The Brief

On Tuesday, Jan. 7, at about 7 a.m., the Getty’s Emergency Planning Specialist Les Borsay arrived at the Getty Villa in Malibu.

“This was not normally a day I would have necessarily been out there,” Borsay told LAist.

He was there with several other staffers from the Getty’s Brentwood campus to test some of the Villa’s fire suppression equipment, which was taking longer than expected.

Then came the message from the Getty in Brentwood: a small brush fire up started up at the Highlands, sparked by embers of the Palisades Fire, he said.

Les Borsay, emergency planning specialist at the Getty Trust

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The Getty Trust

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For the next 28 hours, Borsay and 16 other staffers organized themselves to supplement fire department efforts and along the way contributed to helping keep the Getty Villa and its priceless art collections from going up in flames.

The Getty Villa's emergency operations center

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The Getty Trust

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Now, nearly a month later, administrators of cultural institutions around the country are coming to Borsay to learn what he and his staff did, how they did it, and what they learned so they themselves can close any disaster safety gaps in their own plans.

Putting out spot fires with boots and fire extinguishers

After the start of the brush fire, the museum was closed down and the decision was made to tell non-emergency staff to go home. Borsay and the 16 others volunteered to stay.

From a conference room at the Villa, Borsay and others watched security camera feeds of the flames as they approached the perimeter of the 64-acre property. They kept a close eye on the northeast corner, near Los Liones Drive.

“We have a security kiosk there at our back gate. We had to pull that officer and make sure that they were safe,” he said. “That's when it starts becoming a real situation — OK, this fire is here."

Teams of two people

Borsay organized teams of at least two people, who wore N95 masks and goggles.

Spot fires from the Palisades Fire break out at the Getty Villa.

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The Getty Trust

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“Some goggles were better than others,” Borsay said, but those were all the equipment they had.

In all, 16 people, along with Borsay, were going out to extinguish spot fires around the campus.

Borsay also ran the command center.

“Fire extinguishers, we had them in the vehicles. We were pulling them out of the other buildings to put in the vehicles so that they could be used to go and hit these little fires,” Borsay said.

The teams would then return to the Emergency Operations Center to stay out of the smoke and ash and to replenish their energy.

Borsay commandeered sandwiches, cookies, and chips left in the museum's catering area for the crew.

“They could come inside for a second, get a drink of water, be inside for another 20 minutes or so and then rotate back out,” Borsay said.

They used boots and fire extinguishers to put out fires and help firefighters who arrived to fight the fire that day.

The fires were less threatening at about 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Borsay said, and flames subsided at about midnight. Meanwhile, the Palisades Fire continued to burn.

The next day, Getty CEO Katherine Fleming told news reporters the Villa remained safe and intact. Borsay had stayed the night, along with most others, and by noon returned home to Eagle Rock.

“It felt like the worst part was over,” Borsay said.

Key takeaways from their DIY firefighting

The Getty had done a lot to plan for a potential fire running up the canyons around the Villa.

However, the experience of Borsay and the other staffers who stayed revealed some gaps.

• The ABC fire extinguishers are dry chemical and not very effective in the strong winds that made the fires so dangerous — water fire extinguishers would have been better
• It was a good choice to get staff out of the museum early on
• Practices like shutting off outside air and taping doors to make sure smoke and ash didn't enter rooms worked
• People went above and beyond their job descriptions
• Sharing these practices with other cultural institutions is key

“ I learned that the people I work with are not just amazing, but even more amazing than I could have imagined,” Borsay said.

Other museums want to know

The Getty hosted a large cultural property protection conference last September. Some of the attendees reached out to Borsay, he said, to learn first about how he and the museum were doing. Then, for details about how he and his staff helped protect the Villa from being engulfed in flames.

The amphitheater at the Getty Villa with the glow of the Palisades Fire in the background.

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The Getty Trust

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He said he’s been asked to make a full presentation at this year’s conference. And next week he’s talking to the Cultural Safeguard Alliance, a network formed among cultural institutions to protect cultural property.

