Last year, I wrote here about the dark side of LA, after the Friends actor Matthew Perry was found dead in the hot tub of his $6 million Pacific Palisades house. I grimly predicted that his luxury ocean-facing bungalow – sold on to a developer for over $8 million just a few months after his fatal drug overdose – would become a new stop off on the ‘Movie Star’s Homes’ tours.
Was I wrong? The Perry multi-million glass bungalow narrowly avoided the flames. The LA wildfires have torn through the Palisades area, and have reached the very part of the Hollywood Hills where I used to live in the 1990s. Los Angeles Sheriff Robert Luna said that it looked as though ‘an atomic bomb dropped in these areas’.
Having lived as part of an expat British community out there in the 1990s, the cost cannot be simply measured in financial, human loss, or environmental terms.
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