The California fires didn’t just destroy homes – the climate-driven disaster caught the fabric of community.
At the start of last week, 76-year-old actress and producer Martha Hunter was looking forward to her latest play, a romantic comedy, opening at Theatre Palisades in Los Angeles. But tragedy struck on 7 January, as the first and most ferocious of several wildfires tore into the city.
While driving away from the Palisades fire, she learned that her “theatre home” of 20 years had burned to the ground. The next day, Martha and her husband Craig, 78, heard their family home was destroyed too.
The devastation of the LA wildfires has been total in some areas – consuming over 160 square kilometres of land, claiming at least 25 lives, and ruining some 12,000 buildings.
“Looking at pictures of LA, it looks like Gaza or Ukraine,” Martha says. “It’s just like a bomb went off.”
Scientists say the catastrophe bears the fingerprints of climate change, which is driving a “hydroclimate whiplash” between wet and dry conditions in California.
Speaking from the safety of a family member’s home in the San Fernando Valley, the Hunters are in no doubt that human-caused global warming is largely to blame for their loss.
They aren’t just counting the personal cost, but grieving for an entire community.
What did the lifelong Angelenos save from the fire?
The couple lived in a leafy condominium called the Lower Woodies, overlooking Santa Ynez Canyon in Topanga State Park. None of the 36 homes on the site lasted the day, but on 7 January they received a haze of “vague” messages.
Martha saw smoke rising in the hills that morning but watched as the fire moved south towards the Pacific Ocean. Because the sky was blue and the wind blowing, some neighbours thought they were in the clear. Others tried to leave but hit a traffic jam at the bottom of Palisades Drive, as residents higher up the hill fled.
Emergency alerts were unclear, Martha says, notifying residents of the fires’ movements rather than giving instructions to evacuate.
“I was in total denial and I couldn’t believe embers would come back up,” she recalls. It wasn’t until around 4 pm that they realised they had to go, but even then the Hunters had hopes of returning.
Martha packed a small but careful collection of belongings: passports and other key records, sterling silver gifted at their wedding 47 years ago – “or my mother up in heaven would have a fit” – a few items of clothing, family photos and paintings from an acclaimed great uncle.
First in the car was their dog Tallulah. By 4.30 pm they were escorted downhill by police.
“There were just flames everywhere,” Martha recalls. Sunset Boulevard was an apocalyptic black, with embers flying across the famous road. Turning right towards the Pacific Coast Highway, Martha saw “trees catching on fire. Flames shooting over my car,” and two huge mobile home parks burnt to ashes.
“[Embers] were jumping the highway, catching the palm trees on fire by the ocean,” she adds. “I thought, ‘my car is going to blow up!’”
But half a mile out towards Santa Monica it became “clear as a bell”, and the couple made it to their younger daughter Melissa’s home in Highland Park, near Pasadena.
The family evacuated again when the Eaton fire drew close. They became particularly concerned for the health of the Hunters’ two-year-old grandson Henry in the ash-filled air. While recounting the journey, Martha pauses to cough. “A lot of smoke got into my lungs,” she says.
How is climate change driving LA wildfires?
This isn’t the first time the Hunters have fled from fire. Craig’s childhood home in Malibu burned down when he was 10 years old after a wildfire raced across the hills.
While raising their eldest daughter Erin in Point Dume, Malibu, the family had to evacuate a number of times before moving to the Pacific Palisades in 1997, saving to buy the condo they rented in 2013. But they have never experienced anything on this scale before.
Detectives are still exploring the initial cause of the fires, which were subsequently shaped by a variety of factors. Southern California is visited by Santa Ana winds – warm, dry gusts that blow down from the desert toward the coast during cooler months.
This year, the powerful Santa Ana wind met an exceptionally dry environment – downtown LA has received only 0.4cm of rain since October – meaning conditions were ripe for forest fires to spread.
Decades of drought were followed by extremely heavy rainfall in 2022 and 2023, which allowed lots of vegetation to grow. With a whiplash back to very dry conditions in autumn 2024, there was more fuel for fires.
