by Albert Chang-Yoo and Caitlin Yoder
On Jan. 7, Skye Kirkland-Andrews was at a job interview at the Palisades Village when wildfire erupted from the hillsides. Kirkland-Andrews, 23, has lived in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in Los Angeles County for the past eight years. On the drive back to her mother’s apartment, she was passed by a host of emergency vehicles. “We pulled into our apartment, and my neighbor’s face was white as a ghost,” Kirkland-Andrews recalled. “We grabbed as much as we could, but still thinking we’re gonna come back in a day.” She packed a change of clothes and her dog, and together with her mother joined throngs of people evacuating the Palisades. “It was so smokey. I’d never seen anything like it,” she said.
It took three hours for Kirkland-Andrews and her mother to make the roughly 10-mile journey out of the isolated enclave to a friend’s place in Santa Monica. Their apartment was destroyed by the fire, as was much of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood. The past month has heightened Kirkland-Andrews’ perspective about the future, particularly with climate change increasing the threat of wildfire. “It’s definitely brought concern about living in Southern California,” she said.
The recent wave of wildfires that have consumed the greater Los Angeles area have been violently destructive. Prompted by drought conditions and a dry wind storm, multiple wildfires broke out in early January, spreading over 57,000 acres. As of Feb. 1, the Palisades and Eaton fires, the two largest, were 100% contained. Altogether nearly 200,000 people were put under evacuation order, 29 people have died and losses are estimated to exceed $250 billion. Many students on campus have been directly or indirectly impacted by the fires.
Kara Watson (‘26) is from Santa Clarita, a city just north of Los Angeles situated between the sites of the Hurst and Hughes fires. The Hurst Fire broke out in the Sylmar neighborhood on Jan. 7, while the Hughes Fire first started near the Castaic reservoir on Jan. 22.
Watson recalled waking up to see their grandma staring at the TV in her office. “She was turned fully away from her computer and staring up at the TV because she was like, she knew it would be bad,” Watson said. The news channel was on, blaring warnings and updates on the Palisades Fire that had broken out earlier that morning. Their grandparents comforted Watson and their brother, but it was clear that she was deeply worried.
“It kept getting more and more real, seeing the Hurst Fire creeping over the hill to us and having to sort of keep an eye on these really awful, horrible things happening,” Watson said. The family’s kitchen counter was soon covered in duffle bags holding emergency supplies, important documents and countless memories. “From the time that the fire started to the time that I left for break, there was not a time when they weren’t prepared to leave.” Nevertheless, some parts of life had to go on as usual.
“My grandma still had to work. She would have the TV on; if I called her, I could hear the news reports going on in the background, but she still had to do her job,” Watson said. One moment that stuck out to Watson was when their grandma sent a normal, mundane work email to her coworker only to receive an automated response that explained they were out of office due to losing their home.
Though their neighborhood did not receive an evacuation notice, bad air quality became a major concern for Watson and their family. The EPA has cautioned that the fires likely caused the spread of harmful toxins into the surrounding area. “Especially with elderly grandparents, the smoke blowing down really affected their health, really affected them. My mom had to leave her house and go stay with them, that way she could keep an eye on how they were doing and be able to be there if they needed to evacuate,” Watson said.
Since evacuating, many of those displaced have still been unable to return to what’s left of their neighborhood. Instead, Kirkland-Andrews and her mother have spent their free time meticulously documenting belongings in order to submit an insurance claim. “I feel like that is blocking a lot of the emotional processing,” she reflected. “It’s really hard to process.”
For the past month, the Kirkland-Andrews have mostly relied on the goodwill of friends and grassroots relief efforts led by small business and community leaders. While these efforts have been appreciated, many of the general resources, often shared on Instagram by large corporations like Airbnb, have been unhelpful. “It’s like a big disconnect with people actually using them,” Kirkland-Andrews commented.
Kira Wallace (‘28) and Isabelle Baehler (‘28) are friends who both live near west LA. When the fires hit, Wallace’s family had the idea to start a donation drive at a local business belonging to a family friend. It was going to be a one-day effort to collect toiletries and bring them to larger donation centers that could distribute them, such as the local Rotary Club chapter and the nearby YMCA. They also planned to collect pet supplies for local animal shelters.
One of the posts on the store’s Instagram went locally viral, causing an unexpected amount of people to show up bearing much more than just toiletries and pet supplies. From there, the one-day donation drive turned into a two-and-a-half-week-long endeavor. Whether it was donating or volunteering, people from the neighborhood were eager to help. “I think my mom said on the second day there were like 20 people volunteering because so many people kept asking if they could help,” Wallace said.
On the third day of the drive, Baehler showed up with the intention of dropping off her own donations and leaving. However, upon seeing the piles and piles of donations, she offered to help. Both Wallace and Baehler ended up spending the rest of their break working the drive, up until they returned to campus. They found the experience to be overwhelming, rewarding and sad all at once. “The circumstances were so upsetting, but then people’s outpour of generosity was just really beautiful,” Wallace said.
“There was one guy who came and brought a whole carload of stuff, and then he said, ‘Oh I have like $1,500 left, what other things do you need?’ And then he left and he came back some hours later with all of that stuff,” Baehler recalled.
The fires, which affected both wealthy and working-class communities, reflected Southern California’s disparate wealth gap. “I saw some people online, saying, ‘Oh well, the people that lost stuff in the Palisades, they’re all rich anyways,’ but the thing is, a lot of the people in Altadena, in Pasadena — those people aren’t wealthy,” Wallace said.
“I feel like a lot of people just think it’s celebrities and millionaires, but there’s a lot of other housing there. I knew so many families crammed in apartments just to live in the Palisades because it has a great school district,” Kirkland-Andrews said. “I knew a lot of people who had houses for 60 years, and that was passed down through generations. It was really special.”
“I think it’d be one thing if just the apartment burned down, but since the whole neighborhood’s gone — that whole aspect is what hurts my heart,” she said.
Ways to help:
American Red Cross: Los Angeles Region