An insight into the Los Angeles fire disaster

“What do you think that is?” asks Gary Romoff, holding out a charred piece of plastic to his wife. “Part of my hairdryer,” Louisa Romoff murmurs, continuing to poke around in what was her bathroom 72 hours ago with a small tool in her hand.

Dressed in sports clothes, breathing masks and rubber gloves, the two kneel in the remains of their home. All that remains of the two-story house with four bedrooms is a knee-high mountain of rubble and ash. What was once their neighborhood is now a field of rubble. It is no longer possible to tell where one property ends and the next begins.

The Romoffs lived in the hills of the Pacific Palisades north of Los Angeles for 30 years. Her two now grown daughters grew up here and two years ago they redesigned the garden. Fires have happened again and again over the years; they are as much a part of Southern California as the beach and Hollywood. But the flames have never come so close that the Romoffs had to flee.

The 58-year-old was sure that it would be the same this time. Louisa Romoff stayed in the house until 6 p.m. on Tuesday evening. But then the winds changed, the fire got closer and closer, Romoff started packing – the wedding album, the year books from her daughters’ school days, glasses and contact lenses, the toothbrush. “I wish I had grabbed my makeup too, it was right next to it,” she says with a sigh. Gary was working in the office as usual; Like every morning, he left the house without turning back.

“I thought there might still be walls standing,” says the 58-year-old, looking around. Until Wednesday morning, they had still hoped that their house had been spared from the flames, “like that one,” she says, pointing to a neighboring house that was one of the few in the neighborhood to remain unscathed and now looks like a survivor from the rubble protrudes.

But then one of her daughters saw on the television news that her house had been destroyed: the basketball hoop in the driveway, the large coniferous tree next to it – it was clear that the pile of rubble was her property. The daughters are completely devastated, “it’s like a death in the family,” says Romoff, a petite woman with long brown hair. “It’s just terrible to see your house in the news in this context.”

At first she was full of self-pity – and then grateful that they had not lost their lives – like at least ten residents of the Pacific Palisades.

Driven by curiosity as to whether anything in the house could still be saved, the Romoffs walked three kilometers into their old neighborhood on Friday morning. The entire area is actually closed to residents, electricity pylons are toppled across the streets, and fires are still burning in a few places. Only rescue workers and media representatives are allowed in, but the Romoffs smuggled their way through. Maybe they would still find the jewelry necklace that Louisa had inherited from her aunt and had forgotten to pack in her haste.

They now poke around in vain in the rubble. The flames burned everything beyond recognition. Almost everything: Louisa proudly shows a coffee mug, a gift from her relatives in Portugal, which surprisingly survived the flames. It’s charred around the edges, but Louisa Romoff holds it proudly like a trophy. She finally carefully places it on her handbag. She keeps stopping as she rummages through the rubble and makes sure the cup is still there.

Suddenly Gary bursts out laughing, “Look, Louie, the pine tree did it!” He points to a tree perhaps thirty meters high on the neighboring property. His wife laughs and explains: She hated that tree; her front yard was always full of needles. “That can’t be the case,” she says, she’ll send the gardener up here with a chainsaw.

After a few minutes, Gary has had enough of poking around in the ashes. In general, he seems surprisingly calm and pragmatic. “In the end they were just material things, you can buy them all again,” he says. He has already spoken to an architect about the new building, “I never liked the floor plan anyway.” His wife sees it differently: “I want everything to be exactly the same as before.” She puts the coffee cup and a handful of charred remains in a plastic bag; nothing more is left of her home. Then she, too, scrambles out of the rubble.

“Like an atomic bomb”

Not everyone deals with the disaster as calmly as the Romoffs. If you drive a few minutes down the hills through what was once the shopping street of Pacific Palisades, you will pass a burned-out church tower, countless smoldering ruins and people standing in the rubble of their houses. Some give television interviews, others just wave away. They don’t want to put into words what happened to them here.

But some residents were also lucky. On a side street a few minutes’ drive from the city center, a station wagon stops in front of one of the very few buildings on the street that remained undamaged: white picket fence, artificial turf, palm trees, the US flag flies over the veranda – America like something out of a Hollywood film . Three middle-aged men get out of the car and look around in disbelief at the road’s rubble. “Like an atomic bomb,” one murmurs, tears in his eyes.

Then one of the men runs into the house and, in a panic, begins to pack photo albums, laptops and children’s toys into the trunk. He introduces himself as Matt, but he doesn’t want to answer questions right now. “My wife made me a list of what I should get,” he explains briefly before running back into the house. Why was he so panicked? “Not all the sources of the fire have been extinguished yet,” he says, adding that the sports center around the corner is still burning. Then he disappeared back upstairs to look for a mural that was important to his wife.

In fact, strong winds are forecast again for the coming week, which could further worsen the Palisades Fire and the other fires in Los Angeles County. There have also been break-ins into undamaged houses; by Saturday, the police in Los Angeles had arrested 20 looters. And last but not least, the smoke and toxic gases, such as the smell of French fry fat, threaten to penetrate everything that has survived the flames.

California’s insurance market could face the same fate as Florida’s

A conversation with Andrew and his wife Leslie gives an idea of ​​what fate lies behind all the rubble. They don’t want to read their last names in the newspaper, but they still tell their story. Leslie raised her three sons in the home here in the Pacific Palisades, losing two of them in the last five years. Now they wanted to sell the house, they had already found a buyer and the money had been received by the trustee at the beginning of the week.

“That’s why we didn’t have anything of value in the house, that was lucky,” says Andrew, wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. “But the house itself was important to us.” Andrew is originally from Australia, where forest fires occur again and again, as in California. “We never thought it could hit our house,” he says. “That would have meant that thousands of houses would have had to burn down in front of us.” Plus, the local fire department is just around the corner, he says, pointing to a brick building at the end of the street. “They survived the fire, but they no longer have a district.”

He believes that California is now threatened with the same fate as Florida: parts of the state are considered uninsurable, the danger of annual hurricanes is too great, and no private insurance company wants to take the risk anymore. “That’s exactly what we’re facing here,” believes Andrew. Were they sufficiently insured? Andrew thinks yes, but the coming weeks will show that. The disputes with the insurance companies would only now begin.