The dirty brown smoke signaled trouble as it curled skyward near a popular hiking trail above Pacific Palisades on a breezy Tuesday morning in early January. A luxury real estate agent about to show a 7,square-foot mansion on West Sunset Boulevard wondered if a house up the hill had caught fire.
A resident near the top of the stepped bluffs between the Santa Monica Mountains and the Pacific Ocean glanced briefly at the plume, then resumed pulling in trash cans as a garbage truck rumbled past. A mother running errands in posh Palisades Village watched the fire morph from back-of-the-mind concerning to all-out frightening before she rushed home. Streets were gridlocked at least 40 minutes before the first widespread evacuation order. As flames approached, firefighters and police told motorists to get out and run.
The abandoned cars worsened the jam and prevented first responders from getting through. Residents trapped by blocked roads said they were forced to shelter in place. They wondered how — or if — they would escape. The challenge of evacuating thousands of residents was compounded by delayed alerts and overwhelmed first responders. Residents told The Times they felt as if they were left to fend for themselves.
But state leaders and fire officials assessing the evacuation that day said getting people out quickly was the primary focus. Los Angeles city and county emergency management departments would provide no details of how they coordinated evacuation orders, or why repeated requests for an evacuation order by fire commanders at the scene were not immediately heeded.
Twelve deaths have been tied to the Palisades fire. More than 5, homes were destroyed. What was remarkable, to both residents and seasoned fire veterans, was that the snarled evacuation in one of the worst wildfires in modern California history did not take a greater toll. This is the story of the first critical hours of that fire, when thousands of terrified residents had to decide whether and how to flee the inferno churning through hillsides and threatening their homes.
