Hope among the ashes of Los Angeles - NI reporter David Blevins on the human cost of the apocalyptic wildfires, and how the city's people could rebuild
“People use the term apocalyptic – it sounds like it should be cliche, but it’s literally true. I’ve never seen anything like this in 35 years of journalism.”
Those are the words of Northern Ireland journalist David Blevins, who has been covering the disaster in Los Angeles for Sky News.
Speaking to the News Letter from outside an evacuation centre filled with hundreds of desperate and traumatised people fleeing wildfires that have razed their homes, he said some of the things he’s seen will haunt him for years to come.
"Haunting is certainly one word, yes,” he said, adding that the words that will stay with him forever are those of Kimiko Nickerson, who told David that her 82-year-old father was convinced the inferno would never reach him.
"He went to bed and the fires came,” he says. “Her father went to bed, she told me, and he’s still there now – lying there dead, and she can’t get to him.
“It’s stories like that, and hers is far from the only one, that will stay with me for a very long time.”
David reinforces that while Pacific Palisades is known as an enclave of the rich and famous, the fires are so widespread that most of the affected people are from ordinary workaday backgrounds, and don’t have millions in the bank to fall back on.
As evidence, he points to the evacuation centre behind him; the 600 people crammed inside include many elderly, many pregnant women, many parents with young families.
"Los Angeles has a reputation of being all money and celebrities, but that’s not the reality of it for most people,” he told the News Letter on Friday.
"The people in that centre, for many of them all they had was the roof over their head; now, they don’t even have that.”
Despite that, despite trauma and hardship that will take years to climb out of as one of America’s major cities tries to rebuild, David reinforces that there’s still hope and optimism among the ashes of Los Angeles.
“I met an older woman in the evacuation centre, she recognised me from Sky News and smiled,” he says.
"I asked how she could smile after losing everything; she said there’s always tomorrow, and there’s where her hope lies.”