LA Fires – Inside the Burn Zone Now

(mellow music)
– Brian, we’re high above the Palisades.
This is pretty much the top, right?
– This is kinda the start of it.
One of the fires literally
started on the road behind us.
Then it came down through
here, wrapped around,
and there’s no rhyme or reason
to which houses are standing
and which houses got destroyed.
– Right.
You know the lay of the land well, though,
’cause you grew up in the area,
and you used to be a
firefighter out there, right?
– That’s correct.
– Yeah.
– So I was a wildland firefighter
for Orange County Fire Department
back in the ’80s and ’90s.
– Okay.
– Now it’s an agency.
And in 1993, we fought these fires
up here in this ridge
line, in Topanga Canyon.
One of the interesting things is,
you’ll hear coming in the
stories coming out of this,
like, “Nobody ever expected this.
Nobody anticipated this.”
We talked about it 30 years ago.
– Okay. Okay.
– As wildland firefighters,
we said the more we let people grow
and build into these hillsides
and the less preventative stuff that we do
and the things that we don’t do,
this conflagration was gonna happen.
– Okay.
– No doubt about it.
– Okay, so I’m excited for today
because it’s really hard
to understand these events.
I was just in Helene
territory, North Carolina.
Until I put boots on the ground,
you can’t even understand it.
So the goal today is to
course through it pretty well,
get to Altadena too, another fire
people don’t talk about as much.
– That’s correct.
– Right?
– Correct.
– But get a lay of the land
of what’s going on here
because it’s way more complicated
than I first thought.
– Extremely complicated.
– Extremely complicated.
– It’s extremely complicated.
Layers upon layers upon layers.
– Yeah.
– Different problems
coming from different places.
As you can count, one, two,
three, four, more back there,
that all are total burndowns.
They’re all for sale.
– Okay, yeah.
– Look at that.
– A ton of for sale signs
coming up here.
– Right?
So these are people who’ve
decided for one reason or another
that they’re just not gonna rebuild.
– [Peter] Yep.
– These have been cleared by
the Army Corps of Engineers.
That’s what that white sign
is right there in the front.
Where they take out the slab,
they go down about six inches.
Here’s a good example of that,
where they had to leave some of it
because it’s outside the scope
of work of the Army Corps.
So when these people come back to rebuild,
they’re still gonna have to actually
take out additional
foundation work and groundwork
in order to rebuild.
– [Peter] Has the Army Corps
done a good job overall,
fair to say?
– I say they have.
You know, it’s like anything
else on a big massive scale
that takes a long time.
Some people are gonna be
pissed off and some aren’t.
Right now you can see this haze
that’s in the valley, and part of that
is related to all of the debris
clearing that’s going on.
So, some of what’s in the air
and all the toxins that
people are talking about,
that’s that to a degree.
You’ll feel by the end of the day,
as we’re out here all day
and we go over to eating,
I guarantee you, you’ll
feel some differences
in your breathing, some
differences in your nasal passages,
like, you’ll feel some
allergies and stuff,
’cause it’s out here.
– [Peter] Okay, so this
shopping center was fine.
What’s the story behind this?
– Essentially, because you
got this road on one side,
you got access on one side,
a lot of hydrants on one
side, very little debris,
it was saved.
It’s also a landmark.
I’m told that it also had
some private firefighting here
in order to keep it-
– It’s Caruso’s building,
right?
– Yeah.
– [Peter] Okay, so he
hired private firefighters
to come out.
– Correct.
– Okay.
– Correct.
– What’s your take on that,
what are your thoughts
on that?
– Dude,
I think both from a personal,
like if you’ve got the money to do it,
as well as there are insurance companies
that hire private fire
departments to go out
and save properties.
– Oh, really?
– You know, a quarter
million dollars or whatever
to save a $20 million property.
And so they will engage in,
and they will hire
private fire departments
to come out and do that.
– [Peter] Are these guys
doing a good job out here?
The insurance companies?
– [Brian] You know, they’re doing…
No.
Generally speaking, no.
Now, is it one of the biggest losses
and problems and damages to scale?
Yeah, it is.
But is it any different than
when we have a major hurricane
that hits Florida or Texas
or something like that,
and you’ve got hundreds of
thousands of damaged structures?
No.
– [Peter] But the dollar
number to rebuild this,
I’d say this is some of
the priciest real estate
in the world.
– For sure.
– [Peter] So we’re coming up
on Palisades, the town, right?
– [Brian] We’re coming up
on Palisades, the town.
We’re on Sunset.
There’s fire station
number 69, right there,
literally-
– It held well.
– [Brian] Literally, within
feet of that fire station 69,
part of the massive loss and devastation.
– And I forgot to mention to the audience,
you’re a claims adjuster.
So, someone will reach out to you…
– Correct.
– When they’re dealing
with the insurance company.
– Correct.
– And they’re like,
“I don’t know how to navigate,
this is new territory.”
– Right.
– They’re dealing with sharks and aces,
obviously, that’s their business.
The insurance company
knows what they’re doing.
– Correct.
– The average person doesn’t.
You come in, you sort of
stand on their behalf.
– Exactly, right.
– And make sure
the insurance companies pay out, right?
Is that-
– Correct, so we’re licensed
public insurance adjusters.
We stand in place and help them
to get through tragedies like these,
especially when they’ve had to relocate
and move, in some cases, 30
miles away, 40 miles away.
There wasn’t enough housing
for people just to go across
the street and rent the house.
– Right.
– Like that one burned down
and the one behind that burned down.
And so they’ve had to uproot their kids
and their, you know, their families,
their life.
– Schools are shut down here,
right?
– Their schools
are burnt down, shut down
– [Peter] And look at this.
– [Brian] And so that’s part
of the reason they hire us.
Look at the big bank
vault, smack in the middle.
– [Peter] Oh, that’s a bank vault?
– [Brian] That’s a bank vault right there.
Look at that.
– [Peter] Wow.
– And so this building
has probably been here
since the ’50s, probably
has asbestos in it,
or did have asbestos in it,
lead, all kinds of stuff.
And that’s part of the
hazards of dealing with this
and cleaning this all up.
You can see right here,
all that black splatter
mark is from the roof.
So when the roof melted,
the asphalt roof shingles
or a flat roof, it melted,
and that’s all tar.
So you now have tar and
petroleum based products
that are on the ground
and they’re on the walls and, you know…
There’s your asbestos sign right there.
So this clearly was a bank.
And so what we’re not hearing about
is the jobs that were lost.
Most of these people
had landscape companies
that did their landscape.
They had somebody doing their pool.
They had somebody doing pest control.
They had somebody doing all
these maintenance things
for their houses.
That’s all gone.
That’s not even tallied
in the financial loss of this situation.
You can’t put numbers on that
because it’s not on a sheet of paper.
– Okay, but then you have all these guys
coming from somewhere, right?
– Absolutely. You’re right.
You have all these guys coming in.
But again, so you got a CDL, right?
You gotta have a
commercial driver’s license
to be driving something like that.
You gotta have a skill
set to work in asbestos.
You gotta have a skill set
to work in hazardous waste removal.
So it’s a different skill set.
So to your point, could
some of those people
who lost some of those jobs fill a gap?
Yeah, they could, but not all of it.
– [Peter] Okay, so,
people from all over
the country coming in?
– All over the country.
All over the country.
They’re living in hotels,
they’re living in trailers and RV parks
for extended periods of time,
you know, year plus at a time.
There is somewhat of an economic
increase on that, right?
In terms of jobs and-
– Oh yeah.
– And whatnot.
And they’re making good money.
Like, let’s not kid ourselves.
They’re making good money.
(vehicles roaring)
– [Peter] When did this open up here?
– So this opened up to the public in June.
– Oh, okay.
– Until then,
like, within the last few weeks.
Until then, it was shut off
to contractors, residents,
and that was it.
– [Peter] The fire was January 7th, right?
– January 7th, yes,
is what the day it started, correct.
– [Peter] Okay, so how
many structures in total
were affected?
– [Brian] Somewhere
between 17,000 and 20,000
total structures combined
between the two fires,
between what’s called the Palisades Fire
and the Eaton Fire, right?
– Okay.
So with all of these lots for sale,
we’ve seen a lot of for sale signs,
not here so much, but-
– [Brian] In other spots, yeah.
– [Peter] In the other spots.
The value’s coming down big time
or what’s going on? Value,
– [Brian] Value’s dropping.
– Again, as-
– Like,
what are one of these lots going for?
Do you know?
– [Brian] I know where we were.
– [Peter] Yep, up top
there where we started?
– [Brian] Up top where we started,
those were going for
a million to 2 million
at the top of Palisades.
– They’re like-
– Just an empty lot.
– [Peter] Quarter acre, not even?
– [Brian] Not even.
They’re still going for premium dollars
because that’s at the top of Palisades.
What people are telling me,
some of my clients are telling me-
– [Peter] Potential scam.
– [Brian] They’re racing to
see who can get out first.
Like, if they’ve made the
decision they wanna leave,
they’re getting out and getting
it up as fast as they can
because they don’t want to be in a market
where everything is for sale.
With the insurance money
that they’re getting
and the sale of a lot,
they still owe more than their mortgage.
– [Peter] Okay, and so
a lot of these people
are still paying a mortgage?
– Right.
– I bet
there’s some generational
stuff here, right?
– There is some generational
stuff here, absolutely.
Even to that point, they
were not insured enough
to rebuild their house.
And so they’re struggling
with how do we rebuild?
Because the insurance money,
even if we get full payouts,
isn’t gonna be enough to rebuild.
– [Peter] The cost of construction
has gone up so much.
– Cost of construction
has gone up so much, and
they were underinsured.
– Okay, so that’s a
big point I wanna make,
’cause I learned this
in the Lahaina fires,
and I actually called my insurance
company after that video.
I was like, “Can we up the
levels on my insurance?”
And I was…
My levels would’ve built like a teepee.
You know what I mean?
– Yeah.
– In today’s market.
– [Brian] Right.
– There we go.
Wow.
So, I upped the levels,
and that’s something,
if two people out of this video do that,
then we’re doing something
good here because-
– [Brian] Then we’re doing something good.
– Okay, people out there, you own a home,
it’s really boring stuff to do,
but talk to your insurance agent
and be like, “Hey, where are my levels at?
What are you gonna cover me for
if my home burns like this?”
And you’ll be surprised.
You’re like, “What’s cost…”
Cost of construction here
is over 1,000 a square foot, I bet.
– Close to it.
