- At least 11 people have died and 13 are reported missing as the wildfires in Los Angeles spread.
- Zibby Owens used a security system to watch wildfires near her Los Angeles home.
- Many Southern California homeowners monitored their homes via live feeds during the fires.
When Zibby Owens and her husband installed an internet-connected security system at their home in the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood of Los Angeles, they were thinking of using its cameras to keep tabs on packages, not wildfires.
But on Tuesday, local time, they spent two hours watching a livestream of flames closing in on their home.
“It was like a horror movie,” said Owens, the owner of Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica, who was in New York this week and splits her time between the United States East and West coasts.
Owens said watching the live feed made her feel physically ill at times, yet she was unable to look away.
“I’m glad we were able to see, so that at least we had a bunch of information,” she said. “Otherwise, we could have been in the dark about what was going on out there.”
Story continues after live blog
Story continues
The couple are among the many Southern California homeowners who this week followed a live feed of distress signals or traumatic video coming from their homes thanks to internet-connected security systems.
The digital rituals of surviving a disaster – marking yourself “safe” on Facebook, sharing first-person footage on X, formerly Twitter, or Instagram, taking a video of everything in your house before evacuating – are constantly expanding.
Internet-connected home security systems becoming cheaper and more widely installed have made the digital ledger of disaster grow ever longer.
About 43% of US households with internet access have a security product with online capabilities such as a self-monitored smart camera, video doorbell, or a professionally monitored security system, said Jennifer Kent, vice-president of research at Parks Associates, a consumer technology market-research firm.
“There is a wide choice of devices and systems on the market today, and the market has grown as self-install solutions, lower-cost devices, and lower-cost services have come to market, attracting middle-income households and renters,” Kent said in an email.
When Kent’s firm surveyed consumers about the services they might like to add to their existing home security systems, 66% indicated they’d be interested in adding fire and gas safety monitoring.
From 4800km away, Owens and her husband clicked between different feeds from the Nest cameras at their home, zooming in as they tried to grasp what was happening. At one point, Owens said, they saw firefighters come through the house and extinguish flames in the backyard.
At around 4.30pm Eastern time on Tuesday, the camera feeds gave out and the updates from their security system stopped. About four hours later, Owens’ husband got an alert on his cellphone that the indoor sprinkler system had gone off and the fire alarm had been activated.
They do not know the current status of their home, Owens said on Tuesday.
Real estate agent Shana Tavangarian Soboroff said in a phone interview that one set of clients had followed their Pacific Palisades home’s ordeal this week in a foreboding play-by-play of text alerts from an ADT security system.
The system first detected smoke, then motion, next that doors had been opened, and finally fire alerts before the system lost communication. Their home’s destruction was later confirmed when someone returned to the neighbourhood and recorded video, Tavangarian Soboroff said.
She has been telling her clients to take videos of everything in their homes before evacuating to help bolster insurance claims if a home is destroyed.
Tavangarian Soboroff and her husband had been living in her parents’ home in the Palisades for the past 15 months while their own house in the neighbourhood underwent renovations. Both houses were lost in the fires.
They had to evacuate so quickly that they did not have time to take a record of everything they had at Tavangarian Soboroff’s parents’ home. “I very much wish I did,” she said.
Sometimes security footage from homes menaced by wildfire, viewed from afar, can be deceiving.
Marika Erdely, the 66-year-old founder and chief executive of a sustainability consulting company, evacuated her Malibu home on Tuesday morning with her cousin and young granddaughter.
Hours later she peeped at footage from her Ring doorbell and other cameras with her daughter in Santa Monica.
The devices didn’t show much happening, Erdely said on Thursday. When they checked again in the evening, they could see flames in the backyard and flying embers circling ominously and getting closer to the home.
Erdely and her daughter watched for about four minutes before the cameras abruptly stopped. Kent said that security systems tend to go down when they lose power or internet connectivity.
“I definitely thought it burned down,” Erdely said. “I was preparing for that.”
Erdely didn’t sleep at all that night, she said, assuming her home had been destroyed.
Her daughter, Alex Pearlman, who shared the footage on social media, recalled in a phone interview that several of her mother’s neighbours also watched security footage from their homes after they evacuated.
The next day, Erdely was surprised to receive confirmation that her home was still standing. She first spotted it in news coverage and later that day received a photo taken by neighbours showing her home still standing, in an area where many others weren’t as fortunate.
“I feel so lucky,” Erdely said.
However, without power or gas in her Malibu neighbourhood, she’s uncertain about when she’ll be able to return. In the meantime, she filled out an application to rent a place down the street from her daughter.
“Who knows when I’ll be able to really live in my home?” she said.
Lisa Bonos is a tech culture reporter in San Francisco. She joined the Washington Post in 2005 and previously worked on the financial, editorial and outlook sections.
