This is Gary and Shannon and you're listening to KFI AM six forty the Gary and Shannon Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. Now, the most destructive in LA City history. More than one hundred excuse me, one thousand structures destroyed, obviously by and large homes. You can bet a thousand homes have been destroyed in the Palisades.
We're going to get lucky if that number stays what it is. And that sounds weird, but I mean, you compare it to some of the more destructive wildfires that we've seen in the state of California, and it is the tunnel fire that I mentioned from the Oakland Hills back in nineteen ninety one. They're about twenty nine hundred structures that burned. The campfire up in Paradise, more than eighteen thousand structures burned.
And this is.
As this smoke clears, as we do get more firefighting air resources up there to map this thing, to go through and to you know, once they can get their heads above water basically pardon the pun, and get it into those neighborhoods and go house by house to see the destruction. I mean, I don't know how that number doesn't go up.
You're just seeing the shock and people's faces and people's eyes because a lot of people, especially in the Altadena area, I mean the Palisades initially, yes, same thing where they were not even given time to be told to get out.
They had to get out before any sort of evacuation warning or orner was even given, because that thing took off so quickly and just blasted down the mountain there, which is why Palisades Drive was overrun, which is why cars were abandoned, which is why the fire service had to bulldoze them out of the way to get up to fight that thing with what they could do at a fire burning that angrily Alta Dina as well Alta
Dina overnight. That fire erupted about six thirty seven o'clock, and man, it took off quicker than people knew knew about it. We heard from Ernest earlier in the show who said, you know, yeah, we knew there was a fire nearby, but we went to bed. We woke up, the embers were flying at the bedroom window.
We walk out.
Everything's on fire, both sides of the alley, all the homes on the block. We just grab what we could I yelled fire, We got the hell out of there. I think a lot of people are in complete shock still. And some of those people went back to their neighborhoods and their home was completely gone. They're telling people that if you don't have to go to work, stay home.
If you can stay home, get off the roads, let the firefighters and the incoming firefighters get to where they need to be when you're looking at all, whether it's Silmar or the Palisades, Alzadina or anywhere in between those places.
Door dash services have been suspended in areas including the Palisades, Santa Monica, Westwood, Brentwood, Calabasas, Pasadena, San Fernando, Santa Clarita, Northridge because they understand the importance of staying off the roads and letting the emergency vehicles wherever they need to be.
Just saw on X that Governor Newsom has deployed the California National Guard. They will work alongside cal Fire to get through what is going to be very tough several days. The California National Guard disaster response in emergency preparedness, they train for things like this. They're not just going in there willy nilly. They're also not going to be Hopefully they don't have to be the frontline defenders when it comes to actually fighting the fires, but they do receive
training to fight brush fires, including fire training courses during emergencies. Obviously, National guardsmen can also support operations like security logistics during major fires like this. So the National Guard has been called in to assist in all of the first responders, to assist with all of the other first responders and the duties that.
They have in front of them.
Malibu is not getting a lot of attention, but certain areas of Malibu have been wiped out completely as well.
And listen, there's something weird that happened yesterday when we started talking about the wind event. I mean, when we were planning the show, we were talking about wind is going to be the thing. We have to come back
to the wind. We got to make sure that we talk about the wind, that this is a serious enough situation that combined with the lack of rain that we've had, you know, we've had I think it's downtown LA had sixteen hundreds of an inch over the course of six plus months, when we usually have three and a half or four and a half inches of rain. At this time, we knew that this was going to be a big deal. A few weeks ago, when the Malibu fire started, it
did not materialize in the same way. It didn't happen the same way, even though we were in one of those particularly dangerous situations, and thankfully it didn't materialize the way this one did. I mean, this one is, to your point, devastating. What we thought was a two thousand acre fire yesterday, now we know is well over eleven thousand acres and growing because of zero zero percent containment
on that thing today. And it went straight, it went straight west towards Malibu, and some of those areas, some of those homes that are just west of Duke's Restaurant on Pch are gone and there is nothing left but a charred foundation in some cases.
All right, we are taking your calls when one hundred and five to zero one KFI. If you have any experiences today yesterday, loved ones, you let us know.