Martha grew up in Brentwood, LA, and recalls the Santa Ana winds coming “like clockwork” in September with the start of the school year. “Now it’s any time. This is so unusual to have these winds in January,” she says.
Researchers have confirmed that the winds are shifting from September to December and January, but say there is no substantial evidence yet to link this to climate change.
It will take time for an attribution study to determine the exact role of climate change in these deadly fires, but science already shows that wildfires are getting worse in a heating world.
“Climate change has played a big part in the intensity of the fires over the last 20 years for sure,” says Craig, a lawyer who has also consulted for renewable energy companies.
Millions of LA residents have struggled with insurance
Like millions of other Angelenos, the Hunters have recently struggled to get home insurance as companies respond to the growing threat of climate change.
A few years ago, their structures policy was cancelled, leaving the couple and their homeowners’ association (HOA) scrambling to find a new one. After two years, they joined California’s Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) plan – the state’s insurer of last resort – and secured contents insurance through another private firm, Allstate.
Craig is on the phone with an agent at this company when I call on Tuesday, who wants to know everything about the house.
“My husband can be very stoic about stuff. And then I started to say what was in a certain closet and I just started to cry. It’s hard to talk about,” Martha chokes up again, “to think about my house.”
Beyond the catalogue of losses, Martha is saddened to think of her 10-year-old granddaughter Lola, who lives in London and visits twice a year. “It’s the only house she’s even known of Poppa and Grandmas’. She just loves coming. She loves our kitchen and cooking and watching movies in the living room.”
“It was my home,” she adds simply. “And I’ve had many theatre parties there. Thanksgiving and Christmas and it’s gone.”
The couple are waiting to find out how much money the insurers will allow for rent, and they’ve also registered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is providing aid.
The Hunters’ daughters have set up a GoFundMe page to help their parents with immediate housing, and “all of the enormous costs not covered by insurance as they start over again.”
There are hundreds of other such pleas from suddenly homeless citizens on the crowdfunding platform.
Though grateful for the support, Martha acknowledges they are among the lucky ones; to be safe, with family to stay with temporarily, and insurance – despite its limitations.
Celebrities who lost houses have (as ever) been in the spotlight. But the fires also tore through working-class neighbourhoods in Altadena, where people risked or lost their lives defending homes that have been in their families for generations. They now face a dire situation.
‘Like a ghost town’: Palisades before and after the fire
Like others forced to leave home during climate disasters, the Hunters do not want to move away from the place where they have lifelong connections.
“We’re old! It’s hard for old people because we don’t have that much life left,” Martha says. “Honestly, we have, what, 10, 15 years left? And you think, this is it. We’re here. We’re settled. We’re not going anywhere.”
But Martha doesn’t want to return to the Pacific Palisades.
“It’s very expensive,” she explains. “It was middle income, middle to upper. And then big-time movie stars started moving in and hedge fund people and producers, and they’ve built it up more. They’ve torn down the little houses and built up mansions that are now gone.
“So even before this happened, I was sort of sick of the Palisades… it’s so rich.”
When Lola visited at Christmas, she made a game of counting Teslas – reaching 50 on just a 3 kilometre drive to the grocery store.
Ironically, one of the few structures to survive was the Palisades Village Shopping Center, built by billionaire businessman Rick Caruso in 2018 to the disapproval of many locals. Caruso reportedly employed private firefighters at both the complex and his home.
“But there’s no one to go there anymore because no one’s there. So it’s like a ghost town,” Martha says.
Over an hour-long conversation, the actress takes me on a tour of the community-embedded places that didn’t make it. The library she used to frequent, grocery stores she shopped at, several churches, Palisades High School where she studied and, across the road, “my beloved theatre.”
On Friday 10 January, her 76th birthday and what would have been the opening night for the play she was producing, Martha was surprised by friends at a restaurant in Ontario, California. They had travelled from across the state, some under evacuation warnings themselves, to be there for her. In a devastating week, she cried happy tears.
