I spent most of the evening on January 7, a Christmas Day celebrated by Orthodox Christians around the world, monitoring local news and emergency apps for evacuation alerts for the Los Angeles area. The horrific images of the Pacific Palisades fires were only the start, the city officials warned. Our neighborhood areas were advised to stay put, shelter in place as the night winds were picking up. As the night progressed, the fiery circle around us was getting closer and closer.
What many people outside LA don’t realize is that it’s not one big city. It’s many sizable cities, with their own budgets and mayors encompassing 29 separate fire departments; Beverly Hills, Glendale and Pasadena–LA County is vast. And it was surreal to watch the metro area, with so many resources, still struggling to find enough firefighters and water to contain the fire that was raging through neighborhoods, engulfing entire homes, forcing thousands to flee, going so far inland into the city that few predicted.
