A little after midnight on New Year’s Day, Francine Sohn was jolted awake by a phone call from a neighbor, who sounded hysterical. “There’s a fire on the hill,” the neighbor told her.
Sohn, 72, looked outside and saw a small brush fire perilously close to her Pacific Palisades neighborhood in western Los Angeles. She watched firefighters douse the flames, waiting to see if she should flee. But there was no need: the wind was a brisk but manageable 15 mph, and the fire was contained before dawn with no homes damaged and no one hurt.
A week later, the same thing happened: another small fire spotted in the same area. But this one turned into a monster.
The Palisades Fire, now one of the most destructive natural disasters in Los Angeles history, began in the backyard of Palisades Highlands, a secluded and well-to-do community overlooking the coast between Malibu and Santa Monica. Residents and hikers first saw it as a modest brush fire looming in the parched scrubland.
But whipped by winds that hit 60 mph, the flames rapidly rolled over the mountainside and roared through neighborhoods, growing to more than 20,000 acres and consuming more than 5,000 structures. It is now one of six wildfires burning simultaneously in Los Angeles County that have forced 180,000 people from their homes and left at least 11 dead.
NBC News spoke to nearly a dozen people who witnessed the Palisades Fire’s early stages on the morning of Jan. 7 and watched it grow and move faster than any they had ever seen, leaving a path of ruin they did not think possible — even in a place where wildfires are a part of life.
Sohn was already on edge that morning after seeing authorities’ warnings that dry winter winds were forecast across drought-parched Los Angeles, raising the risk of wildfires.
Then, as she set out from her home on Piedra Morada Drive for a 10:30 a.m. art class at the local recreation center, a neighbor shouted at her from across the street. She looked behind his house and saw fire in the brush less than a mile off. The neighbor’s family had already called 911.
Sohn didn’t wait for anyone to tell her to evacuate.
“I ran in the house, woke up my friend, threw my dog in the car along with as many photo albums I could carry,” she said, “and hightailed it out of there.”
Up in the brush at about the same time, Beni Oren was on a trail run with friends near Skull Rock, a local landmark, when they smelled smoke. They turned and confronted flames about 100 feet away, Oren, 24, said.
Courtesy Beni Oren
They ran in a panic, changing directions as they realized the wind was blowing the fire their way. A widening plume of smoke rose above the canyon as they got to safety. “It was a bizarre experience realizing like, f—, is all this about to be on fire?” Oren said.
Firefighters soon raced in, sirens blaring. On radios, they described it as a 10-acre brush fire on a ridgeline, and they planned to deploy aircraft to soak the rising flames. It was just after 10:30 a.m. The danger was already clear.
“It is 100% in alignment with the wind. It has the potential for 200-plus acres in the next 20 minutes,” one person reported over the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s radio, according to a recording. “We have a potential for structures being threatened in the next 20 minutes.”
Someone responded: “It is pushing directly towards Palisades.” A few seconds later, he added: “This thing is going to make a good run.”
Alarmed residents of the Palisades Highlands, watching the growing fire from their backyards and decks, were coming to the same conclusion.
Stephanie Libonati was at home with her mother and brother on Piedra Morada Drive when she saw flames and smoke about three-quarters of a mile away and screamed, “Fire!” Her mother called 911, then Libonati and her brother ran outside to alert neighbors. They began packing up their photographs, passports and other valuables and made a plan: leave in three separate cars, meet up outside of town, then continue to her grandfather’s ranch in Santa Clarita.
By the time they headed out, the fire looked twice as big, Libonati, 26, said. Firefighters had arrived as well, telling her brother to stop soaking their back deck and get out of there.
“It sounded like a fire pit,” she said. “You could hear fire crackling and everything burning. And the smell was awful, ash blowing in our faces. It was just so fast. You kept seeing it spread and spread.”
Once they started driving, the family immediately got separated, their paths interrupted by flames and traffic and panic. As she drove through Palisades Village, a shopping district at the bottom of the hill, Libonati saw people on the side of the road filming the inferno above. “No one would ever expect the fire to come down to the village,” she said. “It never has.”
They eventually met up, hugged, and continued to the ranch.
The exodus continued, turning from a trickle into a mad rush. Palisades Drive, the single main road leading directly down the hill to Sunset Boulevard, was jammed with cars. Some tried Fire Road, an alternate evacuation route during emergencies, but before long that passage was surrounded by flames, residents said. Sunset slowed to a standstill.
Many panicked drivers abandoned their cars in the road and took off on foot, forcing emergency crews to bulldoze the vehicles aside so that fire trucks could get through. Firefighters told residents in some parts of the neighborhood to stay put temporarily because there wasn’t initially an imminent danger and there was no easy way out.
The winds kicked up, engorging the flames and pushing embers into the air and down farther away, where they ignited new hot spots. The fire consumed the mountainside and swept through the Highlands, the village and the rest of the Pacific Palisades, then west along the coast to Malibu.
Colin Fields and Vanita Borwankar, who live off Palisades Drive, set off in their car after receiving a text alert about potential evacuations. By the time they left their condo at 11 a.m., the fire was moving downhill, but the gridlock forced them to turn around. They headed back up the hill to Fields’ parents’ home at the edge of the canyon, where Fields and his brother sprayed hoses at encroaching flames and flagged flare-ups to firefighters.
Fields, 34, who grew up in the area, said he always felt that it was a matter of time before a big fire hit. “But nothing like this. This was literally a disaster movie,” he said.
Some residents were torn over whether to evacuate, staying as long as they could dousing homes with garden hoses and buckets of water drawn from swimming pools while aircraft dropped retardants on the mountainside.
Around 5:30 p.m., a fire truck escorted Fields and Borwankar, along with others in a parade of cars behind them, down Palisades Drive to Sunset Boulevard, on their way to safety. Fires burned uncontrollably on both sides of the streets. “The heat,” Borwankar said, “it felt like a furnace.”
Some stayed in their homes even later — and then were forced to flee when the fire got too close.
It was midnight when firefighters ordered Suha Tabsh, an anesthesiologist, and her elderly mother to leave their home on Calle Victoria, helping them navigate around an engine truck based in the driveway. “There were embers like tennis balls falling on our car,” Tabsh, 75, said.
“Everything was burning around us,” she said of the drive out of the neighborhood. “Everyone was praying.”
Many houses in Palisades Highlands burned to the ground. But others remained standing after the fire’s initial assault, in what seemed like random luck: one side of a street obliterated, the other still standing. The residents of Piedra Morada Drive, including the Libonatis and Sohn, said their homes had so far survived, even though they had been some of the closest to the fire at the start.
The cause of the Palisades Fire remains under investigation, Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley said at a news conference Thursday. The fire department did not respond to NBC News’ questions about the department’s response and preparations, or about whether the Jan. 1 canyon fire was connected, beyond Crowley telling reporters that the local fire stations were fully staffed and personnel were pre-deployed in the Palisades area because of the threat posed by the high winds.
The full devastation of the fire is still coming into focus, but some residents are already saying it could have been worse.
“I will tell you the lucky thing,” said Don Griffin, 78, a resident of the Palisades Highlands for a dozen years. “If this had happened at 3 or 4 in the morning and no one noticed it, we might have had a lot more fatalities.”
Courtesy Don Griffin
Sohn, who is sheltering at a hotel, said neighbors have been exchanging news on whose homes were lost and whose are intact. She said she is amazed that her home has not burned. But that gives her little comfort, given the wreckage of her community.
She recently delivered the news to a friend that their house was gone.
“It’s a heartbreak,” she said.