A Los Angeles Photographer Captures the Devastating Fires Threatening His Beloved Community

When the Palisades fire started in early January, I was outside the city in a remote area in central California with no cell service, and my family was outside the country. It rose to the top of the hill, and my phone began to explode. It is time to make Beilin’s house. The fires were burned along the Pacific coast road, and then turned north to the top of Toubanga Canyon, where the house in which I grew up was now in danger.

Inside my house, my cat was, oh LifeHundreds of thousands of pictures that live on solid drives – the momWork life, more than a hundred paintings stored throughout the house. The same house can be considered the greatest piece of art. I chose every tile, doors handle, match lighting, tap handle and paint color to create a really unique environment. I moved To the West Hills neighborhood in Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley, about 13 miles north, and a safe fire, two and a half years ago, But its presence radiates the walls. The loss of the house will be catastrophic, the Santa Monica mountains, the tracks that pass through the grooves and the oak forests are a synagate. The idea of ​​losing both was a dagger on my chest.

While I was going back, I started receiving videos, pictures and devastating news from various chats and group applications. My wife and my children terrified that our cats would be burning alive. When I watched a video of fire, Toubanga Canyon tears in a hundred feet -like flames, my heart sank. I started receiving information, some of which are misleading, that the fire was about to take Topanga. The panic set out. Fortunately, one of my friends was not evacuated in my childhood. He was filled with hard drives and managed to seize one of our cats.

When I went back to Los Angeles, it was tonight. I immediately traveled home and managed to find the other cat and seize some paintings. The next day, I returned. I was stopped in the corridor and looked behind me to see a large column of tall dark smoke on my neighborhood. I could see the firefighters sitting on the hill, and a helicopter after the helicopter flew directly over the house, and bombed the blades that penetrate my bones. I felt like a war zone. I fill my mother’s favorite paintings in a feverish way, a group of personal things that my family requested, and all the downsides and ancient photos from the previous digital days. Once the car is mobilized, I knew what I had to do. I had to start documenting the disaster.

I traveled to the top of the street and joined a crew of firefighters who protect the homes Topanga State Park. When it reached for the first time, the fire rose high in the sky. Tariq the helicopter threw the water over and over, and miraculously, the wind calms into a stopping road. The chain pamphlets are soaked when the firefighters cleared the road until a hose was dragged on the side of the mountain. At the present time, they were winning the battle against the mother nature. I stood with a few firefighters, fascinated by all the fireworks that spread across the gardens. How can it be very terrible?

During the following days, she continued to document fire and beyond. I traveled around Pima Ridge, the mountainous area was called my second son. Everything has been burned, as much as I can see, with black bushes that have reached the sky like demonic hands. Surprisingly, most houses were rescued by firefighters. While I was driving my car to the Las Flores Canyon road, along the Pacific coast road, I started discovering the homes of people who were not lucky. When I finally reached Pacific Palisades, the scene was horrific. The abandoned cars that were bound to make way for the fire trucks to reach the sunset street, burned half of it to its shells. A block after a mass of homes was settled. And while she stood on Palisades, I thought about something I heard on the radio: “Wind is King”. If the wind did not die that night when the fire was at the doorstep, Toubanga would have suffered from the same fate of the containers.