– Right?
– Other areas
it’s gonna be well over 1,000.
This area is probably 800.
– Okay.
– You know, 800 a square foot.
– So a lot…
And the insurance companies
don’t wanna up the levels, right?
They’re gonna up it to a point,
or sometimes there’s no flexibility.
– Right, you can’t just blindly
trust your insurance agent.
– Okay.
– ‘Cause your agent
makes a living off of
selling you a policy, right?
And so if you get scared
because of a premium amount
and you go to somebody else,
then your agent’s gonna
lose that commission
and lose their livelihood.
And so you really need
to express to your agent
that you want a policy that
is absolutely gonna cover you
no matter what, in the full extent.
And they need to be in touch
with the local building costs.
And if they do that, then you’re okay.
And you need to pay attention to that.
It’s not that hard to call a local builder
and call your agent
and have a conversation
and say, “What’s the cost
to rebuild my house per square foot?”
And that’s what you insure it for.
– Yeah, really, really boring stuff.
– Super boring stuff.
– Super, super important.
– So I guess there’s that question.
If you’re from here, do you
wanna put in the hard yards
and wait this thing out
for it to come back?
– Right.
– It’ll never be what it was.
– It’ll never be what it was.
– There’ll be something
different.
– Correct.
– Some better, some worse,
I’m sure.
– Right. Right.
– But do you want to put that time in?
Well, he’s going for it.
– [Brian] Somebody’s already
rocking and rolling, man.
I bet you, out of all
the places that we drive,
we’ll see maybe three of those.
– Really?
– At that stage.
– [Peter] Yeah, that’s
the first one I’ve seen.
So, some building permits
have been given out.
– [Brian] Well, and let’s
be fair, we don’t know
that that permit wasn’t already in process
prior to the fire.
And the timing of it may have been lucky
that, hey, now we get to
start building, right?
We don’t know that.
– Oh, right. Right.
– But I have clients of mine
who absolutely were some of the first ones
to get permits to start rebuilding
and they’ve already got a garage up
and they’ve already got
their foundation going in
and whatnot.
– [Peter] And so I see the,
I just missed it on camera,
but, “Palisades not for sale.”
– Correct.
– So a lot of locals
are standing up, being
like, “Hey, developers,
get out of here,” or what’s that?
– That’s exactly what it is.
It’s not that they’re saying, “Hey,”
the individual homeowners,
“Hey, don’t sell.”
What they’re saying is,
that it stays local.
– Developers don’t come in.
– That it stays small.
You know, going back to
the Palisades downtown
that we just went through.
That is a very small community.
There wasn’t even a
Target down there, right?
– Yeah.
– There’s no Target.
It’s all mom and pop shops
and that’s what they want
to keep it as in this area.
And so they’re saying, “Hey,
we don’t want developers coming in,
buying up five, six,
seven, ten lots, whatever,
and putting in commercial properties
and apartment complexes.
And we want it to be these
smaller communities.”
– [Peter] Wow.
– Yeah, so you can see, you know,
a steel structure like that, right?
Most people are like,
“Ah, steel structure-”
– Oh, these guys are open.
– “Steel or concrete,
it’s not gonna burn.”
It probably saved that
structure from burning.
– [Peter] Okay, so that’s crazy.
Just a little bit of life.
Some people still live in
their homes are here and…
– [Brian] Yep. Exactly.
So this right here, what they’re doing
is they’re filling the
debris into the truck,
and that plastic is supposed to
keep all of the hazardous
dust from bouncing out
when they take it to the landfill.
And we all kind of know how that goes.
To the best of their ability, you know,
they’re doing what they can.
– [Peter] Look at this statue out here.
This, right past the Cat, look at this.
– [Brian] Wow.
Broken but together.
Huh.
– [Peter] You’re saying, it’s
coming back a little bit?
– Oh, just a little bit, yeah.
Little by little.
– So you’re busy?
– So with Cover, it’s
kind of a game changer
what they’re doing, and-
– [Peter] What do you mean?
– Just the way that the
house is being made.
Everything’s prefabricated.
– [Peter] Oh, you work with this company?
– [Worker] Yeah, Cover, here.
– [Peter] Cover. Okay.
– And you’ll see what…
They started with the ADUs,
but we’re actually gonna…
We’re doing the ADU in the back
and then we’re actually gonna be moving
to the single family right in the front.
– [Peter] Is that a container
or is that poured-in-place concrete and-
– Well, the foundation is laid
and the walls are all prefabricated
along with the ground.
So everything comes from the
the warehouse right here.
– Okay, so it is the prefab.
– No ways.
Okay, so you’re doing prefabs out here?
– Yeah, the walls are prefab
and then insulated from the inside out.
And then we just kind of put
everything together like Legos.
It’s pretty cool.
Again, it’s a game changer.
– How quick can you
build a home like this?
– So the foundation and the walls
all came up along with
the roof in five days.
Yeah.
– Dude, that’s smoking.
– Yeah.
– Smoking fast.
– And think about it,
we have a six-man crew.
That’s all we got.
And that’s all we need, six-man crew.
– So it’s super common out here
for people to have
what’s nomenclature ADU,
which is basically-
– Now what’s a ADU?
– ADU-
– I gotta get back to-
– Hey, go back to work, man.
I appreciate it. Thank you.
– It’ll be done in two days.
(all laughing)
– So an ADU is essentially an apartment
in the back of these.
– Oh, okay, yeah.
– And so what a lot of
people had to do out here
to survive in California
is they’ll take a garage
that was in the back
and they’ll convert it to a living space.
And so they’ll rent that out.
Some people are making it
mother-in-law suites, whatever.
But you’ve got your typical
two bedroom, two bath,
or three bedroom, two bath home.
And then you’ve got a
garage, in this case new.
But it’s an A DU that
they’re putting in the back
for additional living.
It’s an additional living unit, ADU.
– Yeah, and so what a lot
of people don’t understand,
I wanna make this point,
though this is one of the wealthier
parts of the world really,
the zip code or these zip codes,
not everyone’s loaded, rich.
– Correct.
– Some of these people
inherited these homes,
they’re on a fixed income, right?
– That’s correct.
– Like, not everyone
is banking here.
– No, absolutely not.
– Yeah.
– And where we’re standing,
in the neighborhood
that we’re in right now,
this is working class blue-collar
area within Palisades,
where you’re absolutely
going to be having, you know,
either a couple of generations of family
or somebody renting out an ADU in the back
in order to help offset some
of those costs and expenses
of what it is to live out here.
– Yeah, because they’re built…
Maybe they moved in
the ’50s when a teacher
and a, I don’t know, a
plumber lived together
and they could pay the mortgage.
– That’s correct.
That’s correct.
– Or maybe it was even
a stay-at-home wife, right?
– Stay-at-home wife.
– And one income.
– Correct, and we have that-
– Making it happen.
– And I’ll show you that down
on PCH where the house was,
the original builders
were in my client’s family
back in the ’50s.
They built the house.
They were born and raised there
and they grew up there and
the parents have died there.
And that house was insured for $700,000
and it’s 3 million to rebuild it.
And-
– So they’re just-
– They’re outta luck, man.
And there’s nothing in-
– There’s a lot of that
just outta luck.
– There’s a lot of that.
Out of lock.
– Just a lot of outta luck,
man, scenarios.
– Right, there’s a lot of responsibility
on both sides for that case, right?
– Okay.
– That scenario
develops a lot of
responsibility on both sides.
Insurance companies allowing
for policies to be undersold,
that they know the cost of rebuilding
is significantly higher.
– Okay.
– And the property owner’s
not paying attention to
that, let’s be honest, right?
It’s a two-party deal,
it’s a two-part contract.
– Okay, with that said,
say are there cases
where the coverage is
to a million dollars?
– Yep.
– Then that person
gets a million dollars, right?
– [Brian] No, it doesn’t work that way.
– Okay. (laughs)
– They have to prove
that either the house is worth
a million dollars to rebuild,
they had a million dollars worth of stuff
within the house.
– But out here that’s easy.
– Yes.
– Right?
– But that’s not the game.
The game is, we have to prove,
so we have lots of claims right now,
policies a million in excess of,
insurance companies are
coming in saying, “Hey,
we’re only gonna give you $350
a square foot to rebuild.”
– Okay, how can-
– They are like,
“It’s $1,300 a square foot to rebuild.”
– Okay, so how do they get away with that?
– Well, they’re getting away with it
up until they hire
somebody like me to come in
and say, “No, you can’t do this.
Here’s the proof, here’s what it was.”
Or they go to (indistinct).
– Or is it like
a medical bill?
‘Cause I always pay out of pocket
’cause my deductible’s so high.
I don’t go often, but
I had to do an ER visit
and it was 10 grand.
And so then you get on the phone
and say, “I’m paying cash,”
and then you play the game
and then they get it down to five grand.
– Right.
– Okay.
– It happens.
– So you have some insurance
companies who I know of,
who walked right up, met their
property owner on the site
and stroked a check for
the full amount of policy,
like you’re saying, right?
Some of those insurance
companies absolutely exist.
Here you go, here’s your policy-
– What’s the best one?
What’s the best one?
– I’m not getting into that.
– No?
– ‘Cause when I get into the
best, it gets into the worst.
And then also, the best is,
is who’s paying?
– I want to know.
Come on, Brian.
– I’ll tell you off camera.
– Come on.
You’ll get in trouble.
– There are clearly-
– You’ll get in trouble.
– There are clearly some
that are better than others.
– Are most of them bad options?
– Look, it’s bad right now, man.
Because if I tell you,
“Here are the good ones,”
the premium’s on the good ones,
you’re gonna come back to me
and go, “That premium’s outrageous.”
The premium’s outrageous
because you’re paying for
a quality product and-
– Is it you’re paying what you get for?
– You’re paying what you get for.
– Okay. Okay.
– Largely speaking,
yeah, you’re paying what you get for.
– [Peter] And that person’s,
like nothing happened.
– [Brian] And-
– That’s wild.
– To our current conversation,
well, and I guarantee you
there’s damage in that house.
‘Cause I’m looking at those windows.
Those windows are from the ’50s, ’60s,
maybe the ’70s at the latest,
and they breached and they
allowed soot and stuff in that.
So that house is essentially
a total gut on the inside,
most likely.
And then when you look
at these lots next door,
so Peter, if you look,
you got one, two, three lots behind it,
who knows how many lots in front of it.
Unequivocably, some of these houses
had electric vehicles that burned up in it
and other stuff that burned
and then got into that house
and then it’s a toxic waste dump.