“[I’m going to give] a basic briefing on what happened and what we did and how we protected [the Villa],” Borsay said.

But this is not the happy ending. Natural disasters are never in the city’s rearview mirror.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called the L.A. fires, “The Big One.” While these fires are historic in nature, the longstanding threat of a massive earthquake also looms on L.A.’s horizon.

“It's going to be a bad day when the Big One happens. I don't think anybody's questioning that,” Borsay said.

A large magnitude earthquake will cause different damage, but the experience of going through the recent fire storm, Borsay said, has helped him and his institution prepare.

It’s been a beloved Los Angeles tradition for well over a decade. On New Year’s Eve, a crowd of people gather around on Santa Monica Boulevard and Veteran Avenue in West L.A. to celebrate at midnight.

The crowd isn’t waiting for a ball to drop, or for a bell to toll — not in L.A. Instead, the crowd is waiting for the exact moment that an anti-smoking billboard resets. Its message warns of the dangers of lighting up by showing the number of people who’ve died that year due to smoking.

For one beautiful moment, the billboard shows that not a single American has died from lung cancer or other smoking-related illnesses in the new year. (Of course, there’s no way to know this for sure — the counter is based on previous estimates and statistical averages.)

The billboard has grown from a neighborhood gathering, as the L.A. Times reported in 2012, to a packed viral celebration in the 2020s. Some Reddit users even loosely planned this year’s meetup, and it’s now cemented as a mainstay of how this beautiful, occasionally smoky city rings in the new year.

What’s the origin story?

The billboard dates back to 1987. William E. Bloomfield Sr., an ex-smoker, anti-smoking advocate and Redondo Beach resident, put it up to make the effects of smoking feel more real, according to the L.A. Times.

“I want to do what I can to get even a few people to quit, or at least think about it,” Bloomfield told the Times back then.

Drumroll: What do the sponsors have to say? 

LAist reached out to the billboard’s sponsors to get their take, and long story short: They’re fans of the tradition.

“Seeing the social media response of Angelenos counting down the New Year alongside this billboard is a powerful example of how impactful public awareness can be,” said Jen Maduko, the American Cancer Society’s senior executive director in Los Angeles, in a statement provided to LAist. “Lung cancer continues to claim more lives than any other cancer, and smoking remains the leading preventable cause.”

The ACS also said that they hope that the billboard’s viral status will encourage smokers to quit, or at least make current and former smokers consider getting screened for lung cancer. You can find more info on that from the ACS here.

“Although we appreciate how it brings renewed attention to the effects of smoking, we hope that it encourages action throughout the year,” Maduko added.

So there you have it. The sponsors behind the smoking deaths billboard have given Angelenos the blessing to ring in the new year on the side of the road in West L.A.

Who knows, one day this billboard might become even more iconic than the more traditional celebrations at places like Grand Park in downtown L.A. and the Queen Mary in Long Beach — or even make it to a national telecast.

On the first day of Los Angeles Unified’s Winter Academy, enrollment is 14% lower than last year with about 64,000 students signed up for a week of credit recovery and enrichment camps.

The district moved the program to start in January this year, ahead of the second semester, rather than keep it in December at the end of the first semester, as in previous years. And it is now a full week instead of three days.

“ I believe that even though the enrollment is a bit lower, attendance hopefully will be higher,” said Superintendent Alberto Carvalho on Monday.

The program started in 2022 as "acceleration days,” meant to help students make up for lost learning time during the COVID-19 pandemic using winter and spring breaks.

Enrollment has ranged from 71,000 to 74,000 students, with an average attendance of 55% to 60%, according to a statement provided to LAist by a district spokesperson.

Variations on winter recovery

Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies is one of 319 campuses offering Winter Academy. About 200 students attended the school’s enrichment camps, which in addition to STEAM programs (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics), included focuses on writing and math.

