‘Real life superheroes’: Exhausted Palisades disaster rescue volunteer is interrupted mid-break when a nearby house explodes

Lilly Bradshaw, a young woman helping the rescue efforts in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in Los Angeles, was filming an update to send to her friends when a house exploded next door.

The biggest of the five fire outbreaks in greater LA, the Palisades fire has burned through “19,978 acres and multiple homes,” per the Los Angeles Times, among which were those belonging to Hollywood’s biggest names, including Billy Crystal and Mel Gibson. Lilly, donning a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department volunteer jacket, was standing inside of one of the endangered properties, taking a break from her hard work helping firefighters, when a loud noise reverberated through the walls.

“We’re just trying to help [contain] embers,” she said in the beginning of a video posted Thursday to her TikTok account, where she is followed by more than 22 thousand people. “Every single house around us is either catching embers and getting on fire or it’s already burnt down,” she continued, providing a vivid, horrifying picture directly from the site of the natural disaster — the most destructive in the city’s history.

At that point, according to Lilly’s caption of the video, a house exploded nearby, which stoped her in her tracks, shocked and scared. The video ended with the young woman asking after someone named Billy and putting her gas/smoke mask back on, ready to go back outside.

In the comments, everyone thanked Lilly for her service, dubbing her a “real life superhero.” And if helping firefighting efforts wasn’t enough to make her one, then the fundraiser she set up specifically dedicated to students like herself affected by the fires surely does.

The link to the GoFundMe page can be found on Lilly’s TikTok profile. She has already raised over $15,000 (just $5,000 short of her $20,000 goal) to help students “who have lost everything,” including two of her close friends and their roommates. Lilly is currently a Law student at Malibu’s Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, the same university where she completed a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and Government in 2023, according to her LinkedIn page.

On Wednesday, Pepperdine University issued a statement on X confirming they were monitoring the situation, but that the Palisades/Malibu fire was “approximately 3.5 miles east of the … campus” and that it did not pose “an immediate threat.” Still, Lilly says 50 Pepperdine students “(and counting)” have lost their homes and possessions that she knows of. “Their clothes, their books, their toiletries, everything they have to their names. As college students, sometimes that’s all we have,” she expressed on the fundraiser page.

The university has also set up a relief fund for “students, faculty, staff, parents, and neighbors” with the aim of offering “temporary housing, transportation, and the replacement of essential items to those experiencing loss and displacement.” So far 289 people have contributed to it.

Lilly’s message seems to be getting across, as more than 20 million people have viewed her video already. At this time of writing, 5,316 structures, including homes and landmarks, have been destroyed in the Palisades fire, per USA Today with another 5,000 grounded in Eaton, Altadena and North Pasadena. The numbers could have been much higher if it weren’t for the resilience and bravery of people like Lilly.