One eight hundred five to one five three four. We'll come back with more of those calls. Yeah. I noticed this morning as the sun was coming up, both in the Pacific Palisades area and also over in Altadena that there was an expectation that you would see some amount of destruction. I mean, we knew that that was coming, just based on the absolute terrorizing images from last night, knowing that the darkness was hiding some of the destruction, and then when the sudden came up, it was going
to be even worse than that. And we've seen in cases before fires like this that do cause destruction, but not this widespread, you know, not up and down a road as far as you can see every single home or mobile home or a car or whatever. It is
just completely destroyed. The development that we just found out about a short time ago is that Governor Gavin Newsom has apparently activated the California National Guard to come in and help out with all kinds of things with logistics, with law enforcement, with evacuations, with care for people who have been evacuated. They do have some wildland fire training as well, so I don't know if you're going to see a whole lot of them out on the actual
fire lines themselves. It is a good move simply because we've got to get some rest. Some of these crews have been out there for twenty six hours, and you think about the toll that it takes on somebody who stays up all night because they've got to pack up their house and get out. Think about the physical activity that is required to be out in those hills, or to be on a fire truck, or to be in someone's backyard and try to save their house.
And they grab sleep where they can, you know, twenty minutes here, twenty minutes there, But they're putting themselves in danger the little amount of sleep that they have been able to put together. Again, the word the latest is the fire out of the Palisades burned now more than eleven thousand plus acres that is going to go up. That number is no match for this year devastation. And we use that word all the time right when we
talk about natural disasters or fires, wind events things like that. Hurricanes, tornadoes would have you devastation. But it really sounds trite when you look at what has become of so many people's homes. More than a thousand homes lost in the Palisades alone, hundreds in the Altadena area.
I believe the.
Count is at one hundred, but you see footage and it's got to be more. Again, a lot of people didn't even know that this was a possibility. They didn't know evacuating was going to be a possibility for them because the fire moves so quickly in both of these places. And so to go from just having a Tuesday night at home to suddenly your powers out, you're told to get out, you're grabbing things, you leave, You see your house, your streets already on fire. You come back this morning
and everything's gone. I can't believe the kind of shock that's going to go on in your life for the coming days and weeks. Probably the Palisades Fire now the most destructive in La City history.
To that end, the in the Palisades fire. I was watching James Wood's Twitter account, Yes, yeah, and he had quite an interesting timeline in that he, over the course of a few hours, had basically said, listen to the people have reached out, thanks for being concerned, just letting you know that we were able to evacuate successfully. Don't know at this moment if our home is still standing,
but sadly the houses on the street are not. That was about twenty hours ago, So that would have been just about four o'clock in the afternoon yesterday, and from that point it was about an hour after that which just informed the next door neighbor's houses on fire. Fortunately they were evacuated that same hour. We cleared and built pathways on our hillside and sprinkler systems that can be remotely managed. We also did brush clearance per local fire
prevention mandates. I'm hoping it's done some good. It's hard to beat the windows this, It's hard to beat the winds this time of year, though it's sometime careless. And then he said at one point that all the smoke detectors were going off in his house and transmitting to their phones. And this is obviously after they had evacuated. He said, I couldn't believe our lovely little home in the hills held on this long. It feels like losing
a loved one. The only reason I point him out is, I mean he's a large enough celebrity name that a lot of people are going to be able to follow him and see see his posts on X. But just that timeline of he originally thought this was a fire and that it was going to be okay, but the videos that he took from out his back porch seeing the flames get closer and closer, and then finally making that decision to abandon. I mean, you you abandon ship. You got to get out and you take what you
can with you. But to be able to now technologically watch this thing go in front of you, I mean you can watch it on a ring camera, if you are a doorbell camera, if you still have electricity at your house. And then, like he said, all these smoke detectors in the hall and the house started going off and he was being notified of it as it was slowly taking overtaking the house that he had lived in.
Video that makes me cry.
It's from the I think it's the Altadena fire. And this guy's house is fully engulfed, as are many on this street, and there are firefighters there and they're on top of the roof and it's fully in golf like I said, and they're battling this thing on the first story, in the second story, and the ladders up to the roof on the second story. Firefighter climbs down from the ladder and gives the guy his cat that the homeowner, and he grabs the cat and he's cradling the cat
in his arms and the cat is panting. Cat's mouth is open, tongue is hanging out and the cat is panting, and the guy is in tears and he's cradling the cat to the ground, hugging the cat like just so thankful that his as his home is burning to the ground, lost everything, and the firefighter hands on the cat over the fence like.
It's the sweetest picture.
It's the sweetest video of like, you know, just stuff versus what matters. And I know that just stuff sounds so stupid right now, especially if you've lost everything or know what that's like, because it's not just stuff. But when you think of like pets and your loved ones and everything and your neighbors, if everyone's safe, that's something We're going to.
Go live downtown La again. LAPD Chief Jim McDonald holding a news conference.
