Ring and Nest Cameras Capture Devastation of California’s Wildfires

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 fires that are being described as the most destructive in Los Angeles County’s history and which have 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, as reported by Curbed. 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.