At around 8:30 p.m. Jan. 7, in the hotel room to which they had evacuated, Alyse Wagner and her husband got a phone call notifying them that the smoke alarm was sounding back at their home. For the next hour, they kept an eye on the alarm company’s phone app.
Then the alarm went quiet.
“That’s when we declared time of death of our house,” Wagner said.
The house had been in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. That day a brush fire swept across large swaths of the Palisades and neighboring areas, continuing to burn in coming days, eventually consuming more than 23,000 acres, killing 29 people and destroying nearly 7,000 structures, including the couple’s home.
When Wagner and her husband, Jon Sacks, evacuated earlier that day, they’d grabbed nothing beyond “a small crate of sentimental things,” Wagner said on the phone from Los Angeles.
When they finally returned to their property weeks later, the only remaining objects of any value were a clawfoot bathtub, an inexpensive blue teapot and a small ceramic bowl.
For Wagner, the worst loss was a pair of silver candlesticks that had belonged to her mother, who died in 2023.
Also greatly missed was the couple’s colorfully decorated ketubah, a traditional Jewish marriage contract, which her mother had given them for their wedding. But that loss would have a happier ending.