In the past few months, Jon Oei’s parents, who live in the highlands of the Pacific Palisades, have received multiple wildfire evacuation orders, the most recent in the early hours of New Year’s Eve, he said.
So on Tuesday, when a wildfire began not far from the family’s home, they did not immediately evacuate.
By 10:30 am however, they could see “smoke coming over the top of the hill,” the 35-year-old said. The fire, ignited as a ferocious windstorm whipped the region, was rapidly growing.
Oei was staying with his parents, and he knew the one main road going out of their neighborhood would be snarled with traffic following the first evacuation order. Soon, videos showed long traffic jams as residents tried to evacuate, empty cars lining some roads as people gave up the wait and continued on foot.
“I think a lot of people ignore the first call,” he said. “You get stuck. There you see people abandoning their cars.”
Meanwhile, the wind was also pushing the fire in the opposite direction from his parents’ home, Oei said. So they waited.
It was not until after 5pm, he said, that they finally decided to flee. The family could see the fire coming over the Malibu side of the hills, which meant that the single road out of the community risked being cut off by fire.
A building burns during the Palisades Fire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of west Los Angeles, California, 7 January, 2025. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters
“The decision most people made: how long can I stay before I can’t really drive the one road out any more?” Oei said. “By the time my family did it, it was close to the end.”
Many other neighbors had left by that point, he said, but he recalled “six or seven” other cars leaving at the same time.
By the time they drove down towards the ocean, there was not much traffic on Palisades drive. But it was dark, and the power was out across the area. “There were no lights, and everything was on fire,” Oei said. During parts of the drive, the land on both sides of the road was ablaze.
The family made it safely to Oei’s apartment in Santa Monica,, he said.
Many residents of the Pacific Palisades, an affluent community in the north of Los Angeles, told similar stories. The natural beauty the seaside enclave is known for – tucked between pristine Pacific beaches and the green hills of the Santa Monica mountain range – is also what makes it susceptible to rapidly spreading wildfires. And what makes it tricky to evacuate.
Nearby Malibu witnessed similar scenes in December, when the so-called Franklin fire forced thousands to evacuate there.
Pacific Palisades resident Kelsey Trainor told the Associated Press the only road in and out of her neighborhood was completely blocked. Ash fell all around them while fires burned on both sides of the road.
“We looked across and the fire had jumped from one side of the road to the other side of the road,” Trainor said. “People were getting out of the cars with their dogs and babies and bags, they were crying and screaming. The road was just blocked, like full-on blocked for an hour.”
Longtime Palisades resident Will Adams told the news service embers flew into his wife’s car as she tried to evacuate. “She vacated her car and left it running,” Adams said. She and many other residents walked down toward the ocean until it was safe.
He watched as the sky turned brown and then black as homes started burning. He could hear loud popping and bangs “like small explosions,” which he said he believes were the transformers exploding.
“It is crazy, it’s everywhere, in all the nooks and crannies of the Palisades. One home’s safe, the other one’s up in flames,” Adams said.
Oei said that while some people might find his family’s experience deeply shocking, he has found repeated exposure to wildfires makes people who live in the area accustomed to responding. His parents have lived in their home for more than three decades.
“We were largely prepared to evacuate,” he said. If he hadn’t been staying with them, his parents, who are in their late 60s and early 70s, “probably would have waited a lot longer to leave.”
“I’d be very surprised if people in the area didn’t have go bags already set up,” he said. “This has happened. We’re used to it.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
