Michael Coghlan was at home in Ireland for a family funeral earlier this week and was travelling to the airport to head back to his home in Los Angeles on Thursday morning when he started getting calls warning him about how bad things were getting.
Originally from Dublin, he has lived close to Hollywood Boulevard for 12 years and works in real estate – and many of those calls were coming from tenants of properties he manages, desperately asking him what they should do.
“People started contacting me saying, ‘I think our building is next, I think our building is next.’ So in this instant panic and I called my boyfriend and was like, ‘You need to get out of there with the dogs,’” he said.
“I was on a layover in Heathrow. Not long after that, he and our dogs got evacuated but I was boarding a flight back to LA and not really knowing what was going on.
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“My phone wouldn’t connect to the wifi and it was the most anxious flight I have ever been on – and it was the same for everyone on the plane. When we landed in LAX we all turned on our phones and all the amber alerts and emergency evacuation notifications started coming in to our phones.”
Mr Coghlan landed on the US coast on Thursday afternoon local time as the blazes were still raging.
“We live a few blocks away from Runyon Park and that is where one of the fires is centred. My apartment is a block south of Hollywood Boulevard and I know the properties here so well. They are all old and wooden and any spark is going to set them ablaze. These buildings don’t have a chance,” he said.
As he spoke to The Irish Times he pulled off the highway. “I am on the way back to the apartment now and the sky is just dirty, there is zero visibility. Normally you can see all the houses on the hill pretty clearly but there is nothing now.”
He added that the air quality was appalling. “You can taste the dirt in the air, and while they have contained the fire close to our place now everyone is worried in case the winds pick up again tomorrow or the next day. If there’s any sort of spark in the soil it could literally ignite another fire.”
[ LA fires: New evacuations ordered as largest wildfire expandsOpens in new window ]
He said people in his community were banding together. “There’s so many different community boards of text messages and different WhatsApp groups going and there is hope in the community.”
Despite the “feeling of positivity”, people “are just devastated ... it’s like it’s unreal what people have lost now”.
A couple of the residents of his complex had already returned to the property when he was speaking. “They just said it’s thick with ash and dust and dirt but it is safe for now. Homes 200 metres from our house are gone so in that sense we are very lucky.”
Another Dublin woman, Lauren Tuite, has spoken of her anguish on learning the Californian wildfires had “erased” the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood where she played as a child and where her mother and grandmother both had houses.
Ms Tuite told The Irish Times it was hard to pick out streets and familiar landmarks in drone footage of the Pacific Palisades where she visited her grandmother Sheila Murphy along with her siblings, travelling from Ireland during the summer holidays.
Ms Tuite’s grandparents emigrated from Ireland in the 1950s and her mother Sharon moved to Ireland for some years before moving back to the Pacific Palisades when Lauren was an adult.
Ms Tuite’s mother subsequently moved to Ventura county; Ms Tuite’s grandmother died last November.
But for Ms Tuite, a member of Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council, it has been very difficult to watch the images of Pacific Palisades burning, knowing both her mother and grandmother’s former homes are burned down.
“I know the Palisades well, but have been looking at maps trying to make out streets. My mother’s house is gone, like my grandmother’s,” she said.
Even though she had been very aware of the signs of drought, fire and floods that have been affecting California in recent times, she said she was “shocked at how upsetting it was to see pictures of a neighbourhood erased”.
“I have been struggling to recognise the buildings because they are all so totally destroyed,” she said. “Some of the brick-fronted homes had bricks still in place, while streets were gone. The church was gone.”
Singer Bambie Thug, who is on holiday in LA, had to be evacuated from the house they were staying in.
Ireland’s Eurovision finalist from earlier this year told Cork’s 96FM they were “in Hollywood, just next to the Hollywood Hills, and the Runyon Canyon fire broke out. I was watching the news, but I had turned it on mute and unmuted it and it immediately said ‘Hollywood Hills evacuate now’.
“So I went up to the roof and behind the house by this restaurant called Yamashiro, which is like this old Japanese, historic restaurant, there was this big fire next to it and there were like eight of us on the roof and I was like, ‘Should we leave?’ And then immediately after I said that we got an evacuation notice.”
They said they were “trying to book an Uber and they were cancelling on me and then a friend of mine actually came back into the building and gave me a lift down so I was lucky. I’m in downtown LA so it’s concrete, so that’s not going to burn.”
They noted that much attention has been paid to the celebrities who have lost homes and said that while it is “bad for everyone, they have the money to rebuild” while many others will not have the financial wherewithal to recover so quickly.
They also highlighted that “amazing community spirit ... everyone’s taking everybody in and, you know, everyone’s coming together”.
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