Firestorm: A Reflection on the 2025 CA Wildfires
Somebody said, “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” To some extent, the statement couldn’t be more true.
I had mixed feelings about returning to Los Angeles at the beginning of January. After starting my undergraduate career at UCLA in September of 2024, the city had come to feel like a second home to me, but that didn’t mean I wanted to leave my home in St. Louis again at the end of winter break. It was bad enough to prepare myself for without having to change my flight to an earlier time in an effort to beat incoming Winter Storm Blair, which was certain to ground me and keep me from getting back to school until at least several days after classes were due to start.
Still, I managed it and was back in LA before midnight on January 4th, and overall, it was good to be back. At least, it was good for a few days. Then, a part of me wished I had gotten stuck back home because at least snowstorms are familiar territory to me. Firestorms, on the other hand, are very much not, but in returning to school, that was what I was in for. I was trading one extreme for another.
The Pacific Palisades Fire started around 10:30 a.m. PST on Tuesday, January 7th, my second day back in class. As strange as it may sound to someone who doesn’t know what it was like—who’s never experienced a wildfire, doesn’t know the city or county of LA, or simply wasn’t in the area when it happened—I wasn’t worried about it at first. It was a terrible thing to think about, knowing that so many people, including members of my own community, were losing everything in the blink of an eye, but I was safe. If not for the rising smoke cloud visible from atop one of the campus’s many hills and the accumulating news reports on my phone, I wouldn’t have known anything was amiss.
It wasn’t until that night that it became clear to us just how bad it really was. As the flames overtook the skyline and winds with power I had only seen during tornado warnings whipped ash and dirt through the air, the buzz of mass panic started to rise around me.
The sky was red like a sunset on a clear night, but it was well after time for that, already past 10 p.m. and getting later. By then, the fire was roughly three thousand acres, and though three miles stood between it and us, it felt like it was closing in. We—my five roommates and I—packed bags just in case, uncertain of what to expect from the rapidly spreading fire. Would we wake up in the middle of the night to an order to evacuate? How much closer would the flames get? There was no way to know.
The next morning, the wind was still out of control, and a cloud somewhere between gray and brown shrouded the sky: smoke. But, despite the campus’s appearance, the air quality index (AQI) remained safe and classes continued, although many went online or provided an option for students who didn’t want to or couldn’t go outside. I, already having developed a level of silent asthma—I think related to my 2023 COVID-19 infection, although I don’t know enough yet to frame the statement as fact—took full advantage of the alternative options afforded to me by my professors. I wouldn’t open my door if I didn’t have to.
We were lucky in that the wind was moving toward the ocean, causing the Palisades Fire to spread north and west rather than south and east, where we were. However, with the Eaton Fire in Altadena to the east and, briefly, the Sunset Fire in the Hollywood area, alongside a number of other short-lived fires, we had more than one thing to worry about.
Wednesday night, undergraduate classes were canceled for Thursday and Friday, with graduate courses moved online, and most students fled campus as swiftly as possible. I don’t necessarily believe that was unwarranted, especially for students who live, unlike me, somewhat close, but I wouldn’t be telling this story truthfully if I didn’t say I was slightly annoyed (this became a common emotion throughout the course of the emergency, and I will admit that “slightly” might be an understatement).
When people panic, they lose the ability to think clearly, and rather than attempting to regain a level head and sense of composure, they tend to grasp at straws for an answer. They blame those above them for the situation, criticizing them for everything they did do as well as everything they didn’t. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about leadership, it’s that you can’t please everybody. Somehow, every choice you make will be wrong in someone else’s mind.
In situations like these, there’s also the issue of uncertainty, where difficult decisions must be made based on the information available at the time. People who have never had to make those kinds of calls themselves don’t understand that and expect those above them to be all-knowing and always tell them the right thing to do. In our imperfect real world, that’s not how it works.
Parents and students alike interpreted the cancellation of classes as the campus being evacuated because it was no longer safe, claiming that the university had lied earlier that day when they sent out an email stating that we were not in danger. The reality, however, was that we were still safe, we were not being evacuated, nor were we expected to be, and, most importantly, we were in the middle of an unprecedented emergency situation with conditions changing quickly. If we were safe in the morning but we weren’t anymore at night, that didn’t mean we had been lied to. It meant conditions had changed. We can’t predict the future; it happens.
So, I stayed put.
But the next day, when the entire city of Los Angeles received an accidental evacuation order alert, inciting more fear in the already tense population, and the last of my roommates was on her way home to San Bernardino, I had a choice to make. I could stay behind and hope I was right about the university being out of harm’s way, or I could take the opportunity to go with her on the off chance that I was wrong. After a brief phone conversation with my dad, I was packing my things.
