{"id":99562,"date":"2025-12-18T10:06:23","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T10:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/99562\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T10:06:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T10:06:23","slug":"the-great-underdogs-of-the-palisades-fire-fight-to-stay-afloat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/99562\/","title":{"rendered":"The \u2018great underdogs\u2019 of the Palisades fire fight to stay afloat"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Rashi Kaslow sat on the deck of a boat he bought from a friend for just $1 before the fire. After the blaze destroyed his uninsured home in the Palisades Bowl mobile home park \u2014 which the owners, to this day, still have not cleared of fire debris<\/a> \u2014 the boat docked in Marina del Rey became his home.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou either rise from the ashes or you get consumed by them,\u201d he said between tokes from a joint as he watched the sunset with his chihuahua tucked into his tan Patagonia jacket.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people take their own lives,\u201c he said, musing on the ripple effect of disasters. \u201cAfter Katrina, a friend of my mom unfortunately did that. … Some people just fall into the bottle.\u201d<\/p>\n

The flames burn not only your house, but also your most sacred memories. Among the few items Kaslow managed to save were journals belonging to his late mother, who, in the 1970s, helped start the annual New Orleans Jazz Fest, which is still going strong today.<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/p>\n

A disaster like the Palisades fire burns your entire way of life, your community, your sense of self.<\/p>\n

The fire put a strain too big to bear on Kaslow\u2019s relationship with his long-term girlfriend. The emotional trauma he experienced forced him to take a break from boat rigging, a dangerous profession he\u2019s practiced for 10 years that requires sharp mental focus as you scale ship masts to wrangle a web of ropes, wires and blocks.<\/p>\n

Some days, he feels kind of all right. Others, it\u2019s like he\u2019s drowning in grief. \u201cYou try to get back on that horse and do this recovery thing \u2014 the recovery dance,\u201d Kaslow said, \u201cwhich is boring, to say the least.\u201d<\/p>\n

Living on a houseboat comes with its own rituals; these largely keep Kaslow occupied. He goes to the boathouse for his ablutions, walks his chihuahua around the marina and rides an electric skateboard into the nearby neighborhoods for a change of scenery.<\/p>\n

\u2018You either rise from the ashes or you get consumed by them.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2014 Rashi Kaslow<\/p>\n

He\u2019s not yet sure where he\u2019ll end up. Maybe someday the owners of the Palisades Bowl will let him rebuild, but Kaslow is too much of a pragmatist to get his hopes up. Maybe he\u2019ll eventually scrape together enough money to leave the city he\u2019s called home for more than two decades and finally buy a regular old house \u2014 not a mobile home, not a boat.<\/p>\n

\"After <\/a> <\/p>\n

After two of the most destructive fires in the state\u2019s history, The Times takes a critical look at the past year and the steps taken \u2014 or not taken \u2014 to prevent this from happening again in all future fires.<\/p>\n

As 2025 slogged on, Kaslow repeatedly watched leaders do little to help. The Los Angeles Fire Department had failed to put out the Lachman fire. Gov. Gavin Newsom\u2019s state park had failed to monitor the burn scar for hotspots. The Los Angeles Department Water and Power had failed to fill the Santa Ynez Reservoir, meant to protect the Pacific Palisades. Police failed to protect his burned lot from looters. Mayor Karen Bass failed to force the owners of the Palisades Bowl to clear the lot of debris.<\/p>\n

Kaslow imagines welcoming Bass and Newsom onto his boat \u2014 his life now \u2014 and sailing out into the sunset. \u201cThere should be some accountability,\u201d he said. \u201cI just want to look them in the eyes and ask them, \u2018What the f\u2014 really happened?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Rashi <\/p>\n

Kaslow holds a ceramic vase he recovered from the rubble of his home.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sentiment shared by many from the Bowl, who Kaslow has dubbed the fire\u2019s \u201cgreat underdogs.\u201d They\u2019re among the Palisadians who\u2019ve been essentially barred from recovering \u2014 be it due to financial constraints, uncooperative landowners or health conditions that make the lingering contamination, with little help from insurance companies to remediate, simply too big a risk.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to be a victim for the rest of my life,\u201d Kaslow said. \u201cI don\u2019t want to let this destroy me anymore than it already has.\u201d<\/p>\n

As November\u2019s beaver supermoon rose above the marina, pulling the tide up with it, he felt a glimmer of optimism \u2014 a foreign feeling, like reconnecting with an old friend.<\/p>\n

Kaslow had received a bit of money from one of the various resident lawsuits against the Palisades Bowl\u2019s owners, as well as a modest housing grant from Neighborhood Housing Services, a local nonprofit, that covered the rent for his spot in the marina. <\/p>\n

But a week later, Neighborhood Housing Services ran out of money, and a federal loan that could finally help him to move on from simply trying to stay afloat to charting his future remains far off on the horizon.<\/p>\n

Regardless, Kaslow cannot help but feel grateful, despite all he\u2019s lost. He thinks of his elderly neighbors whose entire lives were upended in their final years. Or the kids of nearby Pali High<\/a>, who pushed their way through the COVID-19 pandemic only to have their school burn in the blaze.<\/p>\n

He thinks of the countless people quietly going through their own personal tragedies, without the media attention or outpouring from the greater community or support from the government: A messy divorce that leaves a young mother isolated; a kitchen fire in suburban America that levels a home; an interstate car crash that kills someone\u2019s child.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou start to appreciate things more, I think, when your whole life is shaken up,\u201d Kaslow said, looking out at the moonlight glimmering across the marina. \u201cThat is a blessing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rashi Kaslow sat on the deck of a boat he bought from a friend for just $1 before…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":99563,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[4457,54280,3802,1576,54282,1073,48,52,51,1637,47,6024,50,49,1741,5434,1831,1829,54281,592,54279],"class_list":["post-99562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-boat","tag-enough-money","tag-fire","tag-friend","tag-great-underdog","tag-home","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-life","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-fire-department","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-lot","tag-marina","tag-owner","tag-palisades-bowl","tag-palisades-fire-fight","tag-people","tag-rashi-kaslow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}