The escalating scope and scale of the Los Angeles wildfires catastrophe won’t be fully measured anytime soon, but every number added to the thousands of homes that lay in ruin across the region represents a personal story of terror, heartbreak and the long journey of grief to come.
TheWrap reached out to its readers and industry contacts to collect some of these personal stories. Here are some of them, in their own words:
Brad Peyton, Filmmaker
Brad Peyton is the director of blockbuster films like “San Andreas” (2015), “Rampage” (2018) and “Atlas” (2024). He has lived in California for over a decade, with a house located in Altadena.
The devastation that ravaged Altadena hit close to home for director Brad Peyton, whose house was miraculously spared from destruction but who spent years imagining ways California could be torn apart by disasters in films like “San Andreas,” which starred Dwayne Johnson and chronicled the impact and aftermath of a 9.1 magnitude earthquake on Los Angeles.
“When I drove up to my house, the house next to me was on fire and the fire department was there, and the house behind me was completely gone. The whole lot was just charred rubble,” Peyton told TheWrap. When he and his fiancé returned to their neighborhood on Wednesday morning to grab more valuables, they decided to take a walk around their block. That’s when the enormity of the destruction set in.
“It was just like whole streets gone, people just out watering ashes, people trying to recover whatever they could, fire trucks shooting around you, explosions going off, big, billowing, fast-moving black pillars of smoke a couple blocks away. It was still all happening,” he recalled.
Peyton brought images of city-wide destruction to the screen in “San Andreas” and 2018’s “Rampage,” but he told TheWrap that seeing the L.A. wildfires first-hand has given him a different perspective on making a disaster movie.
“If I did it again now, I’d have much more to say about it,” he said, noting that the “human story” is much more personal. “There’s stuff that you couldn’t imagine, is basically the thing that’s striking to me. You never imagine the firefighters can’t get water. I’m not in any way pointing blame, I just thought there would be enough firefighters, enough water and enough police, and the response would be quick. But I stood there looking at this elementary school in our neighborhood burn to the ground as fire trucks just drove by it because they couldn’t save it.”
He saw a video of a man screaming at a fire, only for a wild bunny to jump into his arms. He was struck by the notion that the fire was so bad that a wild animal ran to a predator for safety. Hollywood disaster movies can only imagine so much.
Peyton also acknowledged that an industry still reeling from the effects of the pandemic, contraction and last year’s dual strikes just got dealt another massive blow, and he worries some in the industry will give up and leave.
“I think it was desperate before, and I think it’s going to get very dire now,” the filmmaker said. ”I don’t want there to be a creative brain drain, where people just get sick of this place and they leave. One of the things I’ve really liked about living in California is there are so many artists, there are so many creative people. But what I see right now is a lot of people going, ‘That’s it.’”
The Toronto-native director said he hopes people “band together and hold on,” but admitted “you can only take so many serious hits before you get knocked down.”
Another fear of Peyton’s: the insurance fallout for citizens across Los Angeles. The director had been battling his insurance company for four months over a flood in his house before the fires, and he called the situation “frightening.” He said despite “doing everything by the book,” the insurance company repeatedly denied his claim and it’s still in dispute as he, his fiancé and their three elderly dogs have been living in hotels and Airbnbs.
“There’s no humanity in the process whatsoever,” he said. “I just realized, if they’ve been this way with me over a flood in one house, what are they going to be like in this situation?”
– By Adam Chitwood
Kathy Pittman and Ryder Pittman, and ‘The Honda That Lived’
“Be the Honda,” Kathy Pittman says. “Get up, get started and move forward.”
For the next few years, she and her 19-year-old son Ryder will be following the inspiration of his trusty single-stroke dirt bike, which miraculously started up after the Eaton Fire swept through their neighborhood last week and destroyed their Altadena home.
The video of that joyous moment – a boy and his severely melted, but still-running, dirt bike – was captured by a new pair of Meta glasses and heard ‘round the world, with nearly 400,000 likes and 77,000 shares on TikTok.
Pittman and his mother chose to evacuate at the onset of the Eaton fire in the pre-dawn hours as embers rained fearsomely down on their property. They spent 10 minutes grabbing essentials and beelined for the Rose Bowl parking lot, never expecting that their home was in imminent danger of burning down.
The teen and his father (who works in the music industry and is divorced from his mother) raced back to the property and were able to move some vehicles to safety. But the old dirt bike “was not as valuable as everything else I had – I did have a lot of memories on that bike, I wish I could’ve saved it.”