That weekend, UCLA announced that the following week, all classes would be held on Zoom “out of an abundance of caution.” We hadn’t thought we’d be gone from campus for more than a few days, but as some of the evacuation warnings and orders for the Palisades Fire moved east toward the part of the San Diego Freeway (I-405) that sits beside UCLA, we couldn’t be certain how long it would be before we could return not only safely but with confidence that we wouldn’t have to leave again, this time not by choice but necessity. So, while we still could, we went back to get more things for the week.
It was Saturday, and campus was a ghost town. The smoke cloud was still over the sky, although it looked bluer than it had before, a thin layer of ash coated railings and stairs, and on my phone, the AQI meter was bright maroon: hazardous. We didn’t stay long, but as we came up the steps and crossed the bridge leading to our room, rifled through drawers, and zipped up bags, I felt the reality of it through the knot in my throat.
I hated every second of the feeling as I crammed as much as I could into my duffle bag, deciding what to take by asking myself how much it would hurt me if each of my belongings were to burn in a fire. It didn’t matter that I still believed the fire was extremely unlikely to get much closer to campus, much less close enough to burn it. There were people, including UCLA professors, who had left their homes for work on Tuesday and ended their days with nothing to return to, nothing to their names but the clothes on their backs or the cars they’d driven that morning. Had they thought it likely that they would lose everything? At least I had the blessing of a warning, and I couldn’t allow myself to take it for granted.
My stuff is just stuff, and the university buildings are just buildings, but truthfully, they’re not. They’re history and hope, representations of my dreams. When I made the decision to attend a university nearly two thousand miles away from everything I’ve ever known, I was jumping. I was taking a risk and choosing chance over comfort, regardless of how hard I knew it would be for me. But I could never have foreseen this. I could never have prepared myself to wonder what I would do with myself if the universe made ashes of everything I had worked for. What would I be left with?
Of course, I have my family and my friends, all of whom mean everything to me, but I don’t know who I am without my ambition to go beyond what’s expected of me in every aspect of my life. I want to be my own person and leave my own footprint. That’s what UCLA and the city of LA as a whole mean to me. They are the progress I’ve made and the things I’ve achieved. St. Louis is where I grew up, and it will always be my city, but Los Angeles is my city now too. I think people gravitate toward it for a reason, and the fact that only nine of the other forty-nine US states have populations greater than that of LA County is proof (those nine states, for reference, are Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan, based on data from the 2020 Census).
LA is known for a lot of things, but ultimately, what you see on your TV, the big screen, or even social media represents very little of it. Some people root for California to burn, not understanding that very little of it is made up of the things they claim to hate. It’s not all rich people and mansions, although those things do exist; it’s normal people with normal jobs, just like everybody else in this country. Those normal people are too often overshadowed by the rich, but it’s not always in the ways you’d think.
Here, I saw it in the way people saw mansions burning and cheered on the Internet, reasoning their insensitive reactions by claiming it was what their owners deserved for their wealth and that they would be minimally affected anyway because they could afford to rebuild. Neither statement is true to begin with—nobody ever deserves to lose everything they have, and just because somebody can afford one mansion doesn’t necessarily mean they can afford another—but either way, it wasn’t just mansions that were burning. It was regular homes in regular neighborhoods belonging to middle- and lower-class people. It was businesses big and small. It was jobs for thousands of people. That’s what has made this event so devastating; that’s what we’re still grieving for.
People claiming to stand for the “little guy” while heartlessly celebrating their downfall was hypocrisy at its finest, reflective of a trend I see far too often in our modern American society. Bringing one person up shouldn’t mean tearing another down, and if we could all find it in ourselves to care about each other just a little bit more, we would understand that. Instead, we fail to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us, and we’re falling apart because of it.
LA may seem like a place full of fake people, and while I won’t deny that there are some pockets of industry in which it lives up to that reputation, I might dare to say that it’s the most real city I’ve ever seen. If there has been one good thing to come out of all of this, it’s that a spotlight was placed on that aspect of the city’s culture when people came together to provide help to those who needed it.
As if I didn’t appreciate this city enough, I now have a new appreciation for it and everything else I have in my life. Most of it is just material, but material still has meaning. It represents hopes and dreams, but fire doesn’t care who you are, what you’ve done, or what you want to do. It just burns. That reality is something I’m going to carry with me for the rest of my life.
Sources Referenced:
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/losangelescountycalifornia/PST045223 (US Census Bureau QuickFacts Statistics for Los Angeles County)
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/2020-population-and-housing-state-data.html (US Census Bureau “2020 Population and Housing State Data”)
Last Referenced 10 February 2025
