls for light rain over the weekend. Bass issued an emergency executive order Tuesday to shore up Los Angeles burn areas that are vulnerable to mudslides and debris flow.
The upcoming rain, for many evacuees, has only heightened their desire to search their ruined homes for anything salvageable before it can be damaged by water.
During the Zoom meeting, L.A. City Councilmember Traci Park, who represents Pacific Palisades, said hundreds of workers had been in the area, shutting off broken pipes, sweeping up nails, clearing roadways, removing broken tree limbs and inspecting homes.
She said that she had been pushing for more access to the area but that everything was “still in emergency mode.”
The fire-ravaged neighborhoods, she said, are “currently a toxic mess,” and upcoming rain will complicate that situation.
Park became emotional when talking about her own time in destroyed neighborhoods.
“Personally, if I see a clay pot or a stone figurine and I can reach it, I’m leaving it where I think your front door was,” said Park, fighting back tears. “So when you come back, there will be something familiar, not just a pile of ash.
“I want you to know when you do come back it is going to be hard to see your home and your community,” she added. “It’s mostly gone, and the scale of the loss is certainly staggering. But we don’t want you to see it alone. And we don’t want you to feel unsupported.”
Park told residents that when they were allowed back in their neighborhoods, they would see “a heavy presence of firefighters and city workers.”