You know, be ready to go pack what you need up, but then please comply with these orders. Then we don't give them put them out lightly. When we believe that you're in the path of the fire, we're going to order that evacuation and we really really need your compliance on that because if we have to send people in to try and make rescues, those people are putting their lives on the line directly for something that could have been avoidable. Sheriff Louana mentioned looting. That's something that we
also have to watch out for. That is incredible that we'd even have to talk about that during these tragic times. But we are going to take that also extremely seriously and we will follow up with that in the strongest way possible.
Again, the LPD Chief Jim McDonald there from a news conference. There was a point that was made earlier lamer care and Bass is not yet in La although the expectation is that she's arriving back soon. When they held a news conference earlier today, they did mention that she was at the time that they held the news conference, she was in Dallas on her way eventually back to La. She had been in Africa. She'd been in the nation of Ghana, I believe for an inauguration. She was one
of the guests at the inauguration. So this will continue through the day. The Palisades Fire is now up over eleven thousand, eight hundred acres, the largest of the fires. That is not a surprise. It continues to burn zero percent containment. The Eaten Fire in the Altadena Pasadena areas up over ten thousand, six hundred acres, according to the Angelis National Forest And we do know that there were
a couple of fatalities in that eaten fire. We don't know why, we don't know what the cause was, but the fire department did say this morning that there were two fatalities also a number of significant injuries in both of those incidents. One of the telling comments today was from the county chief, Anthony Mark, the county fire chief, that said, we were not ready for this. And it wasn't that they simply didn't see it coming. It was
that they didn't see this many fires coming this quickly. Yeah, and they're really even if even if all they were doing was concentrating all of their resources on the Palisades fire, they may not have been able to do much of anything differently.
No, No, because because it took off so fast, it.
Took off so fast, the conditions were so bad, they were so in over their head and there.
Was no way in and such a small way out.
Continuing well over twenty four hours of our special fire coverage here in southern California, New York Post headline this morning with just the most devastating fire images lost Angelus, Wow, the Palisades Fire burning out the Pacific Palisades Santa Monica Malibu area is up over eleven eight hundred acres. According to a firefighter for La City. They said it started as a backyard fire, but didn't get into the specifics of what that exactly meant, but the county did say
that more than one thousand structures have been destroyed. At this point, they didn't have any fatalities reported in that fire, but a high number of what they referred to as significant injuries.
Including to first responders, making it the most devastating fire in Los Angeles history.
The Eton Fire, burning your Altadina and Pasadena is up over ten thousand, six hundred acres according to the Angelus National Forest. Now that one did have a couple of fatalities, but they don't know the cause of the fatalities, number of significant injuries, and well over one hundred structures they say destroyed. I mean, you could just you could see that in some of the early television reports from today.
Multiple homes in many areas along the foothills there that were destroyed in Altadina and Pasadena.
Not that it matters, but it is Awards season. Critics Choice Awards ceremony has been postponed. The AFI Awards has been postponed. The King's Game tonight has been postponed as well. Everything seems to be shutting down. Everyone says to stay home if you can. Like we mentioned, this wind event continues into tomorrow, I believe until tomorrow afternoon. Now, the most destructive wins, as we have reiterated, have already passed. Those were last night between ten pm and five am.
And if you were in the fire arees, you felt and wins like you've never felt before. I compared my backyard there in the two ten Foothill area to just a freaking popcorn machine with the tables and the chairs and the plants and everything else in the backyard, very small backyard, but just continuing to bounce around as long as I was there till we were evacuated. So it's a crazy, crazy time, a lot of shock, a lot of fear that's going on right now as people return
to nothing. Some neighborhoods still without firefighters because the agencies are spread too thin, are putting out their own fires and trying to stop the flames from reaching the houses if they haven't already done so.
And yeah, you are going to see the red flags continue in terms of the fire weather warnings, because while we won't see sixty seventy eighty mile an hour gusts anymore, doesn't look like we will still see gusts of twenty five thirty five miles an hour, which are plenty to cause multiple problems. We might not see the embers flying two three miles through the air like we saw last night, but we still see some very active flames throughout the fires and Pacific Palisades and altaden Opasadena.
Well, like we talked about those embers yesterday, they didn't need to be sneaky. They were just going to be taken by the wind for whatever attack that they were going to be destined for when it comes to the next house or even a mile or two miles down the way. But now is time for those sneaky embers, the ones that may not be as obvious sneaking from home to home, from a burning home to a home
maybe that's just across the street. We've seen these fires be very weird in the way that they move from home to home on the same street, right And most of the time that's because those sneaky embers will just kind of drift across the street, nestle in the eaves and attack that home from the inside.