– [Peter] Look at this place.
This guy was fire ready, huh?
– [Brian] That’s fire ready.
– [Peter] That was a new build.
– [Brian] New build.
– [Peter] Stucco, concrete,
or what is that, concrete?
– [Brian] Probably
poured-in-place concrete slab
based on the height of it.
All the glass is newer glass,
you can tell by the shading of it
and the thickness.
– Newer glass,
if you have the money,
you wanna get like the
hurricane type windows, right?
– That’s correct.
– Where…
Because my friend who’s a firefighter
told me a lot of it, it’s
not from the outside,
it’s from something
smashing through a window
and going into the house
and burning it from the inside.
– That is correct.
They got lucky over there.
It didn’t happen.
We have houses that we represent
where that’s exactly what
happened because of flying debris,
because these wind speeds
were anywhere from 80 to
100 mile an hour gusts.
Flying stuff all over the place.
Smashes a window and embers come in
and then the house burns
from the inside out.
– [Peter] This just goes on and on.
– It goes on and on for blocks.
Blocks.
– Oh, look at this.
– Missing cats.
– Missing cats.
$5,000.
– Wow.
(birds chirping)
One house still standing.
Do you really wanna be
that house still standing?
And my clients, at the beginning,
were like, “Oh, I’m so blessed.
I’m so happy my house is
here, I have my stuff.”
And now, six, seven months into it,
they’re like, “Kinda wish
it had burnt to the ground.
It would’ve been a lot easier
to get the money.”
– Oh, right.
I never even thought of that.
– “It would’ve been
a lot easier to get the money,
not have to deal with
fighting the insurance company
to get enough money to
fix my house properly.”
Insurance companies are
saying, “Hey, come on in.”
Clorox wipe.
“Cool, you’re good to move back in.”
Like, “No, the house needs to
be gutted down to the studs.
Gotta get to the insulation,
take that all away.”
– Oh, my God.
– “Rebuild it from the inside out.”
And so a lot of them,
even though they’ve
still got their pictures
and they’ve still got family heirlooms
and things like that, some can be cleaned
and some can be, you know…
(cellphone ringing)
– [Peter] There’s a client, huh?
– You know…
– Are you busy?
Are you busy these days?
– I’m a little busy, yeah.
There’s one of the insurance companies,
– They love you, don’t they?
You have a good relationship.
– Most of them hate me.
– They don’t…
They hate you?
– And you know,
some do, some don’t.
– You’re a thorn in their side.
– I generally get along with the majority.
The people that I have to interact with,
the boots on the ground, the
people answering the phones,
look, they’re just being told what to do.
– [Peter] Oh, yeah.
– They’ve got almost no authority
to make decisions and do anything.
And so I try to keep that in mind-
– Yeah, of course.
– When I call and they’re-
– My insurance agent is great.
I like them.
– Good.
– Yeah, you know what I mean?
– Yeah.
– Like, on a personal level.
– Yeah, that’s awesome.
– So you can’t put like a
label all bad, all good.
– No, you can’t.
– Right?
– You can’t.
– But just the system itself,
I mean, you said you could go all day
on the mechanics and the
nuts and bolts of this stuff.
– Oh yeah, it’s so deep.
– Which we want…
We’ll go a little bit on this
just to give an understanding.
But it is deep, huh?
– [Brian] Layers upon layers upon layers.
– We’re talking to a
very cool guy off camera,
not gonna say his name or
his company ’cause, you know,
that’s a lot of what’s out here.
People don’t wanna be
associated with whatever.
– Correct.
– Not for dark reasons,
but there’s liability or whatever.
– Right.
– Right?
– Correct.
– Okay, so what we have here,
I’m trying to understand this.
Wooden poles.
Now I’m sure they’re treated, right?
– They’re creosote treated,
you know, bury them in the ground.
We’ve been doing this for, I don’t know,
100 years or whatever the case has been,
not quite that long, but long time.
And we’re going back to it.
A lot of topic, a lot of conversation
about should we do this again?
Should we put wooden power poles back up?
Or should we take the
opportunity right now
when we’re tearing up the roads already
and they’re all burnt down.
should we just drop it underground?
– [Peter] Okay, so underground
is the most expensive,
but-
– Correct.
– [Peter] The best way to
do it as far as fire danger.
– Correct.
– Strong enough winds,
these could blow over.
– Well, remember, that’s how this started.
A couple of these fires started
as a result of, not these power lines,
not these wooden pole power lines,
but the bigger ones up in the
Topanga Canyons and whatnot.
And the high winds,
they’re still above ground,
they’re the transmission
lines running across,
and the winds came, knocked
off a couple of those
and down into the grass we
go, and here goes the fires.
– Okay, so how is this possible?
Like, whose decision is this?
– There’re a lot of decisions.
– It’s the utilities company?
– I think it’s gonna go everywhere
from local to state to federal,
all the way up the board.
Because it’s not just…
Everything ties into
everything, right, a grid wise.
So your city has a municipality,
they’ve got a water and power district,
and then you’ve got the state
that regulates some of that.
And then you’ve got feds
that regulate some of that.
So it’s all the way across the board.
In reality, I also know of
a private venture individual
who has said, “We are not gonna go back
with above ground poles.”
And he personally is paying
to have all the underground
redone and it’s-
– Near his house?
– 100 something
million dollars.
– Near his house?
– You know,
I don’t even know if it’s
in proximity of his house
or his business or what exactly.
But I know for a fact he
is coughing up the money
to the tune of 100 plus million dollars
to run power underground.
– Okay, I wanna give benefit of the doubt.
’cause this is not my wheelhouse,
but what am I missing with this?
What am I not seeing?
Is it like they’re treated so well
that they’ll never catch on fire?
– No, they always catch on fire.
They always catch…
In fact, I’ll tell you that in proximity,
some of these are so close to homes
that without this massive devastation,
if you had a single
fire home, it’s possible
that you’re gonna lose one
or two of these power poles
just from a single house fire.
It sounds really easy
to just start dropping stuff underground,
but in reality, you’ve
gotta go all the way back
to the, you know, to the
point of distribution,
change that, and then run
everything underground.
Or build a whole new distribution center
and start running stuff underground.
Well, that’s gonna be hundreds
of millions of dollars.
– And they wanna see results.
– And people want their
power back on right now.
– Yeah, okay.
– Right?
Businesses want their power back on.
– But why wood?
You think you’d go metal.
– Oh, that’s a-
– Right?
– Yeah.
– That’s the question.
– That’s the question.
(birds chirping)
– You’re checking out
potentially building here.
– Yeah.
– Potentially.
Okay.
So he said, as a builder, off camera,
they can be super choosy, right?
– Absolutely, man.
– Right.
They’re just deciding if they wanna do it
or not.
– You know, that’s…
So, it’s an interesting dynamic.
And look, we’ve come
across this in hurricanes
where there’s mass devastation,
and you only have so many
competent qualified contractors
who can do work, right?
– Yeah.
And then you got these guys
just crating in the house, basically.
– I mean, look at that.
– Look at that
insulation.
– That is that prefab-
– [Peter] This looks like an advertisement
for their company, but… (laughs)
– I don’t even know who it is.
It’s amazing.
And here’s your insulation
tucked into your metal walls, right?
So you’re already a
little more fire resistant
’cause you don’t have
the wood slabs.
– Do you know these guys?
– No, I have no idea.
– No?
– No.
– They did craftsman
homes, what, in the ’50s?
– Yeah, yeah.
– So they were doing the modular stuff.
– They were doing stuff like this forever.
– No one’s ever really
nailed it, I don’t think.
– I mean, even a log home
was somewhat this way, right?
Remember the log home kits?
– But why is it not like the standard?
It’s still cheaper to just
build on site, it must be.
– And a lot more custom.
– Lot more custom.
– You can create what
you want out of wood.
It’s a lot harder to create
exactly what you want
when you’re prefabbing steel panels,
you know?
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Now, back to the story.
– So that’s an industrial
hygienist firm that’s calling me
to go look at one of the
properties to test it
to see how badly,
you know…
– Industrial hygienist.
– Right.
– What’s that?
– So an industrial hygienist
is a scientist essentially,
who comes out and they take samples
of the smoke, the soot, the ash
in the air inside of the structure
and then determine what is in it.
So whether there’s cyanide in it,
whether there’s arsenic in it,
whether there’s cadmium
and lithium and zinc
and all of these metals
that we’re finding.
Is it in there, and how
much of it is in there
and what do we have to
do to get rid of it?
– Okay, so you’re the one
that’s, like, calling
out the insurance company
saying, “Hey, we gotta go next level here,
we gotta do this, that, that.”
– Correct.
– ‘Cause they’re overwhelmed,
I’m sure, and they’re
gonna do the bare minimum.
– Correct.
Their adjusters are coming out,
they’re looking at stuff
and they’re saying, “Here’s
what I think needs to happen.”
Right?
– Oh, okay.
– No knock on them.
Their adjusters are not
certified industrial hygienists.
Their adjusters are not certified
in smoke restoration.
They’re not smoke restoration technicians.
And so they’re coming out
with a base of, “This is
what we want you guys to do
when you go look at these properties
in terms of cleaning them.”
They shove that into the computer system
that generates the dollars
and how much it’s gonna cost.
And they spit that out and
then we wait, you know?
And they go, “Well, wait a minute.
I can’t find anybody to do
this work for this amount.”
So they call somebody like me
and we go, “Yeah, you
missed the margin by X.”
– Okay, okay.
All state insurance.
– It never ends.
– Never ends, dude.
– Never ends.
Never ends.
Look, dude, there’s like,
you know, 50 of them, so…
– Okay-
– So I’ve heard before,
like, insurance companies
are pulling out of California
or out of Florida or whatever.
– Yep.
– What is that?
– So what they’re doing
is they’re saying, “Hey,
we can’t make money out here
unless the state allows us
to raise premiums to a point
to where our premiums are
offsetting our expenses.
And the risks are too high,
we have too much exposure,
and so we want to get out of the state.”
And that’s one of those long
discussion layered things.
Because part of the problem
is that insurance companies
were just taking on
large books of business
and they were taking on, in some cases,
15 or 20% of the market where you’re like,
“Well, you chose to
overexpose yourself, right?
That’s an issue that you guys
as a company elected to do.”
So then what they do is
they try to pull out,
but there’s not enough insurance companies
to take on some of that, right?
