The lens of the Nest Cam faced the yard, pointing toward the infinity pool of the home cut into the rugged hillside of Pacific Palisades. Across the country, the couple who own the home watched in horror as the orange fireball grew, until the flames began licking the side of the pool, then jumped to the roofline.
They watched the destruction in real time as the shed caught fire. Firemen shuffled across. An alert let them know that their indoor sprinkler had turned on. Another alert came from a heat sensor at their front door. Then the feed went dead.
“I don’t have much more to say other than I’m completely devastated — the loss of our community,” said Kyle Owens, co-founder of the production company Morning Moon, speaking from the home in New York he shares with his wife, Zibby Owens, a publisher. They had returned to Manhattan days before the catastrophic fire, one that is being described as the most destructive in Los Angeles County’s history and which has already destroyed at least 12,000 structures.
One of the eerie realities of home technology, including Nest and Ring cameras, is that calamities are now being streamed live. Fires and mudslides, earthquakes and floods have been rocking the country with ever-growing frequency, and the ubiquity and cheapness of such technology means that you no longer need a state-of-the-art security system to monitor what is happening in your home. (A pair of Nest cams retails for $289 on Amazon).
For those affected by the fires, there has been a particular horror and voyeurism in seeing not just TV footage of a destroyed neighborhood, but a minute-by-minute destruction of their own homes — at least until the power runs out.
On TikTok, Spencer Pratt, a reality TV personality who first grew to fame on “The Hills,” posted images from the camera inside his nursery, showing how his son’s bed had burned in the shape of a heart. Owners of restaurants and other businesses obsessively refreshed the footage from their streaming cameras on laptops.
“Watching this live will haunt me forever,” wrote Mr. Pratt, who is married to Heidi Montag, also a star on “The Hills.”
“I know people are like, ‘You’re rich you will be fine,’” he continued. “Everything in our house was paid for by Heidi and I hustling any way we could. We are starting from zero now.”
On Instagram, the entrepreneur Marta Mae Freedman, 34, wrote: “Have AirTags ever made you cry?”
After she evacuated from the home she had rented in Malibu, she checked the Ring cameras at the property — they showed little more than emergency vehicles speeding by. It was the AirTags left in a bag of surfboards that provided the digital clues indicating the moment her home was consumed: The location refreshed twice, and then all she got was a spinning wheel, she said.
Back in the ashes was everything she owned, including items that once belonged to Ms. Freedman’s mother, who died over a decade ago. Before rushing out of the house, she had grabbed one book. She weeps reading the note her mother left tucked inside: “When you feel you need a little inspiration, pick it up and read a few pages — love, Mom.”
Across the city, in a mobile home park in Sylmar, Calif., Lisa Rubio, 65, recorded the approaching inferno on her home Ring camera, refreshing it until 3 a.m. on the night she evacuated alongside her husband and their siamese cat. The footage showed the winds buffeting the home and an enormous cloud of smoke. Fire is nothing new to these parts — the mobile-home park burned down in a fire nearly two decades ago and was rebuilt with fire-resistant materials, she said.
What is new, at least for her, is the Ring camera — she installed it a year ago. Even before she came back to pick up a few things and protect her house from potential looters, she believed from the footage that her home had been spared.
“It was better than watching the news,” she said, “because we could see our neighbor’s house and the house was not burning, which brought some relief.”
Sheelagh McNeill, Kirsten Noyes, Susan C. Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