The other big fire that we're keeping an eye on is up in the northern end of the San Fernando Valley. The Hearst fire burning in Silmar is up about seven hundred acres. If there's any silver lining in that arena, it's that it is apparently burning in sort of the old burn scar of the Saddle Ridge fire which went through that area a few years ago. That is the one that could potentially cause closure of a couple of fruit.
We know that the at least the westbound two ten was closed for quite a while, and there are exits along the five to get to the two ten that have been closed as well, as long as you see some of those evacuations in those same areas.
Little Garriash, I mean, this is Danny Martinez again. I was just wondering how many more insurance companies are going to quit writing policies here in California because of the fires and all the policies are going to have to pay out not only house policies, but out of policies.
You know, that is an interesting That's one of those that'll be a story for another day, but a story nonetheless.
Absolutely, there's going to be a lot of stories that we get to after the initial shock and awe is over.
What's far from being over.
I'd love to say that this is a done deal, but these fires remain out of control. We talked with Sue Cole from the Pacific Policies Community Council. She brought up a good point when we spoke to her earlier this morning, and she said that, you know, she talked about the homes being gone, her home, she doesn't know about her friends have lost homes. But it's the schools that are gone. It's the businesses that are gone. You've seen churches gone in Pasadena, you see schools gone in Altadena.
It's just centers of community, not just homes, centers of family, but centers of the community that are gone as well. And we saw this in Paradise when the whole town was wiped out.
The hardware store, the gas station that you stop by every morning to fill up and all of that.
Stuff is gone.
Hey, Gary, Hay Shannon, just want to thank you guys for giving all the news and eclipse about this terrible fire. My folks are eighty five and my dad's got dementia and they lost power last night. They're up in Eagle Rock next to Pasadena, and my mom was freaking out, so I told her to just grab your transistor radio put on AM six forty so you can keep in touch with what's going on. You guys are always funny, but now you guys are given some serious hero work, and I want to thank.
You, not hero.
A couple of images that we saw that will and he brings up. One of them was the image of the people being escorted out of that rest home in Altadena last night when wheelchairs and being walked out to get to a safe area. The other one was the burned out line of cars on Palisades Drive from this morning.
I mean, it's hard enough thinking about you're in the golden time of your life and you've got to be wheeled out of your of your home already and then wheeled out.
Of your home home. And then you know the.
Angels that were helping all those people, and I don't know where they went. I'm assuming they're places for them to go, but just you know, you're so lucky if you have somewhere to go.
So lucky.
We're going to try to hook up with Alex Stone, who is covering the fire in Altadena for ab Snows and for us. In a few minutes a.
I'm da Hawkman is being interviewed, which is ridiculous. He did say because you know, there's been two looters that have been arrested. Two looters, yes, which is so disgusting. But he's basically saying that anybody that's taking advantage of people who are leaving their homes, they're pretty much going to be locked.
And that's good.
But Nathan Hoffman has run to every microphone that exists in LA since he was elected.
This is a little overkill.
Sorry, it's okay, It's okay, But I just like his message.
To the criminals.
It's true that fire, the one burning in the Altad Nepacadyen the areas up over ten thy six hundred acres, was the latest that we saw. Have been out there all morning. ABC's Alex Stone has been covering that fire for them and for us and Alex what's going on out there?
Now?
Hey there guys, I'm on Sacramento Street right now and it is just home after home, still burning. We had seen some burning earlier today and still there was a garage that just a moment ago collapsed. In fact, still the power lines. One of the power poles just disconnected, burned to the base in tim tumbling in and gave us a bit of a scare. But there are a number of homes along this street that are now gone. I was just talking to one of the home owners.
He says that he came home and early this morning his home was already on fire. He got off of work and came home. He's got an American flag that is waving in the front of the home. It's got burn marks in it right now, but it continues to wave in the wind. But there are no firefighters on this street that they've driven by. There's not a lot they can do. Seems that they are out of engine.
Some Pasadena firefighters came in a pickup truck. They got up out, they looked around at a garage that was beginning to go up, and then they left from there that there's just not a lot they can do.
It seems like it's a treaws situation, that this is a mass casualty event when it comes to homes burning, whether it be the Palisades or all Ta Dina and firefighters are determining who's on the grain, the yellow and the red you know tarps, essentially of what they can save and what has no chance. And I'm as hard as as it is to move over that red tarp or that yellow tarp to help all the people on the green.
It's got to be really frustrating for them.
