By Alyson Dutch
It was a primal scream that stopped my brain. Pain was all there was, hot and heavy tears, spit, and snot. On my knees, my face smashed into a pillow; I wailed.
Inconsolable.
It was January 8th, 2025, and I had just learned that my magical home in Malibu had burned the night before in the Palisades fire.
Four of us were in a hotel room: my love, Jeff; our chunky, 14-year-old yellow Labrador, Bob; and the 100-pound white shepherd/border collie puppy — a beauty-queen-gorgeous mutt named Spot.
The velvet-upholstered sofas of the Ritz Carlton in Marina Del Rey were littered with exhausted dogs and crushed souls. The lobby was stuffed to the gills with families and kids; at their feet, bags of whatever they were able to grab before they ran for their lives. This was the first surge of fire refugees whose fancy cars were smashed into piles on the sidewalk of Sunset Boulevard by bulldozers making way for firetrucks. I had seen this difficult-to-believe video on my phone, slack jawed at what was unfolding ten miles away; it never occurred to me that my house might be next to burn.
The morning prior, I left my home in the pre-dawn dark to fly to Vegas for the annual CES (Consumer Electronics Show) conference. A coffee cup my mom gave me was left in the sink, a sweet treasure I would never see again. We had booked a fabulous suite where my PR agency team was meeting for our Q1 offsite. The holidays over, we were in planning mode — primed for a powerful new year and amped to meet new clients on the trade show floor.
It did not start well.
So much to say about being one of 13,000 families whose worlds imploded in the Palisades and Eaton Fires that day.
Just a few minutes before I started to write this, I got a call from a new friend, Laurie, the owner of Chile Snapper Trucking. She operated one of the twenty dump trucks that hauled away what was my life. After working for 7 months straight, she just returned from a well deserved respite in Thailand and has brought me a piece of Benjarong china. This will replace one of the many beloved things I had collected from 30 years of working in Cancun, Taipei, South Africa and hundreds of cities in between during my career as a public relations professional. This piece was one of my favorites, an ornately hand-painted round bowl with a miniature stupa-shaped finial topped lid, an architectural nod to a temple spire. I bought mine at the Jatujak market when I was doing PR for the Miss Universe Pageant and living in Bangkok for a few months in 1991. It was stuffed with magazine cut-out wishes of things I hoped to create. This was just one tiny thing of the millions-of-pieces-of-me that was incinerated beyond recognition from the 2500-degree fire.
I learned later from some fire professional friends who told the sordid details of that night (and from my insane neighbor who stayed with fire hoses pumped from his pool), “this was a firestorm powered by 95 mph winds that created its own vicious weather system that whipped into an cataclysmic inferno.”
Laurie is a fearless creature who greases her own truck and hauls around a living trailer, a Harley, and a car — all by herself. She is on a mission to help people like me. Sharing with me her own losses of husbands, properties and grown kids, she explains how this prompted her to dedicate her life to digging other humans out of their pain. She is a massive inspiration to me.
Her truck, named “Lucy,” was just one of thousands of independently owned dump trucks that were staged in the beach parking lots along Pacific Coast Highway. Each truck was emblazoned with creative names of the proud owners, “Smile,” “Dirt Brothers,” and every conceivable way to describe the work they perform. For five months, the only traffic on our main artery of PCH were dump trucks and semis with massive backhoes chained to them, some loaded with piles of new telephone poles and massive reels of new electrical wire. Between these, a few shell-shocked residents struggled to reach their properties, driving while bawling.
