{"id":494358,"date":"2026-01-05T15:34:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T15:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/494358\/"},"modified":"2026-01-05T15:34:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T15:34:11","slug":"on-the-frantic-front-lines-of-the-los-angeles-fires-with-governor-gavin-newsom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/494358\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Frantic Front Lines of the Los Angeles Fires With Governor Gavin Newsom"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the intersection of Midwick Drive and Sinaloa Avenue in Altadena, neighbors had mobilized to stop a situation almost exactly the same as I had seen playing out across the street from my brother\u2019s home in the Palisades<\/a>. Flames from a house, fully engulfed, were pouring up and over the fence toward the home of Eric Fiedler and his son Christopher, which had survived the fire<\/a> that night. With two garden hoses and a ladder, they climbed to the roof to attempt to beat back the flames by wetting the roof and the hedges. It was 9:25 a.m.<\/p>\n

One resident who was wearing a cutoff black T-shirt and sunglasses used the shirt to cover his mouth to prevent smoke from asphyxiating him. A fire truck from Riverside County Cal Fire pulled up, resulting in the exalted screams of even the KNBC reporter on the scene, Michelle Valles.<\/p>\n

\u201cThank you so much! Oh, my goodness. Praise the Lord.\u201d<\/p>\n

Around the same time the Riverside County firefighters battled the flames on Sinaloa, Ashley, the daughter of Herb and Loyda Wilson, was heading back toward their house two miles away after evacuating for the night to see if McNally Avenue had survived. By the time she and her boyfriend got close, she knew it wasn\u2019t good. She called her parents, in Hawaii, inconsolable.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s gone, Dad! Everything is gone!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRelax,\u201d Herb told his daughter in the Hawaiian darkness. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be OK.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cate Heneghan had been receiving reports from her neighbors, too. One of them, who grew up in the home she still lived in on McNally Avenue, had tried to get close around six in the morning. But she told Cate that when she drove past Fairoaks Burger, less than a tenth of a mile away and just around the corner, all she saw was flames.<\/p>\n

Cate attempted to get back to the block as well, but when she was within a half mile, she thought better of it.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to be part of the problem. I know it\u2019s gone. It\u2019s gone, Cate. Just let it go.<\/p>\n

Even though she saw homes just a few blocks away that were still standing, her gut told her to turn around, so she did.<\/p>\n

Nick Schuler of Cal Fire, the state fire agency, had a thought run through his head he had never experienced in all of his years of fighting fires<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the intersection of Midwick Drive and Sinaloa Avenue in Altadena, neighbors had mobilized to stop a situation…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":494359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1022,1582,276,222574,1854,2961,224,5337,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-494358","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-california-fires","12":"tag-gavin-newsom","13":"tag-la","14":"tag-los-angeles","15":"tag-losangeles","16":"tag-politics"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115843226918011577","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}