Yes, I think you're exactly right. And then they're deciding what they can save and what they can't save. We sell them putting a lot of water on a home on one of the main streets here, and there were a number of engines out of Long Beach that stayed there and continue to put water on it, and then they left, and now it's going up in flames. They just don't have, you know, you stop and you waste the ban power of four or five engines to sit there and put a lot of water on the homes
and then they leave and it goes up anyway. So I think with a lot of these homes, as you mentioned, they're kind of freizing and figuring out what they can and can't do. And we know that there is help coming in from We've heard from the Phoenix Fire Department. We know around Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, they're all heading this way right now, so there is help coming in.
But in the meantime where it is mainly Pasadena fire and Long Beach fire and others who are helping out here, they just don't have enough people to deal with this, and so you've got neighborhoods like this street where the homes are just going up in flames.
Or there are neighbors that are there that stuck around and are trying to save the other homes. We've seen, We've seen plenty instances of that and heard from some people who were doing just that. You know, they may have lost their own home, but they were willing to stick around and try to protect the ones of their neighbors.
You're right, there are a couple of gentlemen who are on a rooftop in front of me, and a woman who is out front watering her own land. But there are a couple of guys up on a rooftop using garden hose is doing whatever they can to try to stop their home from going up in flames, and it's
working so far. You know, Typically the advice is don't do that because your garden hose is never gonna be able to compete again the wildfire flames that it's not a firefighter hose and the ability to put that much water on. But they're doing whatever they can to try to wet their roof, and so far it's working. But as I look around in these neighborhoods, it is just plume after plume going up right now, that there are so many homes that are burning here.
Right now, Alex, it seemed like with this fire, just like in the Palisades, that definitely and I know you have to go, but that people just didn't even have time to know they were going to be evacuated before they had to get the hell out.
Well, that's the thing. And then the one guy was talking to a moment ago and he said, a gun out of work and he came home and he knew that there was the fire in Pacific Palisades. He didn't know about this and came home and his home was burning, and it seemed like it came out of nowhere. And as I'm talking to, their explosions all around us right now as ammunition in the homes as a gas that propane tanks are going up vehicles are burning in the
street right here. That it's just one after another. And even though it's not the one hundred mile an hour in guys, it was nuts this morning at about three thirty or four o'clock in the morning, it really was one hundred mile an hour wind. And that has died down. That's not going on anymore, but it's still breezy, and it's enough with these live members in the air to jump from home to home and the heat from one home to go to the next home and then to start that on fire as well.
Alex Stone Sellar, job as usual, We appreciate it.
Stay safe out there, man, you're.
Going thank Obviously, today is basically just catching up in terms of catching up with the information, the size of the fires, the directions of the wind, the where people go if they do have to evacuate them. Fascinated Convention Center has sort of become a main hub for some people, and like you mentioned, that's where the news conference is
going to take place a little bit later. But there are other questions that obviously we will get to over the course of the next couple of days and weeks, I mean, and some of them are the obvious questions of can we get another ingress egress route into Pacific Palisades, you know, the Summit area, the Highlands area. Was there enough water pressure? Is there a way for us to
guarantee water pressure in a situation like that? The hazmat situations that will exist for weeks or months in some of these places where if you've got if you've got the cars that just just look at the cars that burned and the I don't know the process of cleaning up after a car has burned, to get that out of the area, to make sure that all of the hazardous not just hazardous materials, but then all the hazardous conditions.
You've got the power lines that have gone down, the hundreds of power poles that have probably been lost, the wires that continue to drape across some of these areas, and then how long it's going to take to get basic services back up and running in some of those areas, whether it's Pacific Palisades, When you're going to get electricity back, how long does it take so CAT Energy or Department of Water and Power to come and get these lines re energized, and then just some of the basics, you know,
how do you recover, How did how does a neighborhood, how does it, How does a town like Pacific Palisades recover? How does an individual neighborhood recover? And then how do you as a family or as an individual come through something like this where you lose as much as you do in just the course of a quick couple of minutes or maybe a couple of hours.
In some case, you're seeing the best of humanity too, of people helping neighbors, helping family, helping friends, people reaching out. It's one of those things that really does restore your faith in humanity at the same time ripping your heart out for a lot of people.
So be cool to each other, don't be a.
D Always follow Roads on social media. We have some pretty great links, including that app that watched duty app that helps us get information to you, and you can just kind of mainline it. If you'd like to reminder that Rick Caruso is going to be on with John just coming up soon in this first hour you've been listening to The Gary and Shannon Show. You can always hear us live on KFI AM six forty nine am to one pm every Monday through Friday, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app,