Escaping the LA fires: Heart-pounding stories of fleeing the flames

LOS ANGELES - Alexia Palomino woke up with a start. She'd been having a nightmare her neighborhood was on fire and that smoke was closing in.

Heart pounding, she sat up in bed.

"Thirty seconds later we got the alert to evacuate," she said.

Earlier in the day, Palomino had left the Altadena home she shared with her mom for 15 years to watch the movie "Babygirl" and came home to warnings about possible evacuations.

Authorities had predicted extreme fire danger for the Los Angeles area due to high winds and warm temperatures, and now Palomino looked at the column of smoke from the Eaton Fire growing above her neighborhood.

"At that point, everyone knows fire is possible because we've had so little rain," she said. "We could see the header of it from our house and we were like 'should we look into evacuating?' Because it had never gotten that close to the houses before."

Deadly wind-driven wildfires have ripped across the Los Angeles area, forcing tens of thousands of people from their homes as flames set houses and hillsides ablaze. Thousands of firefighters are facing a desperate battle against the flames from multiple wildfires, including in Santa Monica and the Pacific Palisades areas. Ash continues to fall across the area, with schools canceled and officials vowing to protect as much as they can.

Palomino and her mother are among those whose houses burned down. Others, like Zen Buddhist priest and teacher Karen Maezen Miller are still facing uncertainty.

Miller, who’s been tending a 109-year-old Japanese garden in Sierra Madre for almost three decades, fled with her husband as flames danced in the rearview mirror. As they drove, they realized the power of the windstorm that had shaken the area for hours with 100 mph gusts, tossing debris everywhere.

"I didn't even want to look because it moved so fast. I just wanted my husband to drive, drive, drive," said Miller. "You're trying to flee a fire but you couldn’t drive on the road."

'All lessons are hard lessons'

Wednesday morning they awoke to the reality that they may be nomads for some time: They’ve heard no news of their home or their neighborhood and are fighting creeping dread that it will all be gone. But as a Zen teacher, Miller has spent decades contemplating the impermanence of life.

"All lessons are hard lessons," she said ruefully. "But of course there’s this thing called hope. It flares up like an ember."

Still in shock on Wednesday, Palomino tried to process her own early morning race to safety, bumping over debris in her Ford Bronco. All she thought to grab was her MacBook computer containing her still-being-written PhD thesis, a handful of family photos and whatever cash they'd stashed at home.

Palomino said she looked back at the white single-story Spanish-style house  as they left, fixing it in her memory. Just in case.

"I just wanted to make sure I'm going to see her one last time," she remembered thinking as she pulled out. "It was just jam-packed with cars everywhere. It was just to the point where you couldn't see and couldn't breathe."

Palomino fled to her brother's house, texting with a neighbor who is a firefighter for updates.

"He said that our neighbor's house was going up and the houses across the street were already gone, five houses in a row," said Paolomino, a PhD student. "At that point I knew it was just a matter of time."

Across the valley, Kelsey Trainor and her wife grabbed their go bag to evacuate but immediately got stuck among hundreds of cars gridlocked on Palisades Drive as the Palisade Fire exploded. There was only one way out and nowhere to go.

Trainor, an attorney, recalled seeing plumes of smoke rising from the Pacific Highlands and massive flames on each side of the road as they crept toward Sunset Boulevard. She watched people abandon their cars and flee towards the ocean as planes dropped water from above.

There was no cell service, so Trainor got out to check on friends who own Spruzzo’s Restaurant and Bar. They were taking in people who were having trouble breathing, offering them water and letting them to use the bathroom.

"It felt surreal, like a disaster movie in slow motion, with ash falling down around us, wind pelting the ash to your face," Trainor said.

The couple moved to California from the East Coast in 2023 and had never experienced anything quite like this before. Trainor said she has no idea if her house is still standing, but she’s "expecting the worst, to have no home to go back to."

“We feel hopeless and devastated,” Trainor said. “We are so happy to be safe and have a hotel to stay at for a few days. But we have no idea what is next or where to go."