With no water pressure to the house, father and son were rushing buckets from the pool to put out hot-spots before it all became too much. Pittman stashed the Honda and his father “made the executive decision” to run from the onrushing embers, smoke, heat – and soon flames – that had already engulfed the next-door-neighbor’s house.
When they were finally able to return, Pittman picked up the bike and gave it a kick.
@augietheyeti If this doesn’t prove that Honda is made to last, I don’t know what will!! WAIT FOR IT @Ryder Pittman @Honda Clips @hondafolife #lafire #hondabike #apocalypsebike ♬ original sound – Augie The Yeti
“We’re looking around, and it’s nothing but destruction,” Kathy Pittman said. “We’re trying to see anything that made it, and then he picks up that bike – and we’re thinking, ‘There’s no way this thing is gonna start, it’s completely melted.’”
Despite its shredded and melted exterior, the Honda fired right up. Ryder says it’s possible that the bike is still rideable, but is probably not salvageable. Somehow, though, it may contribute to the bigger salvage job.
“It’s just so much joy,” Kathy Pittman said. “I’ve probably watched it a thousand times, as you’re going through this you’re looking for anything hopeful. … You have no idea how happy I was. Looking at him in that pure bliss, glee, raw moment. We haven’t been able go get it out yet. Him and his dad are talking about framing this bike.”
For now, mother and son are living with Ryder’s dad, who has remarried.
“Thankfully, my father and my stepmother are both incredibly amazing, kind and devoted people, who have given us access to their house, however long we need,” he said, adding cheekily: “Or until we wear out our welcome.”
Like all Southern Californians who have lost their homes, the Pittmans have a long road ahead to rebuild their lives. Exhausted from shopping all day Sunday for supplies, they still sounded hopeful that they would do just that in a few years’ time.
So it bears repeating:
“Be the Honda. Get up, get started and move forward.”
– By Josh Dickey
Shannon Losinski-Holdt, attorney and producer
Losinski-Holdt has served in the legal affairs departments at NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. and Netflix, specializing as a production attorney.
A phone call might have saved Shannon Losinski-Holdt’s life. On the evening of Jan. 7, waiting for her husband to arrive at their home in Altadena, she picked up a call from a friend asking if she had evacuated from the fires. She assumed the friend was talking about the blaze that was rapidly burning through the Pacific Palisades, only to discover that another one had ignited in the hills above her home and was rapidly approaching.
“I opened my curtains, and the fire was right there outside my front window,” she told TheWrap.
Like thousands of other Altadena residents, the speed of the fire’s spread blindsided her, leaving her with little time to gather her most important documents and belongings. It wasn’t until days later that she was able to get back to her neighborhood to find that her worst fears had been realized: her home was destroyed.
Four days later, it was Losinski-Holdt’s 38th birthday. She tried to celebrate it as best she could with her husband and her closest friends, including producer Chelsea Fenton and development executive Miguel Berg, whom she met as students at Chapman University’s Film/TV production MFA program. A friend brought a cake, and since they didn’t have any candles, they used a leftover one from Hanukkah.
“I’ve fought for all of my friends at different points in their lives and to have that return to you in a moment where you never thought you would ever need it… I can’t describe what that feels like,” she said through tears.
Since moving from Montana to start her career in showbiz, Losinski-Holdt has had to navigate Hollywood’s growing instability, weathering layoffs at multiple top studios including most recently Netflix. She got a job last year at a media consulting firm and was looking for another opportunity to work in production again in 2025, holding on to hopes that Hollywood’s recent contraction following the strikes would relent.
“Everyone was saying ‘Survive ‘til ‘25, and now here we are in 2025 and now we’re just trying to survive at all,” she said. “There’s just this incredible community of creative people that we’ve become a part of, people who have invested so much and fought so hard to keep being a part of it through the strikes and the layoffs and all of it. Our bank accounts are probably the lowest that they had ever been, and now it’s all gone, and we have nothing left to start over with.”
Everyone was saying ‘Survive ‘til ‘25, and now here we are in 2025 and now we’re just trying to survive at all.”
-Shannon Losinski-Holdt
For now, Losinski-Holdt is at a friend’s home in Valley Village with her husband, Justus, and her dog, Hank, filling out FEMA forms and trying to recover from the emotional shock of the past week. Her friends set up a GoFundMe page to support her, with a little over $6,000 raised at time of writing.
With the Eaton Fire still not extinguished, she hasn’t had a lot of time to think about what’s next, but she is preparing to forge forward
“If there’s anything that has prepared me for crisis management, it is making a movie,” she said. “I want to fight for myself to figure out how to reclaim anything from this disaster. I want to figure out how to use my skills to help my community. This has nothing to do with entertainment law, but I’m a fast learner, and there’s nobody out there who wants to fight this more than me.”
