Los Angeles wildfires: An evacuation disaster was years in the making in the Palisades

LOS ANGELES – Flames were roaring near the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood of Los Angeles when Mrs Marcia Horowitz and her husband rushed to their car, hoping for a quick escape eastward out of the fire zone.

But a police officer along the route directed them to head west along Sunset Boulevard, where the couple found themselves stuck in gridlock. The road was so clogged with panicked residents that traffic was barely moving, Mrs Horowitz said, and an emergency responder told everyone to abandon their vehicles and flee towards the beach on foot.

“Nobody would’ve gotten out of their car if they hadn’t been told, ‘You’ve got to get out, now,’” said Mrs Horowitz, 79, who fled without even her purse when the official warned people not to spend time gathering their belongings.

The abandoned cars near Pacific Palisades – many dented and broken when a bulldozer had to plow through them to make way for emergency crews – became a symbol of Los Angeles’ desperate attempt to mobilise against what is shaping up to be the most destructive fire in its history.

The chaotic scene was one that was years in the making. As in other areas of the towering, fire-prone hillside neighbourhoods that ring the Los Angeles basin, Pacific Palisades residents had long pleaded for more attention to preparing for the fires that are striking the region with ever-greater frequency and ferocity.

As recently as 2019, two fires that burned near parts of Pacific Palisades had shown the challenges of moving thousands of people through the area’s few escape routes.

Those fires, in October 2019, threatened homes in the area and led to traffic jams as people moved to evacuate.

The Palisades, rising on bluffs and foothills over the Pacific Ocean near the elite communities of Malibu and Santa Monica, has long been an enclave for those looking to escape the urban bustle of Los Angeles. Roads that snake up winding canyons provide residents with privacy, panoramic sunset views and access to hiking trails through the Santa Monica Mountains.

But the steep topography and the rugged landscape carry a risk: Wildfires are a constant threat.

Over the past decade, residents have held meetings and sent e-mails urging local officials to recognise the potential for problems with evacuation and do more to avoid the risk of future disaster.

In a 2020 message to Los Angeles City Council members, Palisades community leaders said that there remained “substantial risks to public safety due to crowded conditions causing backups on both substandard and standard streets during required evacuations”.

With the tinder-dry conditions in 2025 and forecasts for powerful Santa Ana winds, the Pacific Palisades Community Council had already been scheduled to meet on Jan 9, with plans to discuss fire safety and a citywide effort for Los Angeles to develop its first Community Wildfire Protection Plan – something many US communities facing wildfire risks have already done to help identify risks, explain mitigation strategies and plan for disasters.

Ms Haldis Toppel, a Palisades resident who was involved in past community meetings about wildfires, said Fire Department representatives had seemed complacent when asked about the need to make more detailed fire response plans.

At one meeting, she said, residents pressed the Fire Department to outline evacuation plans for various scenarios, only to be told that specific evacuation routes would have to be determined at the time of a fire, depending on the conditions.

Minutes from a 2016 meeting between Fire Department managers and the Community Council show that a department official described just such a plan – establishing evacuation routes based on fire conditions.

“To me, that always sounded more of a wishful scenario than reality,” Ms Toppel said.

Captain Erik Scott, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department, said he was not immediately able to review the history of evacuation planning in the area. He said the department encourages people who live in smaller neighbourhoods with fewer exit paths to be prepared to flee by foot, if necessary.

“People need to think about acting outside the box and evacuating on foot, especially if you’re in a hillside community with narrow streets that tend to get clogged and turned into a choke point,” he said.

Referring to the gridlock that stymied evacuation efforts on Jan 7, he said that emergency officials do not advise people to abandon their cars on the road unless they are in imminent danger because it can lead to precisely what happened – blocked evacuation routes.

He said he did not know what person or agency had instructed people to flee their cars on Sunset Boulevard.

Ms Traci Park, who has represented Pacific Palisades on the Los Angeles City Council since 2022, said that residents were right to want a standard, defined evacuation route but that she also understood it was important for fire officials to have discretion about how to evacuate people during a blaze.

She said there were unique factors that had caused the current fire to be so devastating, including high winds that spread the flames and kept emergency responders from using aerial equipment to beat back the fire.

Still, she said, there had been a “chronic underinvestment” in essential infrastructure, including water systems, the electrical grid and resources for firefighting and other emergency response.

“What happened in the last 24 hours was not unforeseeable,” she said. “It was just a matter of time.”

Ms Toppel was one of those who had to evacuate their houses on Jan 7, taking her dog and a few belongings, and she headed for Sunset Boulevard, hoping to head inland to areas farther from the smoke and fire. But like Mrs Horowitz, she encountered law enforcement officers who were directing traffic west, towards the beach.

Ms Toppel said it had taken her about 90 minutes to travel about a mile down the hill, with smoke billowing through the packed traffic.

She was lucky, though, and was eventually able to drive her car past the abandoned vehicles that had been cleared by a bulldozer.

Several people who remained in Pacific Palisades were hospitalised with serious injuries, officials said, and at least eight firefighters battling the Palisades fire have also been injured, including one who suffered a serious head injury on the night of Jan 7.

The Palisades fire, one of five major blazes burning around Los Angeles, was first reported around 10.30am local time on Jan 7.

About 45 minutes after the first report, officials issued a warning for much of the Pacific Palisades area, encouraging people to prepare for possible evacuations. A little before noon, officials ordered an evacuation for a small area to the west, and they then expanded it at 12.07pm to include much of the Palisades.

By then, the fire was churning out of control.

Law professor Kathy Trisolini, who lives in Pacific Palisades, said that she had left shortly before the mandatory evacuation was issued, in part because she recalled traffic jams during one of the 2019 fires.

During that fire, she said, one neighbour sat for hours in traffic. The community was spared that time, and everyone returned to intact homes.

This week was different. Flames scorched Prof Trisolini’s neighbourhood near Palisades Village, and she texted her neighbours after she had evacuated, badgering them to leave, too. One man resisted but finally agreed to leave, she said.

Less than an hour later, she saw a video of her neighbour’s home burning down. Then, on the news, she saw her own home at least partially on fire.

Mrs Horowitz said she had first learnt that the fire was approaching her neighbourhood when her son called her on Jan 7 as she was returning home from a medical appointment. Driving up Sunset Boulevard, she looked out the window and saw flames in the distance.

When she arrived on her street, so many cars were coming and going that she had to pull over and jog up to the house. She got inside and told her husband that they had to flee. Her husband, Mr Edward Horowitz, had not realised the extent of the danger, she said.

When a neighbour had come to check on him, he had responded that he was fine, took a shower and told his wife he needed to shave.

It was clear to her that there was not time.

“I just said, ‘We’ve got to go, and we’ve got to go now,’” Mrs Horowitz recalled. “When you see the flames, you know it’s close.”

She said she was still not sure what had become of her home. She saw a picture online that showed a neighbour watering down one side of the house with a tree on fire nearby.

“I maybe have half a house,” she said.

Now, in the safety of a hotel, she cannot forget the long minutes spent trying to escape.

“It’s terrifying,” she said. “Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not. It’s the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced.” NYTIMES