Last Wednesday, Gadi Schwartz headed to work early to cover the Los Angeles area fires. The winds were strong that morning and, in the community of Altadena, Schwartz saw what he described as absolute destruction.
While reporting on the Eaton fire, the NBC News NOW anchor and NBC News correspondent said it felt like he was in a fire hurricane.
“It was winds that were blowing so strong that the embers were flying sideways, we would lose visibility, the smoke was just choking,” he told Poynter. “The winds were terrifying, the howl of the winds, the howl of the flames. And then that fire, as it came down the mountain, was a little bit more selective. It felt like fingers that clawed down the land. And so you’d have pockets that were still standing, but the devastation was enormous.”
Schwartz estimated that he and P.J. Tobia, his senior field producer colleague, were about 10 or 15 or so blocks away from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Amid the roaring fires and howling winds, Schwartz heard a noise. The journalist peered around and caught a glimpse of a horse running behind a house.
“So we — my producer and I — we ran over and you could see there was a horse that was trapped,” Schwartz recalled. “And there was no one around.”
A tree nearby was fully ablaze. All around the horse, homes were catching on fire.
“The horse had nowhere to go,” the journalist said. “It was very clear that it had already been singed.”
Schwartz said he and the producer attempted to open a gate to get closer, but the fence burned to the touch. A few blocks down, they saw some firefighters, including Garrett Mora. Schwartz told Mora there was a horse that appeared trapped and looked as though it was already starting to burn.
Mora told Schwartz he was a horse guy; he owned horses. The journalist led the firefighter over a couple of fences to the horse’s location. Mora called in backup. The other firefighters arrived with bolt cutters.
“I feel like the universe put him in the perfect place. He somehow uses his knowledge of horses without a halter, to calm this panicked horse that was rearing,” Schwartz said. “I look at him, and I look at the horse, and he faces off with the horse. He puts his arms out in his yellow protective gear, and he settles the horse down. Kind of locks eyes with it, and then guides it without a halter into another corral.”
A video capturing part of the rescue was posted on NBC News’ TikTok page late last week. The caption mentioned Schwartz capturing the moment Mora hopped a fence to retrieve the stuck horse and safely secure it. The next moment, Mora is seen in the video securing the horse into a corral. Schwartz asks the firefighter if the horse will be OK there.
“Yeah,” Mora says in the video. “He’s surrounded by DG (decomposed granite), so he’s good in here. It’ll be safer if we keep him in here so he doesn’t run and get hit by an engine.”
The journalists watched as the firefighters began laying down protective lines. They also sprayed down the horse, the tree, and some of the homes that had begun to catch on fire.
“They saved the horse,” Schwartz said. “It was pretty remarkable to see.”
He and the producer weren’t able to stay there very long, but Schwartz said they reconnected with Mora later and he showed them photos of the horse, which they had later let out to graze on some grass. The horse was content, Mora told him, and its owners were able to get it out. But he described it as a pretty touch-and-go situation.
In his time as a journalist, Schwartz has lost count of the number of wildfires he has covered. He’s also reported on other natural disasters, too, like hurricanes and tsunamis. The worst disaster he’s seen was a super typhoon in Tacloban, Philippines. Schwartz said that disaster reminded him a lot of what’s happening in California — entire neighborhoods and cities laid to ruin.
Since the L.A. area fires broke out, the journalist has spoken with victims and those determined to rebuild. “It’s been overwhelming,” he said. “There’s so many different angles to this story that you want to stop and reflect on. And yet, the threat has not passed.”
Schwartz, who was born in Guatemala City and now lives in Los Angeles, said the fires made him reflect on not taking for granted what many usually take for granted — like the fact that he woke up Monday morning and was able to have breakfast with his family in their home.
“All those things are in the back of your mind, because you know that so many people right now don’t have that. There’s a sadness to everyday life right now, I think, for all Angelenos,” he said. “But at the same time, you try to make the most out of every moment because we’ve just been reminded that a disaster of a scale that we can’t even fathom can happen at any moment in this city.”
When he spoke with Poynter Monday, Schwartz was headed back to the Palisades. He’s been anchoring his NBC News NOW show from the field as he’s covered the fires across all of NBC News’ shows and platforms. On his way, he described to Poynter seeing dry brush everywhere along Interstate 405. The fear of what’s to come — with strong winds expected Monday night into Tuesday — was top of mind for everyone he knows.
“So often, especially in something like this, if you don’t see it with your own eyes, there’s something about human nature that wants to think of obvious solutions: ‘Well, why don’t they do this? Why don’t they do that? Where was the water? Where were the firefighters?’” Schwartz said. “And when you’re in the chaos of the situation, you fully appreciate the errors that were made, as well as the confusion that comes with something of this scale.
“And so for us to move forward, for us to be able to rebuild, and for us to learn from the mistakes of the past and from the changes that we’re seeing with these types of climate fuel disasters, we really have to be able to strip away all of this speculation from people that haven’t seen it, and dive into the first-handed facts that were witnessed by those that were there when it happened, or there right after it happened. And I think that’s where the conversation begins.”
As of Monday, the Los Angeles area fires had killed at least 25 people. According to The Los Angeles Times, to date, the still-active Eaton fire has burned more than 14,000 acres and many structures in both Altadena and Pasadena.
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