-By Jeremy Fuster
Samantha Rose Baldwin, actress
Samantha Rose Baldwin is an actress who starred in 2022’s “Gossip Girl.” She risked everything to save her cat, Kitty, from the flames. This is her story in her own words.
After recently returning to LA from New York, where I was most notably known for my episode of Max’s “Gossip Girl” reboot, I now find myself at the Chateau Marmont in one of their creative union-comped bungalows for the displaced. Here, I’m most notably known as being the girl featured in the Daily Mail for rescuing her cat from the Pacific Palisades wildfire — and not being Leighton Meester, the person you typically think of when you read “Gossip Girl.”
I woke on Tuesday, Jan. 7 to the sun shining and a light breeze in the air, oblivious to what the day would hold, and got myself dolled up to meet a friend in West Hollywood for brunch only for my drive to be interrupted by a very worried call from my dad. A wildfire had broken out, and now he was evacuating children from the school where he works as a security guard. Immediately, I rushed back to our Palisades apartment to evacuate him and my 10-year old cat, a tortie affectionately known as Kitty.
What should have been a 28-minute drive turned into a two-hour ordeal as Palisades was engulfed in black smoke. Less than a mile from my house, I sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic while firetrucks crawled toward the encroaching fire and plumes of smoke swallowed the skyline. With my GPS indicating another two hours still to go, I hid my car away on a side street and ran the remaining distance down Sunset Boulevard with my cardigan wrapped around my face to protect against the smoke.
I made it home to find that Kitty wasn’t in one of her usual spots, leading to a 20- minute search against the clock while my loved ones anxiously tracked my location on their phones. Finally finding Kitty hidden deep inside our couch, I wrapped her in a blanket, shoved her in her carrier backpack and ran outside, hoping I’d beaten the flames. I hadn’t.
In the time it took to find Kitty, the area between me and my car was overtaken by flames and getting back to it was no longer an option. My father chose to stay behind and help the firefighters, so I ran through the gridlocked traffic, dodging flaming palm fronds as they rained from the sky as if I were in a minefield. I called my mother to tell her I loved her, fearing for both my life and Kitty’s.
Somehow, I reached the ocean, where I reunited with my dad — the salty air providing brief respite from the smoke, allowing me to catch my breath from behind my makeshift bandana-mask for the first time in what felt like hours. An ABC 7 news van in the Gladstone’s parking lot provided water and a phone charger to update our loved ones. In exchange, I recounted what we’d just endured to an ABC 7 reporter.
Since then, I’ve returned to the wreckage. By absolute miracle, I recovered my car — and remain hopeful about the state of our apartment building. As one of the “lucky ones,” I’ve used the unexpected attention from the initial ABC 7 story to support IATSE’s Local 80 donation drive and Feed Play Love’s animal boarding efforts, which has offered me a renewed sense of purpose and peace amidst the devastation.
My heart breaks for those who lost everything in the Palisades and Eaton Fires, and I’m deeply grateful for what has been spared. As the winds pick up again, all I can hope for is the safety of our community and for the continued sense of newfound camaraderie that has emerged from the flames and graced my fellow Angelenos.
-By Samantha Rose Baldwin
A Mother Tries to Save Her Son
Shelley Sykes says she made a desperate attempt to save her son Rory Sykes, who as a boy challenged by blindness and cerebral palsy made several media appearances and motivational speeches, from his cottage on their Malibu property as the roof began to smolder.
“I couldn’t put out the cinders on his roof with a hose because the water was switched off by Las Virgenes Municipal Water,” she wrote. “Even the 50 brave fire fighters had no water all day!” she wrote on X.
She “couldn’t stop the flames taking over,” and couldn’t lift or move the 32-year-old out because of her broken arm – so she ran for help. When she returned with emergency responders, Rory Sykes had already succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning.
“It is with great sadness that I have to announce the death of my beautiful son @Rorysykes to the Malibu fires yesterday,” Sykes wrote, adding that he was born in Great Britain and had been living in Australia, but only recently relocated to the U.S. She said Sykes had his own cottage on the family’s 17-acre Mount Malibu estate, which burnt down on Jan. 8.
“[Rory] was born blind with cerebral palsy & had difficulty walking,” she wrote. “He overcame so much with surgeries & therapies to regain his sight & to be able to learn to walk. Despite the pain, he still enthused about traveling the world with me from Africa to Antarctica. [He] was a sought after inspirational speaker for [Tony Robbins] when he was only 8 years old.”
-By Josh Dickey
