Spencer Pratt was photographed Sept. 16 at what remains of his Pacific Palisades home. He and wife Heidi Montag now tape their video podcast at the location. The "Heidiwood" spray-painted on the retaining wall promotes her recently released second studio album. Photographed by Mark Griffin Champion On a late summer morning in the Pacific Palisades, dozens of hummingbirds rise from the ashes of Spencer Pratt's scorched hillside property, where his 2,200-square-foot, three-bedroom home once perched. "This is how much I didn't believe my house was going to burn down on the day of the fire: Instead of packing up, I was changing my feeders, putting in fresh nectar," he says of the hovering flock, which he'd long tended before his hometown's historic destruction. At 42, the onetime reality television villain turned content creator and energy crystal purveyor is now in his unlikely third act - emerging as a zealous crusader against those he believes failed to protect the Palisades from the January wildfire that consumed it. The hummingbirds are one of the few subjects that, briefly, softens him. "They're just magical," he says. But for the most part, he radiates with unrelenting rage. Related Stories Business Joseph Gordon-Levitt Calls Out Gavin Newsom for Vetoing AI Regulation Bill: "Too Scared to Sign It" General News L.A. Mayor Responds to Rick Caruso's Criticism Over Palisades Fire Response: "He Is Sad and Bitter" Visits to what was once their home trigger contrasting emotions in Pratt and his wife, Heidi, who together found fame on MTV's hit 2000s reality drama The Hills. "She comes here and cries a lot," he says. "I come here and get really angry. To me, it's a power source. I'm just fuming right now - we should be sitting in our living room." He adds, "Everyone processes trauma differently. I've tried to channel all my emotional energy into accountability and just making it so clear that this was preventable." To Heidi, who shares her husband's frustrations but directs her own focus toward their resettled family life in the Santa Barbara area, his outspokenness in "standing against the machine" is "heroic and inspiring. He's going beyond himself. He's being such a good influence. He's being such a good example for his children." Those long familiar with Pratt's clownish agent-of-chaos persona both onscreen and on their social feeds may find his latest role disorienting. Now, finally, after two decades in the limelight, for once he gets to play the hero - up against an array of characters he's cast as his antagonists. The hummingbirds have returned due to Pratt's diligent commitment in the months since the fire: "For me, they're a symbol of survival. A hummingbird just does not stop." Pratt strongly relates. "I'm just not stopping." *** "This is the worst thing I could be doing with my life," he says of his advocacy. "I should be slinging my crystals." Photographed by Mark Griffin Champion More than anything, Pratt wants to make it clear that the Palisades Fire - the third most destructive in California's history, killing a dozen people and destroying more than 6,000 structures - wasn't a natural disaster: "This was no act of God. This was an act of idiocy. This was gross negligence." It's a common view among Angelenos, especially Palisadians, although few have advocated for answers in the tragedy's aftermath quite so fervently and relentlessly, or at least so publicly. Pratt, who along with Heidi and other property owners has sued the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power for its infrastructure failures, offers many grievances. Foremost among them is what he considers the fire-fatalist attitude of officials about properties, like his own, that border wildlands: "What's the point of paying taxes if you can't reliably protect us? You can't just blame climate change. It's negligence in preparing for it." He's also ticked off about the unwillingness of elected leaders to quickly hold bureaucrats responsible for their failures. "If this had been a private company," he says, "the board would've come in and [terminated] everybody." Pratt rails against the property insurance situation before the blaze and the foreign corporations snapping up parcels from distressed sellers who'd planned to pass them down to younger generations. He goes on at length about how a previous small Palisades blaze on Jan. 1 set by an arsonist was never properly extinguished, leading to the catastrophic inferno, and how firefighters weren't adequately prepositioned in the neighborhood to respond to it. "It's not like they didn't know the wind was coming," he says. (The LAFD's after-action report identified several significant management deficiencies.) That's not all. Pratt has much to say about FireAid, contending that its $100 million in raised funds have been, to his mind, largely squandered. (The relief organization denies this.) Oh, and don't get him started on the rules for private property fire protection - for everything from ro