‘The Worst Hellscape’: L.A. Fires Claim the Homes of Alumni

In the middle of the night on Wednesday, Jan. 8, Jason Rhodes *99, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, watched in increasing alarm as the hillside surrounding his home in Altadena, California, became engulfed in flame. “It was the worst hellscape I’ve ever walked through,” Rhodes says. “It was howling winds, smoke. I could hardly see 20 feet away.”

Rhodes evacuated that night with his wife and daughter, and the next morning a neighbor visited the burned-out area and informed Rhodes that his house had been destroyed. Two days later, Rhodes examined the rubble himself.

“I thought it was going to be really emotional to see the house burned down, but I found it strangely not emotional at all,” Rhodes says. “The reason was I had no bearing to see that this had been my house, because none of my neighbors’ houses were standing — there was nothing recognizable about my house.” Even big items that he thought might survive, like the refrigerator and washing machine, “weren’t there anymore,” having been incinerated in the blaze.

Rhodes is just one of many Princetonians based in Southern California who have lost their homes to the wildfires that swept through the Los Angeles basin the past two weeks, products of a winter with little rain and the notorious Santa Ana wind phenomenon that brings gale-force winds from the desert that heat up as they descend the mountain ranges and can cause fires to spread with alarming speed.

The Eaton fire in the San Gabriel Mountains and the Palisades fire in the Santa Monica Mountains, as well as several other smaller fires, had burned more than 40,000 acres of land as of Jan. 20, roughly the same size as Washington, D.C., destroying 12,000 structures and claiming 27 lives. The impacts have also been felt across the region, as toxins and ash released from burning homes have contributed to dangerous air quality in a metropolitan area of 18 million residents.

That devastating has been particularly felt in the seaside community of the Pacific Palisades. “I always knew the canyons and the hillsides were at risk,” says Peter Braveman ’72, who lost his Palisades house in the fire, noting the perceived safety of living within the Palisades village, densely populated and in flat terrain. “We actually never thought that where we were in the Palisades village was going to be at risk.”

E. Randol Schoenberg ’88, an attorney known for his role in the Klimt painting repatriation case that inspired the film Woman in Gold, lost his house in nearby Malibu, explained that the fire spread so quickly that nothing could have stopped it. “Our Malibu house was eight miles from where this started,” Schoenberg says, adding that the fire, fueled by 70-mph winds, only took 11 hours to reach and destroy the house. “There’s no amount of preparation that would have prevented most of this damage.”

What’s left of E. Randol Schoenberg ‘88's home in Malibu, California. 

E. Randol Schoenberg ‘88

PAW spoke with several alumni who lost their homes in the Palisades and Altadena, including NASA scientists Daniel Stern ’91, Deborah Padgett ’84, and Karl Stapelfeldt ’84, as well as alumni whose houses miraculously survived, such as Caltech astronomer Mike Brown ’87. “Nobody could believe it,” Brown says, explaining that his Altadena home and the surrounding houses survived, despite the flames reaching a 30 feet from their residences. “There’s just no reason these houses are here.”

For those who have lost their homes, the fallout has been defined by filing insurance claims and the painful task of remembering every possession they had and trying to estimate their value. “You just kind of close your eyes and picture room by room by room, what was in this drawer, what was on this shelf, and then try and figure out what everything’s worth,” says Vonnie Cameron s’67, an artist married to Gene Cameron ’67, who lost their house in the Palisades.

In terms of treasured personal items, Braveman was able to evacuate with a recommendation letter Albert Einstein wrote for his father to attend medical school, but he regrets losing his correspondence with nonfiction writer John McPhee ’53 and his thesis advisor, English professor William Howarth. Padgett and Stapelfeldt lost their copy of the Nassau Herald, among other Princeton memorabilia. Schoenberg also noted that the manuscripts and correspondence of his grandfather Arnold Schoenberg, a seminal Austrian American composer, were destroyed in the Palisades Fire.

Despite this particularly painful loss, Schoenberg says most of the losses were “just stuff,” a sentiment that many alumni shared. For John Frelinghuysen ’87, whose house in the Palisades was destroyed, the loss of the community in the village was one of the biggest tragedies in the fire.

“Many people that I’ve known and neighbors on my street who have been in the Palisades for many, many years are advanced in age and probably won’t be able to ever live there again,” Frelinghuysen says.

Many survivors have spent the days since the fire in a frenzy looking for housing in a market flooded with displaced people. Unlike many of the displaced, Padgett and Stapelfeldt were quick to land rental housing in the area. Padgett credits her NASA training to their crisis-management outlook. “Working for NASA, especially in operations, we’re used to planning for worst-case scenarios,” Padgett says. “When the bad stuff happens, my tendency is to try to focus on ‘What’s the next step?’”

And for others, the next step is to rebuild. “We’ve already spoken with the original architect of our home,” Frelinghuysen says, adding that he’s been studying how rebuilding took place after the 2017 fires in Santa Rosa, California, for lessons learned. “It’s going to be very dependent upon our ability to move quickly.”

Since the fires, some commentators have argued that rebuilding in wildfire-prone areas should be reconsidered, often citing “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” a 1995 essay by Los Angeles writer Mike Davis, who argued that the Santa Monica Mountains caught fire regularly enough during the 20th century that living there was inherently perilous.

Schoenberg suggests that such arguments lack perspective. “We live in a dangerous area, but most of California, like 40 million people, live in a dangerous area, right?” Schoenberg says. “Wherever you go, there’s going to be threats of natural disasters. And this was a natural disaster. It was a perfect storm.”

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Harrison Blackman ’17 is a freelance journalist and writer based in Los Angeles.