Although he was in Las Vegas when the inferno struck, Pacific Palisades resident Michael Gisser nevertheless saw “rivers of fire” going down his street, right past the Ring camera affixed to his front door.
“I was like, how could any house withstand this? The air was on fire,” Gisser, 67, recalled. “I think a lot of people at that stage were like, ‘I hope my home survives.’ And I was like, nothing can survive this. It’s impossible.”
In a uniquely 2020s experience, many fire evacuees used their phones to watch the Los Angeles conflagration rampage through their neighborhoods on Jan. 7.
Video doorbells have taken the country by storm, capturing crimes big and small on camera and providing footage of events like the Philadelphia plane crash.
In Ramona, northeast of San Diego, a Ring camera recently recorded a domestic attack that ended in homicide.
People are using their video doorbells to monitor hurricanes, storms and other weather events, Mimi Swain, Ring’s chief commercial officer, said in a email.
“Much like mobile phones, video doorbells are becoming a regular part of our lives,” Swain wrote. “Video doorbells have reshaped how we interact with our homes.”
As of last year, at least 18% of U.S. households — or at least 25-27 million — had video doorbells, according to Dallas-based market research firm Parks Associates.
That’s up from around 7% of households in 2018.
California’s video doorbell usage is “about the same as the national average,” according to Parks Associates — not surprising since Ring was born in a Pacific Palisades garage. Hence, it’s likely that hundreds, if not thousands, of Pacific Palisades and Altadena residents watched homes burn in real time.
Some fire victims said having video doorbells, security cameras and other smart-home devices gave them immediate feedback about the condition of their homes.
In cases like the Gisser’s, it gave instant confirmation of the worst possible news, plunging them into grief.
Others said doorbell videos made it possible to move on while those without such technology clung to false hope, not learning for a day or two that their home was gone.
And as they watched, they kept looking for fire trucks to roll up and save their property. But the fire trucks never came, residents interviewed for this story said.
Several fire victims say doorbell footage is just the latest sign of the times.
“We live in such a digital and technical day and age. In a lot of ways, that’s a blessing,” said Pacific Palisades resident Tiffany Michelle, 40, a professional poker player. “It’s almost like a movie where you have this recording and the story of everything that happened. And the question is, do you want to have the story?”
Rooms on fire
Reality TV personality Spencer Pratt, a Pacific Palisades native, equipped his home with a dozen security cameras.
When the Palisades fire broke out, Pratt was stuck in gridlock on a 405 freeway overpass.
He pulled out his phone, brought up his security cameras and watched as fire approached from three directions. He switched from camera to camera, checking the deck, the garage and rooms inside his house.
“I was just watching as the fire was coming into each part of the property,” said Pratt, 41. “And then, I watched it burn down until there was no electricity.”
It was “mind boggling,” Pratt said. But it also gave him closure.
“I felt if I didn’t have that, I’d be like, what if, what if,” he said. “I have a lot of friends that didn’t know their house burned down until the next day.”
For the first time since he moved to Los Angeles, Anže Rozman found peace when he and his wife rented an apartment in Pacific Palisades. The natural beauty of the place reminded him of his native Slovenia.
Last April, the television and film composers rented a two-bedroom, two-story house on a hill overlooking Temescal Canyon. Rozman planted a vegetable garden and started making plans to buy the house. He also installed a Nest video doorbell and two additional cameras.
When news broke of the fire, Rozman, 36, bicycled to a nearby ridge to see where it was burning. Within 10 minutes, he saw flames approaching Temescal Canyon. He returned home and prepared to evacuate with his wife, Kara Talve, and their cat.
Before leaving, however, he positioned the camera on his rear balcony looking west down Monument Street toward the canyon so he could know when it would be safe to return.
- See Anže Rozman’s time-lapse video: Short version and Long version
It took two hours for the couple to reach their studios in Santa Monica.
Once there, Rozman brought up the cameras on a large computer monitor and watched as the fire jumped the hill at the end of Monument Street and worked its way through the neighborhood toward his house.
He called the fire department to report what was burning.
“They said they’re doing the best they can,” he said. “Soon our neighbor’s house caught on fire, and then, the whole street’s on fire. … In one hour, the whole street was on fire.”
DoorBot
The concept behind the Ring doorbell was conceived in a Pacific Palisades garage.
Company founder Jamie Siminoff had been working in the garage when he realized he couldn’t hear his front doorbell there, according to news reports. To fix the problem, he invented a doorbell that would create an alert on his phone, calling his invention, “DoorBot.”
