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By 9:30 a.m. CT on Wednesday morning, Tracy Tutor was already mid-trip on a flight from Dallas to Los Angeles, hoping that when she arrived to her destination, her home would still be intact.
The Million Dollar Listing LA star was “racing home,” she told Inman in an in-flight message. “Won’t be landing for a few, but so many friends have lost homes. Trying to get there as fast as I can.”
Los Angeles County residents woke on Wednesday morning to nearly 3,000 acres of land that had been scorched by the Palisades Fire, which broke out early on Tuesday in the Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood between the Santa Monica mountains and the Pacific Ocean.
On top of that, by Wednesday, four additional fires were burning throughout the county with over 80,000 people ordered to evacuate over the course of the two days. The major fires that morning were at 0 percent containment and at least two people had been confirmed dead by mid-morning.
Credit: Michael Nourmand
The Los Angeles Fire Department expected the number of burning acres to “rise drastically” on Wednesday, according to a CNN report, as high winds of up to 100 mph gusts have hindered efforts to fly aircraft above the blaze and drop flame retardant from above.
It was unclear just how many properties had been damaged or destroyed by the fires, but by Wednesday morning, the LA County fire chief said at least 1,000 structures had been destroyed in the blaze.
An unusually dry start to Southern California’s rainy season contributed to the fire outbreak, with only 0.01 of an inch of rain recorded in LA since the beginning of December. That lack of rainfall has made it the driest start to LA’s water year (which begins Oct. 1) in at least 80 years of records.
Thus far in January, typically the second-wettest month of the year, no rain has fallen — and none remains in the forecast for at least the next week. If that forecast holds, the county will have made it halfway through January with no rainfall.
As Michael Nourmand was between Beverly Hills and Downtown LA on Tuesday, he turned his gaze west toward the iconic high rises of Century City and said that as he saw smoke billowing in the background behind the towers, he had flashbacks to the images that surfaced on TV during 9/11 as the Twin Towers burned.
Credit: Michael Nourmand
“It literally looked like 9/11,” Nourmand, who is president of Nourmand and Associates, told Inman. “Obviously the buildings weren’t on fire, but just the angle [at which] I looked, with the smoke in the background, and the fires are, let’s call it five miles from those buildings in Century City — that’s how big the smoke was.”
Nourmand said that he knew colleagues and friends whose homes had already been destroyed by the wildfires and had offered his home as a place to shelter for those who needed it. As of mid-morning on Wednesday, he believed that he and his family would not need to evacuate, unless the situation drastically changed (which he didn’t rule out — they had bags packed, just in case).
Some of Nourmand’s clients wondered how the fires might impact their intention to imminently list their properties in neighboring communities, and he reassured them that they should still be able to put their homes on the market as planned.
That said, even against the backdrop of LA’s real estate market challenges in recent years, including low inventory, lack of affordability, a mansion tax and homeowners insurance pains, Nourmand thought that these wildfires could become the “most significant thing [to happen yet] in a bad way.”
“This is just catastrophic,” he said. “I do think that people will build back and all that, but this will take some time.”
Since he is also located outside of evacuation areas, Kofi Nartey of GLOBL RED at Real said he had also offered clients and their families a place to crash or bring pets, if needed. In general, he said today was a day to check in on people to be sure they’re ok.
“There’s amazing strength in community, especially when that community steps up,” Nartey told Inman. “I’m urging all of our team members and all of our real estate agents to reach out to all of their clients and friends to check in, because these are our communities.”
Even if people don’t feel like they have the financial means or bandwidth to help, Nartey said just asking how someone is doing and showing you care can make a big difference in someone’s day.
Local brokerage leaders like Mauricio Umansky of The Agency also took to social media to offer support to the community. “This is so devastating[. M]yself and The Agency will do whatever we can in our power to help,” Umansky wrote on Instagram on Wednesday.
Agents across the board echoed concerns about the fires exacerbating LA’s home insurance woes, making it even more difficult and costly for homeowners to obtain protection in insurance plans over wildfires.
“If we learn from the past, one of the big challenges that we’ve seen from the Woolsey Fire [in 2018], for example, was insurability,” Nartey said. “Insurability became just ridiculously challenging. It became extremely challenging to insure properties, hillside properties, properties in fire areas. We have what’s called the California FAIR Plan here. A lot of homes had to resort to getting the California FAIR Plan, which pretty much ensured that homes could be insured [with basic fire insurance coverage]. But it’s the amounts for the insurance [premiums] — the cost of insurance was much, much, much higher and has been much, much higher since we’ve seen more prevalent fires in the area.”
Local regulations about clearing brush also created confusion and posed challenges for residents, Michele Harrington of First Team Real Estate told Inman. Homeowners want to protect their homes by clearing any loose brush nearby, but some plants are protected. It’s not always easy to distinguish what’s permissible to get rid of versus what’s not — and sometimes different regulatory bodies seem to contradict one another, Harrington said.
“There’s a contradiction between the fire hardening and the environmental laws,” she said. “And I was talking to one of our agents that lives in Big Bear who has a huge problem with this, obviously, and she says it’s so complicated because the county laws, the state laws, the local laws, all contradict each other. So you might have an area that would be best if you cleared … behind your house for fire hardening, but you can’t clear certain areas because of environmental reasons. And it’s — it’s complicated, and it’s very hard to figure out.”
Nartey said he would like to see more technology implemented to build fire-resistant homes in the future to prevent such devastation, as well as action from local and federal governments to establish better and more affordable insurance policies for homeowners in areas prone to such disasters.
“This is unprecedented,” Nartey said. “The insurance companies are businesses, but they’re here really to ensure that people have remedies when these things happen. So we have to make sure that one, the insurance companies do step up, but also moving forward, that there are avenues to continue to get insurance when people are purchasing homes in these areas.”
As fires continued to burn on Wednesday, it was unclear how the next few days might shape up for LA-area residents; the impacts will certainly rattle those who call the City of Angels home and present immense challenges to overcome.
“I literally can’t imagine what it’s like to have your house — the most intimate thing that you own, where you raise your family, where you spend your time, where you sleep every day — just gone,” Nourmand said.
Email Lillian Dickerson