So the state comes in
and says, “Hey, we’re not
gonna let you do certain things
or we’re not gonna let you
raise the rates a certain amount
because you’ve gotta stay in the market.
We need you guys to be
able to cover things.”
And it is not an easy problem to fix
because you definitely need
the insurance companies there
and be in the marketplace
to protect businesses
and homeowners and whatnot.
At the same time, the state’s like,
“Well, we just can’t
let them set the rates
or else every insurance
company will raise it so high
that nobody can afford to live here.”
And then, now the state
doesn’t get taxes, right?
– [Peter] Right.
– That’s why the state steps in.
And yet people will complain
about, “My insurance was
so high to begin with.
Now what is it gonna be?”
Well, it’s all relative, you know?
You live in Florida, you
guys pay high premiums
because of hurricanes out there, right?
– Super high.
– So when people
live in certain areas,
you’re going to get premiums
that are associated with the risk.
It’s one of those things
that’s out of balance.
It just is out of balance.
– But don’t insurance
companies, aren’t they making
record profits these days?
– They are.
– Or is that
an oversimplified statement?
– Probably both, but yeah,
they aren’t making
record profits, you know?
But again, they’re in
business to make money
and who’s to come in and manage them
and say, “You’re only allowed
to make so much money.”
Right?
So it’s a hard game, it’s not easy.
And then you got the banks
that are involved with it
in terms of mandating mortgage, you know,
mandating insurance to certain points.
– [Peter] Right, they want
their investment covered.
– Exactly.
– Or their debt covered, so.
– You got it.
And there’s a lot of
responsibility on both sides
that needs to go into that.
If you’re making record profits, you know,
why are you asking for 33% price hikes?
Why are you asking for
a 15% premium increase?
– [Peter] What’s the CEO
of one of these big insurance
companies make, do you think?
– [Brian] Anywhere from,
you know, 15 to 20 million.
– [Peter] Okay.
– And part of that, and
I know this to be true
from having worked for one
of the insurance companies
for a while, they make
a hefty, hefty salary
and then they get a bonus
based on how well the company is doing
at the end of the year on
how much money it’s making.
So the incentive there is
for them to make money.
There was a study done
due to a lawsuit after
Katrina that I worked,
in which they looked into how much money
an insurance company was making
just off of interest for the money
that was sitting in the
bank account every day.
– [Peter] Okay, what was that?
– [Brian] Tens of millions of dollars.
So every day that they delay-
– A day?
– paying a claim,
the amount of money that
they have in the bank
making interest is tens of millions.
And so if they’re making tens
of millions of dollars a day
off of interest, then every
day that they slow pay claims,
they’re able to make more money.
– Okay, so if that’s the case,
do some of the insurance companies
work hard to delay payment, let’s say?
– Yes.
– Okay.
So what we just saw out
there, some of those homes,
how long before someone
receives payment, typically?
– So typically, they would’ve
all gotten some payment
by now, but not necessarily a full payout,
anywhere from 50 to 60%.
– It comes in (indistinct)?
– Yeah, it comes in chunks.
Comes in chunks.
Depending on, again, this goes back
to depending on some insurance companies,
not all of them operate the same.
I know of some who walked right up
and handed checks to the policy holder
for the full amount of their policy,
were like, “Here we go.”
But in general, if we were to classify
more well-known domestic
insurance companies in a grouping,
the slower they are to pay the claims,
the more likely they are to
save themselves financially
on their book of money.
– Okay, so you were saying
off camera that celebrities,
people that have large
YouTube channels, right,
or can put a message out there,
that payment’s gonna come like that.
‘Cause they don’t want bad publicity.
– Correct.
– Right?
– Historically speaking,
that is absolutely true.
I deal with it now, I’ve dealt
with it for almost 30 years.
I dealt with it when I was
with the insurance company.
People with a platform,
people with a voice,
people with a name, people with some way
of getting bad press out there
in a relatively fast manner
and a relatively large audience,
those claims are gonna
get paid pretty quick.
– Okay, and then is it
the old retired lady
that just gets hung out to dry?
– Pretty much.
Pretty much.
Let’s just use a total loss, for example.
Your house is a total
loss, it’s insured at X.
They look at your policy
and they say, “Hey,
here’s what we’re gonna do.
Right now, we’re gonna cut you a check
for 50% of the structure of your house.”
“Okay, why only 50?”
“Well, because we’ve gotta
figure out if the rest of it
is gonna cost as much as it’s policy
in order to replace it.”
And you’re like, “Well, we know it is.
We know that it’s costing
more than what the policy limits are
to replace these houses,
like, why don’t you cut the
rest of the other percentage.”
And so what they’re doing
is they’re taking 50% of that money,
and we’re talking about
hundreds of thousands of dollars
on one house, right, or
millions on one house.
Multiply that out by thousands.
You’re now talking about
millions of dollars
to one insurance company per day
if they simply only pay out 50% upfront
and then delay that other 50% payment
for months while they investigate
and determine what the cost of rebuilding
actually is going to be.
– So what can you do, other
than hire a guy like you?
– Scream, yell, write your constituents,
make a lot of phone calls,
make a lot of noise.
– Call them every day.
– Make a lot of noise.
– Make noise.
Make noise.
– Make noise.
You gotta have the data
to support that, right?
You can’t just call them
and go, “Hey, I want
the rest of my money.”
– So if you’re-
– You gotta prove your claim.
– If you’re noisy with that stuff,
you think you’ll get results or just-
– You’ll get results.
– Okay.
– In some cases
you’ll get pushed back.
You get the wrong adjuster,
you get the wrong clash of attitudes,
if you go in it with the wrong attitude
and start a fight, they’ll push back.
You’ll get a lot less
attention and a lot less-
– Do some of them wanna work with you?
Like, they actually
have some compassion going on?
– Yes.
– And they’re like, “Okay,
I got this guy’s story.
I wanna really push this through.”
– Absolutely. Right.
– Okay.
– And I have some of those,
I have plenty of those as well.
And I have the ones
where by law, by statute,
the insurance companies
are allowed to take 15 days
to respond to anything that you…
If you make a phone
call, you send an email,
you write the letter,
whatever.
– Oh, by law?
– They can have 15 days to respond.
– Oh. good.
– And so, day 14 and a half,
at the end of business on day 14,
I’ll get an email, “Still
looking into things.
We’ll get back with you soon.”
That’s considered a response in 15 days.
It doesn’t have to…
15 days doesn’t have to resolve anything.
They just have to respond
to you within 15 days.
And so that becomes a game
if you get into a scenario
that is not a good working relationship.
– Okay.
– [Brian] Here we are getting
at Will Rogers State Beach,
kind of the area where
we’re moving from Palisades
into the Malibu area.
– [Peter] Okay, so this just opened.
– [Brian] So PCH was closed
up and until into June,
so just in the last couple of weeks.
It was closed only to
contractors, residents, adjusters,
service providers, things like that.
And then today is the first
day that things have opened up.
That was on the news.
The Getty, restaurants,
the Malibu pier has a restaurant
that opened up last week.
– [Peter] So these businesses
really got hurt up here.
– Absolutely.
– Yeah.
With this traffic cut off pretty much
– Correct.
– Sure.
– This is Topanga Canyon on our right.
Still partially closed off.
This was that old historic
motel, Topanga Canyon Motel.
It’s gone.
Waterfront homes.
Everything from right here
is burnt down, destroyed.
And then you have a few of
them left standing right here.
– Yeah, this was all-
– Gone.
the homes here, right?
– These were all homes
right here, every single square inch
of this place was homes.
And if you look forward,
you’ll just see it’s all gone, pfew.
– [Peter] And okay, these homes
are like 15 million, 20 million, right?
– Yeah.
Everything from the stuff
built back in hippie time
of the ’50s and, you
know, ’60s to stuff…
There’s another Porsche.
– There’s a car there.
– There’s a Porsche right there.
– Wow.
– You know,
to stuff built recently with steel
and glass and and whatnot.
– [Peter] So the fire
just jumped over the road.
– So it, absolutely.
– Went across.
– In fact, what it did,
and I’ll show you that
when we get out up here,
is the fire was up on these hills
and the winds were coming
off the coast up the hill,
grabbing the fire, the peak of the fire.
And the fire was coming down
and hitting these homes.
– Oh, okay.
– And burning the homes.
So it didn’t necessarily
just run down the rock.
It was actually so big and so
strong and powerful up there
that it was actually just folding over
all the way down to here.
Which is part of the
reason it’s hit and miss
because you had a wind over
here, a wind over there.
You have a gully going
up the hill over here,
but not over there.
– What was the evacuation like?
Just pure panic, chaos
here, or what was it?
– It was pretty bad here.
My daughter was in Point
Dume on the seventh,
and called me, and
having worked these fires
back in the ’90s and I said,
“You need to get out now.”
And she said, “Well,
they’re not evacuating us.”
And I said, “If you wait
till the evacuation,
you’re gonna get stuck
behind a bunch of cars.
People are gonna start running outta gas,
EVs are gonna start dying
and you’re gonna have to be walking.”
And that’s exactly what
happened, mostly in the canyon.
But PCH did have backups.
PCH had cars stopped on the highway
that they had to bulldoze off
and people had to get out.
We’ll go up here right now,
we’ve got some houses down here,
but as you can see, they’re
still clearing this out.
– [Peter] So nothing on the
ocean front is being rebuilt.
Do you notice that?
– [Brian] So I was told,
and I don’t know how accurate this is,
but I was told that in
certain portions of PCH,
that there is a likelihood
that they’re not gonna
allow some rebuilding
on the waterfront side.
– [Peter] So those people are just out.
– [Brian] And who knows,
those are also the people
with a lot of money, a lot
of power, a lot of influence,
and so that may not happen.
– [Peter] How much does that
play into this whole event?
Power, money, influence.
– [Brian] Plays into a lot.
Power, money and influence
is what allowed some of these homes
where we are right now, to even
be built in the first place.
The money to be able to build up here,
the power and the influence
to be able to get cities
and counties to allow that to happen.
– [Peter] Okay, now that is
such a nice drive though.
You’re coming outta your house,
looking at that every day.
– [Brian] And now look
off to our left, right?
And you can see, house totally gone.
That was their view.
– Mm-hmm.
– Totally gone.
(car door closes)
(chainsaw whirring)
Watch, that chainsaw’s going right now.
This is a house that we
represent right here.
It looks pretty well intact, right?
– Yeah.
– From the outside,
you look at it.
– Yeah.