Middle schoolers at SOCES on Monday crowded around lab tables to watch folded paper flowers bloom when placed in a pan of water, a display of “capillary action”— the movement of sticky water molecules through a porous material.

Norman Goss keeps a foil ball aloft with the power of static electricity as classmate Catherine Galvez, left, watches, on the first day of SOCES' Middle School STEAM Camp during Winter Academy.

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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Seventh grader Catherine Galvez said her dad signed her up for the camp because she wants to be an astronomer.

“We're trying to find STEM programs that are like, inviting, but also, like, easy to get into,” Galvez said.

Teacher Riley Leary said unlike the traditional Winter Academy, the Middle School STEAM Camp is not focused on replacing work from the school year.

“This is based on curiosity. This is based on wonder,” Leary said.

Across campus, seventh grader Sophia Bezgubenko's wonder is limited to whether she can bring up her grades in health and science. She's one of the 300 students who are signed up for credit recovery. Bezgubenko is here at her mom’s urging.

“ I'm a little annoyed, but it’s alright,” she said of having to get up early during the last week of winter break.

The Algebra II students in Raymond Toleco's Winter Academy classroom review linear functions and absolute value functions.

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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A few doors down, 31 of 35 students enrolled showed up for Raymond Toleco’s Algebra II class.

Toleco said the additional days of Winter Academy give him more time to review with students instead of just assigning them work to complete on their own over the break.

“Mostly I have hardworking students and some of them wanna improve from D to hopefully a B,” Toleco said.

Christine Moore, founder and owner of Little Flower Candy Company in Pasadena, has died. Her children announced her death on Monday in a post on the cafe’s Instagram describing her as "the heart and guiding force of Little Flower and our community."

Moore founded the beloved candy company nearly two decades ago from her home kitchen in Highland Park, where she pioneered what would become her signature sea salt caramels and handmade marshmallows.

In 2007, she opened Little Flower at 1422 W. Colorado Blvd. The cafe transformed her candy business into a neighborhood gathering place known for its French-influenced pastries and seasonal fare.

Moore built her reputation on what Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold described in her acclaimed cookbook “Little Flower Baking” as food that makes you "feel happy and well served by life." Moore also published her cookbook “Little Flower: Recipes from the Cafe”.

She trained in Paris under award-winning chef and baker Nancy Silverton, at the former Campanile restaurant in Mid-City.

Along with the cafe, Moore opened Lincoln restaurant in 2016 inside a restored 1920s machine shop in northern Pasadena. It closed permanently during the pandemic in 2020.

Moore’s family made headlines when her 17-year-old son, Colin, fought to save their home from the Eaton Fire as it swept Altadena last year.

Despite being displaced herself, she immediately opened Little Flower to feed evacuees and first responders with her staff of 27. The service embodied what Moore had long championed: "We have 200 chances every day to make someone happy."

A culinary powerhouse remembered

Tributes poured in from across the community on Instagram following Moore's passing.

Christine Moore was described by her children as "the heart and guiding force of Little Flower and our community."

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Courtesy Little Flower Candy Company

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"She was a beacon of light and hope for me and our Braeburn pod after the fires, like she was for so many others in our community. That's just who she was," wrote Olivia Gutierrez.

"Christine was warmth itself. She welcomed people, remembered them, celebrated families, and built a true community at Little Flower," wrote Rachel Bitan.

Artist Anna Chotiner recalled a recent conversation with Moore: "We talked about how special [Little Flower] is. We were both in tears in the middle of the store as she radiated love and pride for the legacy she built. She talked about how all she wanted was for LF to be a place where anyone can come in and feel loved and cared for and feel just a little better about the world."

Pastry chef Nicole Rucker wrote, "They better have their sh*t together in heaven cause if not Christine is gonna bust em up! The best of the best."

Moore is survived by her three children: Maddie, Avery and Colin. The family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to Camp Conrad Chinnock, a nonprofit diabetes camp for children, in her memory.

Little Flower is temporarily closed until Tuesday, but service is scheduled to resume on Wednesday, according to the family.