‘God willing, we will rebuild the Palisades’: locals survey the devastation

In Los Angeles earlier this month, it wasn’t just the buildings that burned — they were homes, family businesses and places of worship. Yet, the Pacific Palisades community still stands.

Sarah Peterson was at home when she got a text about a nearby fire. Fires near the Palisades weren’t uncommon, but when she opened her front door to check, she was only greeted by a wall of smoke. “I’ve been through other fires before, but I could tell this one was really, really close — and too big to ignore,” she said.

Her first thought was of family. “You grow up with a feeling of community, and family, and home, So obviously your immediate thought is to make sure that everyone is OK,” she said.

Sarah’s brother, who had just welcomed a son the day before, wouldn’t make it back in time. She rushed to his house a mile away, to gather some of his belongings and evacuate their mother, his newborn and the baby’s nanny.

Watching the inferno consume the hillside was something she described as “Hades.” But it wasn’t the size of the fire that terrified her — it was “the speed at which it engulfed every part of the neighborhood.” By the time they fled her brother’s house, the flames had already reached the neighbors’ trees.

The Petersons joined a caravan of residents fleeing the Palisades. But Sunset Boulevard was gridlocked, forcing many to abandon their cars. Sarah’s husband, Dave, took another route, only to find himself trapped, too. He and some workers he picked up left their cars, splitting up — Dave heading toward the raging bonfire that would soon dominate headlines.

Sarah lost contact with Dave as she arrived at their agreed-upon evacuation site, her brother-in-law’s home. She spent hours trying to reach him without success. When the fire grew closer, the family was forced to evacuate again. The house, once a place of refuge, was later consumed by the flames.

Matthew Alpert, a Palisades native, had long since moved to the San Fernando Valley to start an optometry practice. Still, his ties to the area were strong. When Dave called him for help, the next day, Alpert grabbed a dozen fire extinguishers and joined other locals fighting smaller fires to protect homes.

“You’ve seen the pictures on the news, but nothing prepares you for how intense the destruction is when you see it firsthand,” Alpert said. Together, they saved Dave’s house, but many others weren’t as fortunate.

“One minute, I’m at the gym, planning to hang out at home, clean up, do some stuff,” recalled Lindsey Taft. “The next, I’m fighting for my life to get out of the only hometown I’ve ever known. I’m saving my friend’s grandma, her dog, my cats — and I’m not even in my own car. I’m separated from my husband, and I have no idea where my parents are.”

After reuniting with her husband and learning her childhood home was gone, Lindsey felt compelled to return to her own house for priceless family photos. Driving back through her decimated town, she said she stared straight ahead, focused on her mission and unwilling to face the destruction around her.

She recovered the photos but told her husband she wished it had been their house that burned instead of her parents’. “At this point, it’s not home. It’s just a structure that somehow, by the grace of God, managed to make it.”

Nell Stephenson and her family had only eight minutes to grab what they could. They assumed they’d return in a few days. Instead, their home was completely reduced to ashes.

Walking near the beach with her son, Stephenson choked up. “I know this sounds like something a kid would say, but I just keep thinking — I just want to go home.”

Through it all, the love and support of greater Los Angeles never wavered. “We’re spread all over the place, but the sense of community is exactly why I want to rebuild,” Taft said. “There’s nowhere else like the Palisades.”

Those who stopped everything to help somebody evacuate, put out fires or update each other on the destruction of the fire were not heroes. They are simply members of a family — a community, one bound together by generations of Little League games, Fourth of July parades, pancake breakfasts, cul-de-sac potlucks and tight-knit church congregations.

The rebuilding will be physical, but the bonds that unite the community were never broken. As Sarah put it, “God, country, family. This is what we believe, and God willing, we will rebuild the Palisades. Not by ‘re-imagining’ it, as Gavin Newsom told Palisades local NBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff, but by seeing it as beautifully as it already was, is, and will be again.”