– This gentleman rode out
the majority of the fire,
used some hoses and, you know,
(indistinct) around.
– Oh okay.
– Yeah, crazy.
Got sick because of it.
But we’ve written over
1.5 million in damages
to this house, to the
inside of this house.
So to give you perspective,
outside is fairly well intact, right?
– Yeah.
– You kind of look at it
and you go, “Oh, some paint,
put some lipstick on it,
the pink comes out pretty well.
Inside of it almost has
to be completely gutted.
Top to bottom.
– [Peter] Can we go inside or-
– [Brian] We can go inside,
yeah, yeah.
– Ah, cool.
– [Brian] We got permission
to record inside the house.
– What this?
– If you wanna go in here.
So this is containment barrier
(barrier crackling)
that got set up.
And so what happened,
as we go through the house I’ll show you,
but you can see this cast
iron pipe right here.
So this cast iron pipe goes
to the patio that’s above us.
– [Peter] Uh-huh.
– And when everything burned,
all the vegetation on this property burned
and the trees burned and
they clogged up the pipes.
And then we had the
rains and the firefight
and then water started
coming into this house.
– Oh.
– In this room anyway,
as a result of that.
But if you look here, you also
had a flying debris impact
and crack the window and
break the window open.
And so you had smoke and
soot and ash coming in.
So this room had to be gutted
as a result of the smoke, soot, the ash,
the contaminants, and the water damage.
– So this was one of
those insurance company
comes in and says, “Hey,
there’s not much to do here,
we’ll give you a little check.”
– Correct.
– And then you start
pulling back the walls
and you’re like, “Oh, geez.”
– And you start realizing,
“Oh, boy.”
Correct.
So what is it?
Why is it, like, is this
toxic air in here or some…
What’s this all about?
– Yeah, so what they do
is they came in and in order to mitigate
and minimize the spread of toxins,
they put these containment
barriers up in certain spots.
That’s gonna reduce the amount of spread
throughout the rest of the house.
Right now those doors are open
because they don’t have fans
running in there and whatnot.
So nothing’s kicking outta that room.
Here’s another containment
barrier in another room.
– So it doesn’t seem too-
– Very similar.
– (laughing) You can punch me if you want,
but it doesn’t seem
too bad in here, right?
Those walls look good and everything.
– So it doesn’t, right?
But as we keep going, I’ll
show you what’s going on
and you’ll see,
like for example-
– Sorry for being a smart ass.
– No, no.
So if you look at the stairs, right?
And you look, that’s all soot
that has come in as a result of the fire.
The gentleman that owns this
house lives here full-time,
his primary residence.
– [Peter] Where is he now?
– He is currently down in San Diego.
– Okay.
– But as you can see,
as we go closer to the
sliding glass doors over here
and you look outside and
you look down at the floors.
So here’s where you’ve still got smoke
and soot and ash down here
that has yet to be removed
as we still deal with
the insurance company
on the cost to do the job.
And you can see where you’ve
got floor register vents
and it went down in there.
So all of your duct work for
your HVACs has to be replaced,
because it all went down there.
These sliding, these awesome,
lovely sliding pocket doors,
it’s inside the pocket doors, right?
So you have to open up the
walls to get into there
to clean the contaminants
out of that.
– Oh, what a nightmare.
– This house actually got broken into-
– [Peter] Are you serious?
– Right after they lifted the…
Right after they removed the guard.
– So there was a lot
of that, just coming in
and breaking in?
– A lot of that.
A lot of that.
Right after the guard left and
then they loosened that up,
a lot of break-ins happened.
– Look at this.
– And this house
didn’t have power until
a couple of weeks ago,
and even the power to this
house is limited right now.
Everything just torched, scorched.
That was AstroTurf over there.
Had awnings
and places to sit up there.
– Yeah, okay.
I see what you mean.
From the outside it looked
all good and then you
start poking around.
– You come up here
and you’re like, “Oh,
maybe it’s pretty bad.
If you look real close, Peter,
where those two windows come together.
– [Peter] Yeah.
– [Brian] The caulking actually melted
between those two windows.
– Oh, yeah, I see.
– And it literally whistles
going right in.
– [Peter] I don’t think the camera
will see that from here.
– I don’t know.
– I see what you mean.
– We can look from upstairs.
– [Peter] How much was this place
before the fire, do you think?
– [Brian] 12 to 15.
– [Peter] That much,
with hardly any property?
– With hardly any property.
I mean ’cause it’s vertical, right?
The property is literally
a vertical hillside.
And you can see here where, you know,
patio furniture melted onto the concrete
to the point where it started to actually
affect and chip away the concrete.
Stairs are breaking,
handrails are breaking.
If you look real close
on the security camera,
that’s all fogged up.
The security cameras are melted.
– [Peter] What’s crime like around here?
Or what was it like?
I mean, it’s a pretty
safe neighborhood, right?
– Yeah, prior to, yes.
Afterwards you had all the typical,
as we do after every disaster,
thugs coming in, people coming to rob,
steal whatever they can,
even with contaminated…
The funny story is on this
particular one, whoever broke in,
before the cameras were
back up and working,
came in and ate some
soup and drank some wine
that had been sitting here from the fire,
and that was in June.
And you’re like, “I’m
pretty sure that wasn’t-”
– They had a meal and then looted.
– Yeah, they literally had a meal,
left it on the counter and left.
So, who knows if they
got sick the night after.
– [Peter] What’s this guy gonna do?
Is he gonna come back here, do you think?
– Yeah, he’s itching to come back.
And so right now the
restoration company is here,
starting to get the place
cleaned up and moved out.
You can see,
just still with the amount
of stuff that’s in here,
all of this has to be taken outta here
in order to get in and start
cleaning things properly.
And so part of what’s going on
is the negotiations with
the insurance company
on the scope of that and the
price of doing all of that.
– [Peter] It doesn’t smell
bad in here, gotta say.
– [Brian] No, it doesn’t.
And that’s because the remediation
company is here working.
They’ve had fans running,
doors open, things like that.
It’s not horrible.
Here’s where you can see, you know,
just again, stuff blowing
in, damaging the floor.
Here’s the soot and the ash still in here.
– [Peter] How much was
this guy insured to?
– He’s insured enough
for the loss that he has.
In the event this had burnt down,
he’s not anywhere close to
being insured for enough.
– [Peter] So he’s in a
good position actually.
– He’s gonna be in a
fine position, correct.
– Okay.
– Correct.
– There’s that hole
that melted in between.
Look how close it was to
catching fire inside the house.
– [Peter] Right.
– Yep.
– Oh, wow.
I mean, that’s how close
you were to having-
– [Peter] Once this goes up-
– Once this goes-
– The wall’s burning.
– It’s gone, right?
You got one, two, three side by side,
it catches the drywall and the ceiling
and it just keeps rolling
and rolling and rolling
and at that point it’s gone.
Now take a look at all the
lots, you know, just gone,
commercial properties and
residential properties.
– [Peter] Oh yeah, all of those.
– All of them.
So that pink rubble down there,
that’s one of my clients.
So that particular house
has been in his family
for three generations.
They were the ones that
built it back in the ’50s.
– Okay.
– They survived the ’93
fires when I was out here.
They had damage, but
they survived that fire.
That house is insured for
under a million dollars
to rebuild, and to rebuild on that lot
will cost almost $1,500 a square foot
to rebuild on that lot.
– [Peter] How big is the size it is now?
– 1,800 square feet.
He is underinsured by the
tune of 2 to $3 million.
– [Peter] So what’s he doing?
– So he is now faced with the fact
that at his age and his situation,
he can’t go get a loan,
a mortgage to rebuild.
So he’s faced with having
to probably sell that lot.
– [Peter] Could he get
much for it, do you think?
– He’ll get an okay amount for it,
for sure.
– Like a million?
– Probably, I’m guessing,
that’s a guess, yeah.
– So he is not too much
behind in the whole thing
with the insurance money
and selling the lot.
– No, but he’s losing-
– Yeah.
– You know,
his family-
– Three generations.
– I mean, he lived
there, he grew up there.
So he’s losing his childhood home,
the home that they had
in Malibu, you know,
for three generations.
And so that is representative
of these older generational
homes that are out here.
That’s a consistent story
where, for a variety of reasons,
it’s woefully underinsured
and it should not have been,
and yet it was allowed
to go on and it happened.
And now these people have
to uproot their lives
and decide what they’re gonna
do ’cause they can’t rebuild.
– Yeah, and that’s the story out here
a lot of people don’t understand
and everyone thinks it’s, not everyone,
but many think it’s all
actors and the super wealthy.
But these old Malibu families
that have been here..
Like in 1950, what was that to, you know,
it was probably like 158,000
to buy or something, you know?
– Well, yeah, less than that.
– Less than that.
– Less than that.
– And so they’ve just stayed on.
– Right.
– Because it’s…
I can see how this is
a tough place to leave
when you grow up here.
– And so what happens over there,
are those four or five lots
gonna get bought by a wealthy individual
and he’s gonna build one house over there?
Or, I don’t know.
But it definitely changes the landscape
of what was known as Malibu,
from kind of that slow hippie vibe
with also some newer money vibe,
but really just kind of slower, low key.
Now it’s gonna change.
– [Peter] So Malibu
itself, this is the center
or closest center?
– This is the hub of-
– The hub?
– Yeah, this is the hub
of Malibu, there’s the
famous Malibu Beach Villas.
Here’s Nobu, the famous restaurant.
– [Peter] So this didn’t
get touched at all?
– No, not really.
So this is the first time
in the almost seven months
since I’ve been here
that this has been this way,
where it’s been this busy.
So because they just opened it up
and because you have restaurants
and stuff coming back, the Malibu,
now people are really
starting to come and revisit.
You can see all the new green grass
and all that.
– Are you talking
this Palisades fire or a different fire?
– [Brian] No, this Palisades fire.
– [Peter] Oh, okay, so
this was all ripped,
all the way up here?
– [Brian] All the way through
here, all this entire canyon.
This was the same canyon that
I fought fires on in 1993.
The Woolsey Fire, again,
through this canyon in 2018.
So it’s not a once in 100 years,
it’s becoming more and more common.
It’s more and more dense.
You were just saying off camera,
that the greater LA area
is something like 18 million people.
– [Peter] Metro LA is over 18.
LA County is roughly nine mil
– [Brian] And LA County is massive.
We’re in LA County.
– Yeah,
we’re in LA County still, yeah.
Is it because the topography is so rugged,
you can’t, like, cut a, like a
fire line that’s wide enough.
