While broadcasting from a staging area in Pacific Palisades Anderson Cooper was surpised when Jay Leno spotted him and came over to say hello. (Leno has been serving hot meals to firefighters battling the ongoing blazes, shuttling to diffferent locations in his 1941 American LaFrance fire truck.) “They’re all getting boxed lunches. We figured, ‘Let’s get some hot food,’” Leno told Cooper, offering the CNN crew meals as well.
When pressed to reflect on the situation as a longtime resident of Los Angeles, Leno tried to emphasize the level of destruction that the fires have wrought. “It’s unbelievable,” he said. “It’s ten thousand buildings. If you drove all day, you couldn’t see 10,000 buildings. You get on that hill and you look for miles, and there’s nothing. It looks like Hiroshima or just some horrible thing.”
“It’s an entire city wiped out. Pacific Palisades, it doesn’t exist, and probably won’t exist for the next five, six years,” Leno continued. “I don’t know how you rebuild from this. It’s $160 billion dollars. There’s no insurance company in the world that has that much money. The problems will be insurmountable.”
“But we’ll get through it,” Leno added. “We always do.”
Shifting his focus toward the silver lining, the comedian noted the newfound camaraderie and goodwill that has sprung up as a result of the devastation. “The sense of community—neighbors meeting neighbors they never met before, and people all pitching in,” he described. “I try to look at the bright side of things, you know?” Perhaps inspired by the longtime late-night host’s presence, Cooper couldn’t let Leno go without a quick zinger: “Nice to see someone else with some white hair,” he quipped as he and Leno parted. Watch the video here:
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