PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. – In a matter of seconds, everything went black. Then the flames flared from right outside the car window.
Fire trucks roared into view as this reporter and other cars braked and flipped around, driving through the wall of dark smoke on the wrong side of the road. Residents who were riding through on bikes skidded to a halt, trying to cover their eyes as the wind gusts drove the sharp smoke straight at them.
Turning down a side street through a neighbourhood, it was eerily quiet except for the popping. To the left, a home caught fire, massive orange flames dancing behind a white picket fence. One or two residents who had stayed behind stood watching it, paralyzed. Pausing at a stop sign, a few cars tried to go left, into the smoke-shrouded orange glow. Flames danced from below, right by the high school. Deciding it was too dangerous, one turned around. Another home had just caught fire. In the house next to it, a Christmas tree stood in an abandoned living room. All the lights were still on.
The Palisades Fire erupted in a way that residents here know fires can move, but are still never prepared for. The winds had arrived early on Tuesday, in what the National Weather Service called a “life-threatening and destructive” windstorm. Once the fire broke out, it quickly exploded. Everything, it seems, caught fire in a matter of minutes, outpacing the swarm of police and fire officials who raced to the scene. “It’s going to burn everything,” one sergeant sighed after hearing the news come across his radio that the fire was making its way to Palisades High School.
On Sunset Boulevard, the remnants of a chaotic, harrowing evacuation were littered everywhere: at least 50 cars crunched together, their mirrors and doors smashed after a massive red L.A. Fire Department dozer came through to make way for trucks. The fire moved so fast that police officers ordered the drivers to get out and run, ditching their vehicles because the “fire was literally right on top of them,” said officer Tim Estevez.
“We told them, ‘you need to go now,’” he yelled over the blare of engines. “When I say on top of them, I mean,” he paused, gesturing with his hands at how close the flames were to cars. They couldn’t get people down the hill fast enough, and the sudden, mass evacuation created a “bottleneck” in neighbourhoods where there were minimal options to flee.
“It was an emergency, for their safety we had to get them out of the cars,” he said.
At that point, it was 3 p.m. in the afternoon. Estevez and a cluster of police officers stood at the corner of Sunset and Palisades Drive, where residents who lived in hillside neighbourhoods farther up the road were trapped earlier and were told to shelter in place for hours due to how fast the fire moved around them. They were finally able to leave, navigating their cars around another collection of smashed vehicles that made it nearly impossible to evacuate.
“There was no communication,” an officer said to the group, detailing the madness of trying to funnel the hundreds of cars into the narrow winding streets. Fast mass evacuations in densely populated neighbourhoods with basically one way in and out can be deadly during a disaster. This is what happened in Lahaina, during the Maui wildfires. On social media, residents reported getting stuck in their cars and unable to move.
The problem, Sergeant Rich Adams explained, was that the “fire was burning so bad” that firefighters told police that they couldn’t send people one way. But on the other side, “the fire was burning just as bad.”
“So you have two sides with people in the middle, and what are you going to do with them?” Adams said. In a situation like this, he went on, “You have to know the area, the little routes and backroads where people can go.” He picked one and sent cars that way.
“Someone has to take lead to do that and nobody was,” he said.
As he moved the new line of evacuees down to Pacific Coast Highway, Bryan Espin, a community lead officer in the Palisades who has been on the west side of Los Angeles for 18 years, agreed that the evacuation was “out of control.” Officers were trying to get as many people out as they could, but people up the road were also trying to leave, quickly filling up the two-lane road, and then tried to head in the direction of where the fire was also going, he said. It’s a very difficult situation to plan for and to see, he said, though they had been trying.
“It’s all dictated by the event itself,” he said. “This, and this being the only road up, it’s always dangerous.”
Another key factor as to why this fire became so horrific so fast: This area has not burned in a while. And over New Year’s Eve, Espin said, there was a small fire “at the very top of the Palisades Highlands probably from fireworks or something.”
“Maybe this is kind of where this started from?” he guessed. “Who knows. Any wind-driven fire like this, there’s very little you can do to slow it down.”
Both officers said this was the worst fire experience they’d ever seen in more than 20 years on the job.
As night fell, the fire reached the ocean, its flames crawling up palm trees like Christmas lights. The smoke became thicker and sharper as dozens of fire trucks poured into the parking lot of Will Rogers State Beach, right by the Getty Villa, as the grounds around the iconic museum went up in flames. On their radios, dispatch after dispatch crackled in about one address or another that was in need of structure defence, planning how they might be able to get a handle on it overnight, if the winds allowed. “Our priority is life safety and structure defence,” said one voice.
And then a man walking a bicycle appeared between the rows of flashing red trucks and police cars. He was hysterical. He’d left his dogs at home. “I need my dogs they’re my family,” he wailed. He needed to get to them. Hearing the news that the fire was close to his street, he tried to get back from his job in the city, but the roads were closed. So he rented a bike, trying to sprint there. He gasped to a firefighter who was taking notes, repeating his address over and over. His home was by the Vons, near the high school, where the fire had just erupted.
“Can you get them?” he sobbed. “Can you go there?”
“We will try,” the officer replied.