– You can’t cut a very wide fire line.
You gotta go up to the
ridge and cut the ridge
and then you’re doing Phos-Chek fire drops
and everything else on, you know,
trying to get it to stop.
– [Peter] So is that being done?
– That is always done.
And then the problem is,
you also have the winds
come through canyons, right?
And they rip up these
what’s called a chute
and act completely different over there
than it is 100 yards
away or 200 yards away.
And so it’ll flip flop over.
I’ve seen it jump from
this canyon to that canyon
because of the winds.
So you could have 100 firefighters up here
and aircraft and everything
else, and they’re slowing it.
But stopping it is almost like, “Hey,
we’re gonna let it run to PCH
and hope it stops at PCH.”
– So, as a former firefighter…
– Yep.
– [Peter] Is there anything preventative
you can do out here?
– So there are things
you can absolutely do
to reduce the risk.
And a lot of that goes
down to the shrub brush,
the underbrush being
controlled and managed
in a way that it hasn’t been,
in my lifetime, at least,
and from when I was a
wildfire fighter out here,
where fire crews take
care of the underbrush.
You’re letting the trees live,
you’re letting the bigger stuff live,
but you’re getting rid of the grasses.
You’re getting rid of the dead stuff
so that when a fire comes,
that is not there to catch fire and move.
There’s been historically
speaking all kinds of issues
because you kill some snails,
you end up killing a slug,
you end up killing some worm or something.
in the name of trying to
prevent this from happening.
– Yeah.
– And so you have environmentalists
who say, “Hey, that’s bad.”
You have animal rights,
people who say that’s bad.
But you end up with this
when you don’t control things
and you let things get outta control.
You end up with situations like this
where now you have people
who are devastated.
– Do you think that empathy towards snails
or whatever is probably going
away with this recent fire?
– I think the people
who care more about that
also don’t care that the people
in Malibu lost their houses
and the people in Palisades
lost their houses.
– Okay, ’cause they’re rich people
and whatever, they can
deal with it, right?
Is that the mentality you’re saying?
– You asked me what I get.
That’s my thought.
– Okay, that’s your-
– I’m not saying I have any, you know-
– You’re not the spokesman for-
– Yeah, I’m not the spokesman
for PETA or, you know,
the environmentalists,
but I, generally speaking,
would bet that they don’t care about that.
They just want the environment
to stop being destroyed, you know?
And yeah, I want the environment
to stop being destroyed as well.
But there has to be a balance
when you’re talking about
trying to have people
live within an environment
where there is wildlife and there is trees
and there are shrubs and all these things.
You’ve gotta allow a balance.
And it seems to me like
we’re on a one or the other.
We’re on a do nothing and
let everything happen,
which is clearly what happened here.
Or we’re on the extreme the other way
and we just wanna pave
and concrete everything
and tell people, “You’re
not allowed to have trees
in your front yard anymore,
’cause it could catch fire.
You’re not allowed to have, you know,
bushes up against your house,”
which is what’s happening now.
“Hey, we’re not gonna let you replant
within 15 feet of your house.”
You’re telling me I can’t have bushes
and stuff 15 feet of my
house because it might burn.
– Another thing I forgot to mention
when we were in Palisades,
the water ran out or the
water wasn’t available.
Do you know that story,
like the very basics of that one?
– Yeah.
– Like the reservoir was empty
or what was that?
– Yeah, well, so part
of it is the reservoir.
And that is both true in
Palisades and in Eaton.
It’s true in both areas.
– Where we’re going now,
we’re going out to Eaton.
– Where we’re headed.
– Okay.
– The fire hydrant systems are designed
to be able to work on two
or three structure fires
at any given time within
a short proximity.
– Mm-hmm.
– They were never designed
for something like this
where you needed to open up 100 hydrants
to get water into fire engines
to then push water out.
And so that created the pressure drop
to where there wasn’t enough
pressure in the system
for them to use water
to put out the fires.
And so that was part of the problem.
There is the issue with not
enough water in the dam.
I’ve also heard that
the dam never emptied,
that there was water in it.
Some official reports that said that.
And that really it was the supply issue
with hydrants being open and
water lines being broken.
And on top of that, you know,
people were turning on
their sprinkler systems,
people were turning on their hoses
and watering stuff down
and leaving them on.
And I don’t know what the ratio,
but I know a large portion
of the fire system over in Altadena
is also on the primary water line,
meaning that is draining it
because it’s not a dedicated system.
(vehicles whooshing)
All right, so we’re pulling
off the 210 right now
and pulling into Altadena,
Altadena to our left, Pasadena
to our right, essentially.
– I mean, the drive we just
took when we had traffic,
but that was an hour and 45 minutes.
– Hour and 45 minutes.
– Inland.
– Inland.
– Totally separate fire
happened at the same time.
– Totally separate fire
at the exact same time
with the same circumstances.
Started because of the high power lines
coming out off the mountain side.
So that’s what’s alleged.
That’s being challenged by some,
but proven quite easily by others.
– [Peter] These are cute little homes.
And Altadena is more middle class
compared to Palisades, yeah.
– Yeah, a lot of these
actually have sustained smoke
damage and interior damages.
Albeit, the outside
doesn’t look like it’s-
– Yeah, it looks fine
right now.
– Horrible, but that,
you know-
– Except for that one.
– [Brian] Right.
– [Peter] Okay, now we’re back in it.
– Yep.
This is Altadena Drive, one
of the main thoroughfares
that just got completely obliterated.
This is an area where it’s
block after block after block.
And we’ll make a loop through here.
– [Peter] Is this the Eaton Fire?
– This is the Eaton Fire.
Correct.
– Okay.
– And it’s called the Eaton Canyon,
which is how it got the Eaton Fire name.
– [Peter] So Palisades
gets most of the attention,
Malibu, most of the attention.
Nobody’s really talking
much about out here, right?
– That’s correct.
Money driven, power driven, voice driven.
Again, you know, as we saw,
we just passed a couple
of other for sale signs,
but here’s another one, right?
So people have chosen to not
try and come back, you know,
for a myriad of reasons.
You can’t capture the vast devastation
that this is on camera.
It’s just so big, so vast.
And so looking from here,
three blocks up there’s nothing,
two blocks down, nothing.
You know, cars still there.
So this is the lot that they chose
not to have the Army Corps
remove the debris for them,
for whatever reason, that was
an option that people had,
both here and the Palisades Fire.
And so it’s still sitting here,
waiting for them to get that lot cleared.
– [Peter] Okay, so that’s
the owner’s decision.
– That’s the owner’s decision, correct.
And it could have been
a financial decision.
If you had an insurance policy,
that insurance policy
has a specific coverage
called debris removal on it.
And what the Army Corps was coming in
and saying, “Hey, if you have insurance,
then we’re gonna come and
tap your insurance policy
for the total value of
the debris removal.”
– Okay.
– Now that can vary.
From this lot, that
debris removal coverage
could be 30, $35,000.
The next lot, it might be $100,000
depending on the size of the house
and the policy and all of those things.
So you had this issue with
the Army Corps coming, “Hey,
we’re gonna charge whatever it
is on your insurance policy.”
Well, people were saying,
“But if I can get it done
for less than $100,000
that my policy entitles me to,
why would I give 100,000
to the Army Corps?
I could pay a private contractor
to do it for a third.
– Right, right, right.
That makes sense.
– And so-
– Okay, so I didn’t know
that the Army Corps of Engineers,
they actually go to your insurance company
and get some of the money back.
– Correct.
– It’s not a free service
showing up.
– It was free if you
didn’t have insurance.
So it’s not free if you do.
– Okay.
– [Brian] And so this
area, it’s wiped out.
– Yeah.
– You know?
– It’s properly wiped out.
– [Brian] Absolutely.
And so you have a tax basin
that’s, you know, gone.
Local businesses are affected
by thousands of homes being
destroyed and no longer here.
– [Peter] They’re gonna knock it down?
– Yeah, so that’s what’s happening.
Okay, so here’s the
excavator, there’s the Ram.
And so what they’re doing right now,
that is more likely than
not, got asbestos in it.
And so they’re wetting it down
so that when they go to tear it down
and they start knocking it
over, it keeps the air down.
It keeps it from getting airborne
and reduces how much is
going into the atmosphere.
There’s no perfect way out of this.
There’s no easy way out of this.
The more water you put on
it to get it out of the air,
the more it goes into
the ground, you know?
– [Peter] This downtown got roached, huh?
– [Brian] It is absolutely devastating.
– [Peter] Wow.
– [Brian] The entire school’s
burnt down over here.
Entire grocery stores, malls.
– [Peter] I didn’t even know about this.
– [Brian] Yeah, there’s
more burnouts over here.
There’s more damage over here.
– [Peter] More than Palisades?
– Oh yeah.
– Seriously?
– Largely.
By far.
Numerically speaking.
Numerically, like the number of of units.
– [Peter] Okay.
– [Brian] Here’s a house right here
that we’re gonna go to this one
on the right.
– Oh, that’s beautiful.
– Yep.
– Okay, again, it looks great.
– [Brian] Looks great
on the outside, right?
– [Peter] Oh, you can smell it up here.
– [Brian] Yep.
– [Peter] A bit of that char.
How you doing?
– Hey.
– [Alisa] How are you?
– Alyssa.
– Alyssa?
– Alyssa, it’s a hard name.
– [Peter] I know, it’s a nice name.
– It’s only hard for me.
– We’re trying.
We’re trying.
– It’s only hard for me.
– Yeah.
– Alisa, this is your place?
– Yeah.
– [Peter] How did your
tree not get torched?
– Well, you know, these
trees are over 100 years old.
They are deodar cedars
and so they’re very…
They hold a lot of moisture.
– Okay.
– And so that one got singed,
but we’re kind of thinking
they might have saved our house, yeah.
– But obviously this house
totally burnt to the ground.
– [Peter] Did you move out ever?
Or you’ve been in the whole time?
– Oh, no, we don’t live here at all.
It’s not habitable.
– It’s not?
– At all, no.
It’s like super toxic land inside.
– [Peter] This is like the most stealthy
burn situation I’ve ever seen.
You would never know driving by.
– It just makes you wanna do
the “Sound of Music” twirl.
And then you go, “Oh, no.”
– [Peter] How long did
you live out here for?
– We bought the house in 2005.
We had a lot of intrusion.
You know, windows came open
because of the winds were
like 100 miles an hour.
– [Peter] What a cool place.
When was this built?
