Monument Street, which cuts through the center of Pacific Palisades, tells two starkly different stories of the fire that has engulfed the community. On one side, lots where multimillion-dollar houses once stood are now ash and rubble. On the other, an outdoor shopping mall whose tenants include Chanel, men’s clothier Buck Mason and an upscale sushi restaurant, is largely intact.

The 1950s standard “This Could Be the Start of Something Big” could be heard Friday playing over speakers around the mall, known as Palisades Village, even though the stores were closed. Large water trucks stood sentry, ready for action should the fire again threaten the rows of businesses.

During the height of the fires, Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, Rick Caruso, the billionaire developer who owns Palisades Village, was conferring with his security staff as they deployed several private firefighters from Arizona to save the shopping center (and who, Caruso said, tried unsuccessfully to save nearby homes as well).

Early Wednesday, after fire hydrants in the area went dry or lost pressure, Caruso called in private water trucks to assist.

“Our property is standing,” Caruso, who ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 2022 and lost to Karen Bass, said in an interview Wednesday. “Everything around us is gone. It is like a war zone.”

Across Los Angeles County, the fires have destroyed more than 12,000 structures. In the most devastated communities, the structures that survived, like Palisades Village, make a jarring juxtaposition with the ruins only a few steps away.

As the fires continue to burn, officials and many of the millions of people who live in Los Angeles are expressing anger, shock and frustration over how the fires, unprecedented as they were, overwhelmed emergency responders.

A central question is whether the city and county fire departments could have enlisted additional firefighters more quickly and whether such a faster mobilization would have kept the fires from spreading so rapidly.

But some property owners did not rely on the public agencies, turning instead to private firefighters like those who helped save Caruso’s property and who have become a coveted resource in some of Southern California’s most wealthy — and most fire-threatened — communities.

Nestled in canyons between its better-known neighbors, Malibu and Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades had many of the charms of a small town, yet its seven-and eight-figure mansions counted Hollywood stars and moguls among their residents.

The extent of the role private firefighters played in protecting certain businesses and homes in the Palisades is still emerging. But during drives around the community since the fire struck, their presence has been evident — and not just at Caruso’s Palisades Village, which opened in 2018.

The shopping space, with about three dozen businesses, was designed to feel like a quaint, walkable town center, in a region where most of the landscape has been dominated by automobiles and freeways.

As fire trucks from local and state agencies were putting out spot fires in the Palisades on Friday, teams of private firefighters riding in white pickup trucks were on the scene as well, keeping watch on individual homes.

Outside one mansion in a Palisades neighborhood with little or no fire damage, two men — who declined to provide their names — said they often contract with city governments, but this afternoon were protecting a single house. They said they did not know who the owner was, only that their company, National Wildfire Protection Service, had dispatched them there.

The business of private firefighting burst into public view in 2018, after TMZ reported that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West had hired private firefighters to protect their mansion in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Hidden Hills from the Woolsey fire that year.

Online, some people criticized the couple, saying they were using their vast wealth to undermine what should be a public service, although Kardashian said at the time that her private firefighting crew had also saved neighbors’ homes from damage.

On Tuesday night, as flames consumed much of the Palisades, Keith Wasserman, a co-founder of a real estate investment firm, faced similar blowback after he took to the social platform X with a desperate post.

“Does anyone have access to private firefighters to protect our home?” he wrote. “Need to act fast here. All neighbors houses burning. Will pay any amount.”

A two-person private firefighting crew with a small vehicle can cost $3,000 a day, while a larger crew of 20 firefighters in four fire trucks can run to $10,000 a day, according to Bryan Wheelock, vice president of Grayback Forestry, a private firefighting company in Oregon. Hiring them is not as easy as putting out a post on social media: Most won’t work directly with homeowners.

About 45% of all firefighters working in the United States today are employed privately, according to Deborah Miley, executive director of the National Wildfire Suppression Association, which represents more than 300 private firefighting groups. The majority of them work as government contractors fighting wildfires, she said, supplementing local firefighting teams when needed.

Others are hired by insurance companies that are trying to head off major losses. AIG, Chubb and USAA are among the insurers offering homeowners’ insurance policies that include wildfire protection.

Often, the work of private firefighting teams is done before a wildfire reaches a property, in a practice known as fire hardening. It entails clearing vegetation, spraying flame retardant and sealing vents with fireproof tape in the days and hours before the flames arrive.

“We make the property survivable, so the fire can pass over it,” said David Torgerson, founder of Wildfire Defense Systems, a company based in Montana.

Demand for private firefighting has been rising as wildfires have grown in ferocity and frequency over the past several decades, a trend that Miley, Wheelock and Torgerson all confirmed. But so has the public backlash — so much so that in 2018 California passed a law to regulate the industry.

The law requires contract firefighters to coordinate with public fire agencies’ incident commanders during wildfires. It prohibits them from driving vehicles bearing insignia suggesting that they are public emergency personnel, and from using emergency lights or sirens. Since the law was enacted, many private companies have stopped offering their services directly to homeowners in the state.

Mt. Adams Wildfire, a private firefighting group based in Northern California, is one of those that backed out of that market. Don Holter, one of the company’s owners, said it had become too difficult to work directly with homeowners.

“You have to deal with the government entities that show up, and it’s more hassle than anything,” he said. The company now works only through government contracts.

Access to water — in particular, whether private firefighters should be able to tap public hydrants during a wildfire — is another consideration, and has been a recurrent concern among critics of private firefighting. In the early hours of the Los Angeles fires, many hydrants ran dry at a time of intense demand for water from city and county firefighters.

Private crews often ride in trucks that also carry a few hundred gallons of water, Wheelock said. Wiley said her teams, when working in remote locations, will draw water from nearby ponds and lakes. In more developed areas, Holter said, his teams have often drained residents’ swimming pools for water and then turned to fire hydrants to replenish their supplies.

Another critic of private firefighters coming into a big-city fire is the leader of California’s largest fire service organization.

“When we see groups like this come in, we don’t consider them an asset — we consider them a liability,” said Brian Rice, president of California Professional Firefighters, which represents 35,000 firefighters.

Most private firefighting groups, he said, are trained to work in deep forest, but “the firefight that’s going on in Los Angeles right now is an urban firefight,” he said. “We are going neighborhood to neighborhood.”

“The private contract companies are not trained or equipped to operate in this environment,” he added.

That does not appear to be diminishing the demand for them.

As an inferno raced through Runyon Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, Adam Leber, a Hollywood talent manager who represents Miley Cyrus, called on private fighters to save his house, he told the San Francisco Chronicle.

“My family are unbelievably lucky to be in the position we’re in, given what everyone else is going through,” he told the newspaper, adding, “I was 100% certain our house was done. Thanks to these guys, they were able to hold it off long enough so the department could come in.”

Leber did not respond immediately Sunday to a request for comment.

Bruce Bromberg, whose Blue Ribbon Sushi chain has a restaurant in Palisades Village, was in Las Vegas when the fires neared the shopping center and was watching feeds from the restaurant’s security cameras. When he saw flames starting on the restaurant’s patio Wednesday morning, he called Caruso’s team, who told him they were “doing everything they can.”

The fire was quickly extinguished, he said, by one of the drivers of the water trucks Caruso had hired.

Bromberg said he had been reading criticism of Caruso’s use of private firefighters and said it was unfair.

“Rick built the place for the community and protected it for the community,” he said. “He saved these businesses. And if those hydrants were filled with water, he would have saved whatever he could have saved.”

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