B+W Engineering has been focused mainly on taking on residential hillside grading and drainage projects for the last 5 years or so which has been close to my heart because of the amazing landscape Los Angeles has to offer. I remember an Architect telling me to stop taking on the most complicated hillside projects, which ended up fueling my interest in taking them on for the majority of our work. We take great pride in being involved in changing the LA landscape to get the Architect’s and other consultants vision onto the land. As we started to really get the flow down 15+ years in, we get the heavy winds resulting in massive fires that caused complete chaos.
Thankfully we evacuated in time, but the Altadena house is gone. Looking through previous projects over the last 10+ years, the majority of the houses we worked on, are gone in Pacific Palisades. This has been a real punch to the face. There was one house almost finished with construction, gone, which is still hard to believe looking at the now updated Google satellite images. My mind is still in a haze reading through the stories and seeing pictures. Eventually I had to stop looking at the pictures as its so sad to see the destruction.
We are still here and preparing for whatever potential construction boom happens for the rebuilds in both Altadena and Pacific Palisades, personally my favorite two cities in Los Angeles. This is as close to my heart as possible to be a part of this. Our prices will stay inline with what we were already doing, as I know no matter what, everyone who lost a house got destroyed financially and mentally. $1 or $100mil net worth, its brutal what just happened.
It sounds silly but I saw a brief clip that Leonardo DiCaprio lost a Pagani. Anyone who has talked to me on driveway design knows we try to do our best to accommodate low exotic cars for clearance. That beautiful house in Manhattan Beach designed around a low Porsche that can’t get an aftermarket height adjustment kit always cheers me up. Anything car related sticks out to me, especially my favorite car brand, Pagani, as these are like limited works of art. Expensive rare cars or family pictures, its very similar. A memory is now gone from existence. I happened to lose my now classic Honda s2000 I was trying to keep for my kids to have once they can drive. Its all the same to me, and really our only option as a business and for personal to heal is to do whatever we can for the rebuild.
My story is pretty terrifying as I will never forget the house filling with ash, the evac notice and the street turning so black I couldn’t see our car with a flashlight. With whatever is to come I will start posting again to our blog giving thoughts about all the random stuff we encounter like I used to do. A couple quick shout outs to Stephen, Bo, and Barbara as not many others know what happened. Thank you everyone for being so kind. If anyone comes across our blog looking for Architects or Engineers in the affected cities please give us a call, we also work with great people that will send you in the right direction.