– [Alyssa] ’23, 1923.
– [Peter] So you’ll be able to save it?
– Yeah, we got to essentially gut it.
We’re trying to figure that out.
There’s all sorts of toxic stuff
and everything that you
see, it’s in the walls,
in the crawl spaces,
all over our belongings.
So we’ve got a long road
ahead and, you know,
it’s been a hard almost six months.
– Mm.
– Yeah.
– [Peter] Where are you staying now?
– We’re living about 15 minutes down.
We were lucky enough to be
able to rent from a relative.
So this room got hit really hard.
Everything that you’re seeing right now,
this place is frozen in time from January,
the night of January 7th when we fled.
Nothing’s been touched at this point.
– Right.
– So share with him
what that was like on that night
with the gap, like the
timeframe that you had
from start to leaving,
because it was something
that we were talking about earlier.
– Yeah.
– But to hear it
from her perspective and, you know..
– We had a really interesting situation,
a really interesting
story in that, you know,
we had had a huge windstorm.
We get insane windstorms up here,
but this one was…
It was like totally
different kind of thing.
It was swirling wind.
And so we had been in a
blackout since the evening,
the evening of January 6th.
So we had no electricity.
And we kind of suffered through.
And when we have storms up here,
I’m always nervous about
these huge deodar trees
falling on the house.
– [Peter] Yeah.
– Particularly the one in the
front that we walked past.
Because that one is right
over my children’s bedrooms.
So I’m always sort of
up all night staring.
And the next day there’s this,
I don’t know if you’ve heard
about this guy in Altadena,
Edgar McGregor.
He’s like a weather-
– No.
– He’s a climatologist.
– Okay.
– Young, cool climatologist.
And he just, like,
picks apart the weather.
And he had posted on his
page, I follow him on social,
and he had posted, “If you
thought last night was bad,
that was just the edge of the hurricane.
Tonight is gonna be a
matter of life and death.”
– It was a hurricane?
– It was hurricane force
winds.
– Santa Ana winds, yeah.
– Yeah, I mean-
– Hurricane force, yeah.
Over 100 mile an hour winds up here.
So I said to my husband, I said,
“I think we should go stay
at your Mom’s house tonight.
Like, I don’t think we should be here.”
I wasn’t even thinking about a fire.
That’s the weird thing.
I was thinking about the wind.
The day went by, I went to pick up my son,
probably got home around six, came in,
grabbed some things just overnight.
We drove down Holliston, which
is this street right here
that we came in.
– Mm-mm.
– We were waiting to make
a left on Altadena Drive.
So the fire was there and
it was very quiet out.
And then we made the left
and the whole sky was red.
– [Peter] Mm-hmm.
– So we drove a little bit further, sorry.
We drove a little bit further
and it just…
We saw it just barreling down the hill.
It was probably, I looked at
the timestamps of my texts,
I think it was 10 minutes
after the fire was reported to start.
– [Peter] So right down this?
– [Alyssa] So if I had to
point to it, it was there.
– Okay.
– I started shaking.
We pulled over, we tried
to call my husband,
but the phone lines were dead.
So we came back and we
didn’t get very far.
It took us just a minute to get back.
By then it was dark.
The wind was crazy.
We couldn’t even hear each
other talk on the street.
So he ran in, got my husband,
and then came back out
and then he and I started knocking
on all of our neighbors doors
and getting them awake
and their attention.
– Oh, yeah.
– And, you know,
we have elderly neighbors here
that we really love and care for.
And so we got everybody out,
at least in our little block here.
And then we left and we-
– How’d you leave? Just in cars?
– I left in the car with my son
and our two dogs and we
went down Lake Avenue,
which maybe you came up on the way here.
I’m not sure.
– Maybe, yeah.
But it’s all burned down now.
And we were just dodging
falling wires, poles.
It was like…
I don’t know, it was kind of…
Like, I actually haven’t really
been able to deal with kind of the trauma
of that whole night
because we’ve been so immersed
in like, what do we do?
You know, how do we handle all this?
But it was really scary.
It was really scary.
– [Peter] I bet.
– And I think probably
about 40 minutes later,
from that point, we got
the alert to evacuate
over our phones.
– Okay.
– Now, I don’t know if that was because
we went into a part of
Pasadena that had reception.
– Mm-hmm.
– You know, everybody’s
very blamey around all this.
And I sort of feel more like
everybody did their best
to do what they needed to do to help us.
– Yeah.
– So, you know,
I don’t think anyone
could have anticipated
something of this magnitude-
– Yeah, that’s wild
– Happening here.
Yeah.
– Yeah.
– It’s hard to face the
reality that, you know,
everything is not what it used to be here.
– [Peter] Yeah.
– So I miss my neighbors, you know?
– [Peter] I bet.
And how’s your experience
been with the house cleanup?
– Our insurance company
has been slow playing,
just all the communication with us.
And we finally got our
industrial hygienist tests back,
which were terrible.
Like, gut the house kind of terrible.
We’ve given it to them.
Brian has been, you know,
working to sort of chase
them down about it.
And they finally came back yesterday
and said, “We’re gonna send
our own industrial hygienist.”
So there’s just this constant feeling
of like not being trusted
and no forward motion.
So now we have to do that
because for some reason
our industrial hygienist
that we hired independently,
I mean, everyone’s having
to hire independent IHs
because they’re refusing to pay for IHs.
But as soon as you hire one,
you pay, ours cost $7,000.
– Oh, wow.
– And that’s money out of our-
– How long were they here for?
– He was here I think
for two or three hours.
– $7,000?
– Yeah.
But it’s like all the testing
that they do, you know?
– Wow.
– It’s like the lab fees.
It’s everything.
– Wow.
– So…
And then the interpretation
of all of the…
We have like 160-page report on-
– And the insurance company says, “No,
we don’t totally get this guy.
We wanna send our own person in.”
And then you gotta battle
back and forth with that.
– And our insurance
company, like in February,
they were out here inspecting
And they sent a remediation
company out here to inspect.
– Okay.
– Never got a report
from either our insurance company
or the remediation company
until just two weeks ago.
– So what happens is with homes
that are built up like this
with the crawl space underneath,
and these vents go all
the way around the house,
is all of the soot and the ash
and the contaminants get blown in
and now they’re in the crawl space
at the bottom of the house.
And then you have it blow through a door,
comes through the door like this,
and now it’s on the top of the floor.
And so it’s contaminated below it
and now it’s contaminated on top of it.
And when we ran the tests
on this, it’s chromium,
it’s arsenic, it’s lead,
it’s all these things
that are coming up hot
for all these chemicals
that we haven’t had to deal
with in these situations
until now with all the
EVs and stuff like that.
– [Peter] You think a
lot of it’s from EVs?
– I think a lot of it’s
from EVs.
– Batteries cooking?
– Correct. Yeah.
That’s where some of this…
Some of these chemicals
that are being found in this
can be tied back exactly to the computers
and the batteries in the EVs.
We opened up this wall cavity,
drilled a hole, took a test,
an air sampling test
inside that wall cavity.
And inside that wall cavity
where the insulation is,
it’s completely contaminated.
So the walls have to come
out to get to the insulation
to remove the contaminants
and the carcinogenic
stuff out of the house.
So, as we walked up
and you were like, “Man,
this house is beautiful,”
it’s almost an entire
gut job of this house.
So out here they’re requiring everybody
that still has a hole
in the ground for a pool
to put a fence around it.
Most of those don’t have water in it
or they have very little water
so they don’t pop out of the ground,
but they’re requiring fencing to go around
in case some random dude
decides to walk across your lot
that is completely a burnout and falls in.
And then you get sued for liability
because you weren’t
protecting some knucklehead
from falling in your pool.
So every one of these
now has a fence around it
for absolutely no reason,
because we don’t wanna
hold people accountable
for their stupidity of falling
in somebody else’s pool
that they’re not supposed
to be on the property.
– So I can just show up, walk
on someone else’s property,
fall into their dry pool
and then sue them?
– Yep. Absolutely.
– And potentially win?
– And win.
– And win. Come on.
– And win.
No, there is case law
out here in this state
absolutely would support you
and say that they were negligent
for failing to protect the property
to keep it from somebody falling in.
– [Peter] Oh, this is interesting, Brian.
– Right, so-
– You got a dirt road up here?
– Yep.
– Nice.
– Yep, so we’re gonna tuck away up here.
So right up against the hills again,
right in Altadena, kind of the top of it.
This is a former professional
football player’s house.
They had just finished remodeling,
had just moved back in in 2024.
The insurance broker didn’t
properly insure this house.
So this house was insured
for roughly $700,000
and it’s about a $3 million build.
And so this guy’s taken a
multimillion dollar hit.
– [Peter] Can he rebuild or…
– I think he could probably rebuild.
I think he’s, you know,
he’s still working.
He is doing some other stuff, right?
But they were out at dinner
for his 50th birthday.
He and his wife and his kids were up here
with the babysitter.
They get the alert on the phone.
You know how we get the amber alerts?
– Right. Right.
– So the amber alerts go off,
they look at it and they go, “What”
And people’s phones start going off,
they start making phone calls.
So they raced from town to here
to get to the babysitter,
to get to their kids,
loaded them up and took off
and went back into town.
So he gets back into town,
they get settled wherever
they went, I don’t know.
And then he realizes
that his Super Bowl ring
and some other very valuable
stuff is still in the house.
And so he came back to get that
and by the grace of God,
he was able to get it
and got a few things out
that were really important
that you, you know, just
can’t easily replace,
got those out and made it out.
But you know, they’ve relocated
all the way to Dana Point.
We were talking earlier about families
who’ve just decided to…
Schools are down and they’ve
got, you know, four kids
and they’re down in Dana
Point now, you know?
They relocated out of here.
(birds chirping)
(car engine humming)
The hard thing, to your point is,
hey, let’s go find if we can
talk to some people, right?
Not a lot of people here.
– Yeah, that’s right.
– Because of how much
devastation there is.
– Yeah, look at the road.
The road’s empty.
– [Brian] Not a lot of
people just hanging out
in their empty lots, you know?
– [Peter] No, you see
some RVs out here, though.
People living out there.
– You do see some RVs out here
so they can be at their property
and, you know, there’s
some folks right there.
– [Peter] Oh, we gotta stop.
We gotta stop.
Zach, so what’s going on right now?
– We’re trying to keep our…
– Hold that.
– Here.
We’re trying to keep our landscape…
– [Peter] Okay.
– Intact.