Two years later, Siminoff pitched his new product on a 2013 episode of “Shark Tank,” claiming it was the first video doorbell for the smartphone.
“Think of it as caller ID for your front door,” he said.
All but one of the “Sharks” rejected the idea, and Siminoff didn’t like the terms of the offer he did get.
Cast member Mark Cuban doubted that DoorBot (now called Ring) would ever be worth as much as $80 millon-$90 million.
In 2018, Amazon paid $839 million to buy Ring, according to Bloomberg.
As of 2024, Hawthorne-based Ring doorbells continue to dominate in U.S. market share, followed by ADT, Blink, Simplisafe and Google Nest, according to Parks Associates.
False hope
Altadena resident Walter Seace clung to hope his house had survived even after seeing part of his roof catch fire on his video doorbell.
Seace and his wife, Yalda, were glued to his phone after evacuating to her parents’ house.
They could see embers blowing up their driveway from the house next door, which was fully engulfed in flames. They could see what turned out to be a school bus burning across the street.
Then, suddenly, there was a flash as his house caught on fire.
““It was like a firestorm,” said Seace, 61, a sporting goods sales representative. “The flames came over the roof, and then the camera went black.”
“Oh, my gosh!” Yalda Seace exclaimed as she burst into tears.
But Seace believed the rest of his house would be spared and tried to reassure his wife.
As they drove back home the next morning, they could see from the end of the block that nothing was left.
“The only thing that was left standing is our chimney and the two front posts that are made out of brick,” Seace said.
When Rozman’s cameras went dark, it felt like watching a science fiction movie and not knowing the ending.
“It’s kind of surreal,” he said. “You know what you’re watching, but your mind can’t really process it.”
Malibu resident Marika Erdely believed the worst had occurred when her cameras went dark.
Erdely, 66, had forgotten about her video doorbell system until she arrived at her daughter’s home. “What about the Ring cameras?” her daughter asked.
When she checked them just before 6 p.m., she could see flashes of light, flames billowing from a neighbor’s house and a stream of embers flying through her yard and up against her house. The fire kept flaring up, then the cameras died.
“We basically thought, that’s it. We’re done. The house is burning,” Erdely recalled.
After a sleepless night, she learned the next morning that her house was spared when she saw it on TV.
“My grandson, who’s 7, is like, ‘Oh my god, your house is there.’ There was a lot of emotion. … I mean, it’s a miracle that it survived. It was a big relief.”
Pacific Palisades resident Peter Albores and his family were watching the news at a friend’s home when a neighbor called to say they should look at their video doorbell. His wife, Sandy, pulled out her phone.
“I saw her face from across the room, and I’ll never forget it,” Albores said. “She just put her hand on her mouth, and she started crying.”
The fence and the apple tree were burning, the house engulfed in sparks and embers.
“Just flames everywhere,” he said. “I knew that was it.”
Tiffany Michelle pulled over on Pacific Coast Highway just outside the evacuation zone, her car filled with computers, photos, keepsakes and 25 bottles of her oldest wine. Then, she got a Ring alert on her phone.
She opened the image and saw her fiancé still in the neighborhood, hosing down the front of their house.
“I can now see the smoke clouds have gotten much closer than when I left the house,” Michelle said. She texted her fiancé and said it was time for him to leave.
He walked down the street, through the Palisades Village and down Pacific Coast Highway to her car. It was his last walk through their community.
As her fiancé drove, Michelle constantly refreshed her phone. The sky grew dark as night. Then, she saw flames on her street. She tried to keep optimistic, thinking the firefighters were on their way. Then, she saw that the neighbor’s yard was on fire.
Once they reached their friend’s house in Hollywood, Michelle and her fiancé settled in with their companions, uncorking one of the wine bottles.
“The next time I check my phone, I see every single camera says, ‘Offline.’ Instantly my stomach dropped,” Michelle said. “I knew that it meant that my house was on fire. I knew that it meant my house was burning in that moment.”
She called her fiancé outside and gave him the bad news. In grief, they hugged and cried.
Looking back, Michelle wondered if it would have felt better or worse to not have cameras, to not know the outcome in real time. What causes the most torture: a quick, swift blow, or days of not knowing?
“In some ways, having that immediate knowing really helped the process of mourning and loss,” Michelle concluded. “We didn’t have to sit there with hope for a long time before we knew the answer.”