John DeNuccio Lost Everything

The air is muggy and dense in downtown Pacific Palisades – more accurately, what’s left of it. A once-bustling Sunset Boulevard is now eerily vacant, with only a few charred buildings spared from destruction. Along the side of a parking lot that used to serve a now-ravaged Ralph’s grocery store, half-a-dozen food trucks line the street, feeding a diminished customer base of displaced locals and disaster relief workers.

Sitting in the bed of his black Toyota Tacoma in this parking lot is John DeNuccio, 63. He’s eating a burrito from one of the food trucks, while his dog, Calla, sits at his feet. He’s wearing a blue Notre Dame cap and a forest green Dickies jumpsuit, leash in hand.

“Everything I own is in this chest,” said DeNuccio, as he gestures to a large white trunk in the truck bed. “Like, three bags of clothes and a blanket. Everything I own is in that white chest and these two buckets in my back seat. Couldn’t save nothing.” Along with the chest, the truck bed holds a case of bottled water, another of Sparkling Ice, two bright orange Home Depot buckets and a shovel.

The Palisades wildfire started burning in the Santa Monica Mountains on January 8, fueled by intense winds that reached up to 80 mph. The blaze burned across over 23,400 acres of Los Angeles County, destroying an estimated 6,800 structures and evacuating over 100,000 residents. It is the single most destructive fire in Los Angeles city history. 

Before the fire, DeNuccio was a caretaker for a wealthy French family in the Palisades, whose property he lived on. The family’s entire property was destroyed in the fire, leaving DeNuccio with no place to call home. He says that the family is planning on rebuilding their estate, but no specific timeframe has been provided yet. Like many other locals who have found themselves displaced, DeNuccio is part of the working class army who form a protective apparatus around the rich.

“A lot of people here in Palisades, they have wealth, but not everybody. Lots of people don’t,” said DeNuccio, who is originally from the San Fernando Valley and moved to the Palisades for work. “For example, I’m working on a property for 15 years, and they give me a little place to live in with very, very cheap reduced rent. So I work paycheck to paycheck – now it’s all burned down.”

His only possession untouched by the flames is his trusty Tacoma, where he sought refuge immediately after the fire. “The first night, my dog and I, we slept in the truck,” said DeNuccio. “We tried to roll back through, and they stopped way over there, down Sunset – and they said ‘no, you go to the Red Cross shelter,’ so we went there.”

DeNuccio and Calla temporarily relocated to the shelter, but it wasn’t a good fix. “It took FEMA a week to show up over there at the shelter, and it’s just a big gymnasium at the Westwood Recreation Center,” said DeNuccio. “There’s no showers, you know, and the bathrooms are dirty and everything. It got real disgusting after about two weeks.” 

The Red Cross shelter was only a temporary solution to a very permanent problem. “It started winding down and they gave everybody like $700, which I had to pay for my January [health insurance],” said DeNuccio. “It was $760, it didn’t even cover that month’s health insurance plan. Then FEMA put us up in a hotel for like three weeks, and then they gave us an extension for two weeks. Now our hotel runs out on the 27th, this week. A couple days.”

DeNuccio has nowhere to stay after his voucher expires, other than his truck. He says there are no financially feasible housing options for him. “FEMA gives you this voucher grant. After that, they don’t pay the motels – they give you like $3,800,” said DeNuccio. “So the hotel I’m staying, it’s not a very nice place, and it’s like $4,000 a month.” He says that FEMA gave him a total of $13,000 for the loss of his property, but estimates that the destruction was actually worth anywhere between $100,000 and $150,000.

“We’re talking about your furniture and everything, and all your kitchen stuff, stuff that you’ve just been having for years and years and saving and buying, and work tools and all that,” said DeNuccio. “Yeah, it adds up. It’s a lot of money.”

As a day laborer, DeNuccio is in a much more difficult position than many of the wealthier residents of the Palisades, where the average home listing runs for over $3.6 million. That number is down from last year, too. “They’re at their other homes they own,” he said. “I know some people, they’re in Tennessee, in Idaho or Montana at their ski lodges and stuff. You know, these people have other homes too. You know, my boss, he’s in France. He’s in Paris.” The Palisades’ 90272 zip code is one of the 30 most expensive in the entire country, and is the single costliest within Los Angeles’ city limits.

“People are basically starting over,” said DeNuccio. “Some people have insurance and have a lot of wealth because this is a wealthy neighborhood, so it’s not as hard on them. It’s hard on them, yeah, okay, ‘my personal things, pictures.’ You know, some things that can’t be replaced. But as far as you know, laying their head down at night, and having healthy food to eat, that’s important too.”

When asked if he lost anything sentimental in the fire, DeNuccio was quick to play it down. “No, just pictures,” he said. “Pictures of my dad. My dad, mom and stuff like that. Everything else could be replaced, you know.”

Having to navigate the fire’s aftermath with his dog in tow has also proven to be a challenge for DeNuccio. “That’s what makes it difficult,” he said. I could go in the wind by myself pretty easy, but when you have a pet – and he just had surgery.” He revealed a large scar on Calla’s back leg, where he says two tumors had recently been removed. 

DeNuccio has strong suggestions for relief efforts, and is deeply unhappy with how the federal and local government has acted in the wake of this disaster. “I’d like to see the federal government come in and set up temporary tents, you know, with commodes and the plastic showers ‘til people get on their feet,” he said. “At least they have somewhere to lay their head with a cot.”

He points the majority of the blame at one figure in particular: Karen Bass, current mayor of Los Angeles. “Karen Bass shorted the budget for the fire department with $7 million, $17 million, whatever it is, they’re bickering about that,” he said. “There’s no water in the [Santa Ynez] reservoir for over a year. Somebody’s ass needs to get reamed for that. This is unbelievable. That is just poor city management – that lays on the mayor, Karen Bass. She should be fired.”

As he reflects on how his life has been uprooted over the past two months, there’s a palpable air of apathy. He knows how dire his situation is, that his last place of temporary residency will be swept from under his feet in only days’ time, but he has become so accustomed to the grief that it almost feels routine.

“You know, you get mad, you feel angry, but the best medicine is laughter,” he said. “But that doesn’t help you with a place to stay.”

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into the 2025 California wildfires. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available here.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club.