You know, it’ll be three years
before the house gets rebuilt.
– Okay.
– At least.
So, it gives us a little peace of mind.
My wife bought the place 47 years ago
and then I met her six months after that.
– Oh, wow.
– And then we got married
10 years after that.
And then we raised a couple of kids here.
And it wasn’t a castle,
it wasn’t a, you know, high end place.
– Mm-hmm.
– It was just home.
– Can we check it out?
– Yeah, oh yeah, come on in.
– Yeah?
– Yeah.
– Alright.
– I’ll open the gate for you.
– [Brian] (laughing) There we go.
– [Peter] So you’re
keeping the grass green.
– Yeah, you know, you
couldn’t get water running
until the Army Corps got
finished and signed off.
– [Peter] How did they do?
Did they do a good job for you guys?
– They’re exemplary.
– Okay, great.
– I mean,
if I ever had to…
We’re both corporate business managers.
– [Peter] Okay.
So you’d give them a five star on Yelp?
– There’s absolutely
no question about that.
– [Peter] Okay, that’s good to hear.
– Yeah, they not only listened,
they managed their crews in a great way.
– [Peter] Oh yeah, I see
you got a fence around here.
That’s good.
– Yeah,
that’s where the basement was.
There was 175 square foot basement.
Linda bought the house from
a fellow that built it,
and he was way ahead of his time.
He put 7/8 inch rebar
and he poured 8 to 12 inch wide walls.
– Okay.
– So he was way ahead of it.
In fact, the excavator operator
said he took more rebar
out of this place, out of my foundation,
than he’d seen in 20 homes.
– [Peter] Okay, so it was well built.
– Yeah, it really was
from that standpoint.
It went through several earthquakes.
Foundation was poured in ’23.
– [Peter] So you’re
looking to rebuild here?
– Well, that is the long-term plan.
The insurance company
has just now finished up
their engineering report
and then they fed it into
their rebuild system.
And their rebuild system
tells them, you know,
what the cost to rebuild is.
Now, we haven’t seen that report yet,
but we were told 10 days ago
that it exceeded all of our policy limits,
which is the dwelling
plus replacement of 50%.
There’s a 50% uplift for replacement,
and then there’s a 10% ordinance of law,
which is to meet new code.
So we exceed all that stuff.
– So that’s good?
– Yeah, that’s headed
in the right direction.
– That’s good to hear.
– Yeah.
– All right.
– I think we kind of expected
that, in just our rough
conversations with some builders,
it’s gonna take 1.5
million to get into it.
We’ve been to a couple of
rebuild meetings of Altadena
and we met older folks
who really don’t have a clue what to do.
They don’t know which way to turn.
And I really feel badly for him.
Got a guy across the
street that no insurance.
His insurance expired last August
’cause rates went up so high
and yeah, his rates went up
so high he couldn’t afford it.
– [Peter] He owned the house outright?
– Yeah, he paid cash for
it back in the what, ’60s?
Yeah.
– [Peter] What was the house
for here back in the ’60s?
Like $100,000 or something?
– No.
– No,
I think he paid 30.
– Okay.
– He paid 30.
You paid 40.
– I paid 40 for mine.
– You paid 40 grand for this?
– Yeah.
– Wow.
– And Zillow’s got it now
as a vacant lot for 1.1 million.
So, I mean, stuff changes,
but the problem is there were
no vacant lots in Altadena.
The ones that can get to
FEMA and can get to Red Cross
and have family who can reach
out and help guide them, yes.
But I don’t know where
you’d find them today.
But those are the people
that have a really good story
because they just lost it all.
– Well, you know, they’re in their 80s.
– Yeah.
– And
they’re not computer literate.
– Yeah.
– So they’re…
– [Peter] They don’t know
how to fill out the paperwork
online for whatever.
– Exactly.
– Oh yeah.
That’s really a big problem.
And even though down
at the rebuild center,
they brought in everyone.
You had the county assessor,
you had the permits,
you had building and safety.
It was once and it was great.
– Okay.
– ‘Cause we went in there
multiple times and everybody was…
They’re doing their best to help everyone.
– Yeah.
– But you got old people
don’t even know what questions to ask.
Now, LA County, the folks
we met inside of LA County
seem alert and smart,
but I’ve read that they’ve
only approved 30 permits
up here so far.
There’s over 600 plans were
submitted as of three weeks ago.
– Okay, so in the Palisades
saw a few homes going up.
Not many, but a few.
Here I’ve seen none.
– Yeah, there’s one-
– There’s a few.
– There’s a few. Okay.
– There’s one right there.
That’s the first one,
on Palm Street.
– Okay, right there.
– Right.
And then we passed two
coming here tonight.
– [Peter] So what’s that process?
Getting your permit to build what, like…
Well, if you had the money, say right now,
could you start right away or-
– No, no, no, no.
First, you gotta get in
line with an architect.
The architect’s gotta do the plans, right?
The plans gotta be submitted
and then they have to go through
the approval of the county.
Now if you got 600 plans at the county
and only 30 approved,
there’s a major gap there.
– What’s going on?
– I don’t know.
– [Brian] There’s not enough people,
– Well…
– There’s not enough staff
to approve that fast
enough to do the reviews.
– So let me ask you,
you’ve been out here before.
We birthed Google Silicon chips,
Apple semiconductor up in the, you know,
up in the Gulfs, right?
– Right.
– Now we have AI.
Why isn’t government employing
AI to approve these plans?
Okay, there’s a lot of money out there.
– 100%.
– There’s a lot of money.
Where’s the money going?
I don’t know.
– Well, I also think
that there’s a lot of
people like Zach and I,
that we should be retired.
I don’t wanna rebuild.
– Retirement was supposed to be this year.
– I mean, I have several
clients like you who, you know,
who were a year out or
in, 2025 was the year,
and now they’re forced
with the exact same problem
where they’re like, “Now I gotta
go do a three-year contract
so that I can rebuild
my house and, you know,
and move back.”
– Yeah, how many banks want
to give 72-year-old people
a 30-year mortgage?
– Right.
– Huh?
– [Brian] Right.
– Or even want it, though.
– Yeah, the property is worth…
You know what these properties
are, this is absurd.
At the end of the street,
the corner of the street,
number 2 West Pine and number
16 West Pine, side by side,
$94 per square foot for the land,
$85 per square foot for the land.
That one across the street,
sold in February for $52
per square foot, right?
– [Brian] Almost doubled.
– Yeah, and this is like…
Now there’s 196 lots and homes.
There’s 130 lots available.
There’s been over 100 lots
sold since January 7th.
– [Peter] Who’s buying?
– Oh, that’s an interesting thing.
You leave this off, but-
– [Peter] Do you want me to turn it off?
– Yeah.
– Okay.
Sorry, guys.
– There’s a limit of 35 feet
from the highest point of your property
on the size of buildings
that you can put in, right?
But I believe California’s legislation,
that’s either pending or passed,
allows anything along a
major corridor, an artery,
to exceed those limits automatically.
So now, if you go down Lake Street,
that was one and two-story buildings,
you can very easily in
five years see 5, 10-story,
you know, 5 and 10-story buildings
because the shortage of buildings
in the state of California,
shortage of residences,
they really want them
plowing in more buildings
and putting them on mass transit routes.
Now logically that
makes really good sense.
But, you know, this is in Germany,
– And when you own in that area,
you don’t want it to transform
your neighborhood, right?
You don’t want your neighborhood
to all of a sudden become an apartment.
– No, this was all one story.
– That (indistinct)
on the corner with.
– There were a couple of two-story homes.
– [Brian] Units.
– But this is all fundamentally one story
and they were all unique.
– [Brian] Correct, and now
that’s not gonna be the case.
– No, no, there was not
cookie cutters here.
– I can tell you this.
if there’s 600 plans already in…
– [Zach] Yeah.
– These are not 600
uniquely designed homes.
– No.
– These are 600,
these are plans
that architects and firms already have.
You know, you can go online,
you can buy the plan.
Here you go.
– Drop it in Kansas City,
drop it in Denver, drop it in here.
– Yeah.
– Exactly right, man.
– [Peter] Not set up
for the aesthetics of-
– You’re dead right, ’cause, you know,
my neighbor’s been working with
an architect since February
and he’s still not finished.
– Correct.
– And he’s doing a custom
rebuild of what he had.
– Right. Right.
– So, you’re right.
You’ve got a big challenge in front of you
to piece together a very complex story.
– [Peter] Yeah.
– This is not one interview.
– I know, it’s one day of shooting
and I could spend every day
out here for the next month.
There’s so much to cover.
Like, any one of these big events.
– You know what?
If just think about it.
This place was never exposed, right?
You didn’t see this place
as a point where you go like
Hollywood Boulevard, right,
where you understand,
I say Hollywood Boulevard,
bang, you’ve got an image.
– Nobody knows about Altadena.
– No, no.
– Yeah.
– It was just a great place to be.
– ‘Cause there’s nothing
up here except residential.
– Yeah.
– Right.
– Nice neighborhood.
– Yeah.
And that’s why we’re
still watering the grass.
It’s a nice neighborhood.
(birds chirping)
– [Peter] Alright, well thank you Brian,
for bringing us all into that world.
– Absolutely.
– Because most of us
have no understanding of
what insurance is like.
And to all of you watching who own homes
or even renter’s insurance.
Right?
– Absolutely.
– Okay, up your insurance
or check out your policy.
– Check out your policy.
– Make sure
there’s enough coverage.
– Right.
– Wow.
Now I’m talking like those people
that I was always like, “All right,
I don’t wanna listen to you, man.”
You know what I mean?
– Yeah.
– Telling you what to do.
– Absolutely.
– But, okay.
– Listen man, it’s an important thing.
You know, if we’ve learned
something out of this today,
talking to the few
people that we spoke to,
it’s how fast their lives changed.
– Yeah. Yeah.
– Within minutes to hours.
– Yeah.
– And so people
often think, “Hey, I have
time to figure this out
or to deal with this in my house.”
Homeowner’s insurance, right?
10 minutes, 20 minutes and then two hours,
their life changed completely forever.
– Yeah. Okay.
I’m changing my policy tonight.
– There you go.
– How about that?
– Good idea.
– All right, Brian.
– Oh, oh, did you want anyone…
You never asked for it,
but do you want anyone
to know of your business?
– I’ll give it to you,
you can put it in the link
down below.
– All right, thanks, Brian.
– Absolutely, man.
– Guys, thanks for coming on that journey.
Until the next one.
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