'We need to get out now! The fire is coming!'

Elizabeth Kalmus and her family were eating dinner shortly after 7 p.m. Tuesday when they heard a car maniacally honking down their street in Pasadena. Running outside heard a voice screaming, "We need to get out! We need to get out now! The fire is coming!"

As strong winds whipped her face, Kalmus said she turned to her left and saw the Eaton Fire burning. Racing inside, she rounded up her wife, Sheryl, 39, and their two kids and three dogs, along with her elderly parents who live in the back.

A Type 1 diabetic, Kalmus said her heart was pounding as she stuffed her backpack with her meds, including insulin.

“We didn’t bring any phone chargers, and I left my work and personal laptops,” Kalmus recalled. “We quite literally walked out with clothes on our back.”

Just as they got to the Holiday Inn Express, Kalmus said they saw a transformer explode, temporarily knocking out power at the hotel as they and other arriving evacuees waited for their rooms.

She then got a call from a neighbor who stayed behind and told her “Embers are flying and I see that your roof has caught on fire.” Kalmus said she and her wife drove back to their home and saw firefighters trying to put out “candle-like flames coming through the attic,” before they had to leave again as other houses near theirs fared worse.

After a restless night, Kalmus returned midday Wednesday. She was met by her neighbor, Rich Snyder, a retired fire chief from neighboring Sierra Madre, who showed her the fire had destroyed her home.

"It's rubble," said Kalmus, adding that her insurance company has deemed the house a total loss. "But the in-law remained intact."

Kalmus said her family plans to rebuild. "At the end of the day, we're all OK," she said. "We're OK."

Palomino and her mom are still in shock. After their firefighter neighbor warned them many houses had been destroyed, her uncle and brother made their way to the neighborhood to report back: It's all gone.

Unlike some of their neighbors, Palomino said they have insurance and will likely be able to afford to rebuild. But she worried about how the losses will change the already-gentrifying neighborhood that was once one of the few places near L.A. welcoming to Black and Hispanic Americans in the 1960s. Today, those single-story homes often sell for more than $1 million, she said.

But she also worries what it means for her own family, and the loss of 15 years of memories etched into the house, along with heirloom textiles from Mexico and jewelry her grandmother gave her mom.

"Losing those memories, it's feeling like being violated. They could rebuild the house exactly as it was and it won't have the same sounds and the same smells," she said Wednesday from the safety of her brother's house. "You can't put that into blueprints and build it all over again. And that's the part that's lost when we lose our home."

'Worst fire I’ve seen in my life,

Malibu resident Dan O’Connor, 53, is one of the lucky ones: Wednesday morning he walked three miles down the Pacific Coast Highway to find his two-story house still standing.

O’Connor left work in Beverly Hills early Tuesday and did his best to keep the fire at bay, leaving around 1 a.m. His wife and children left hours earlier.

During the worst of the blaze, he said he was tearing ivy off a fence that was on fire, and flames were starting to hit trees on the property.

“It was gnarly,” he said. “These trees were exploding up here, and they hit that tree. I said, 'I got to go.'”

He said he used a hose on Tuesday night to spray trees with water and kept sprinklers on throughout the night.

"Oh boy, this is it! We did it," he shouted Wednesday, looking at his home with a grin, the hillside behind charred black.

Some evacuees with animals took shelter at the Rose Bowl.

Tim Olausen, 41, woke to the smell of smoke Wednesday morning. He roused his father, put his cat in a crate, the dog on a leash and put a halter on Nash, his horse.

His father drove the small animals, while Olausen and Nash walked roughly five miles to the Rose Bowl, a place he thought Nash would be safe.

"This is the worst fire I’ve seen in my life," he said. "I’ve seen some fires but I've never seen anything like this."

Contributing: Michelle Maltais, USA TODAY; Wes Woods II, USA TODAY-Network

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: LA fire escapes: Heart-pounding stories of families fleeing flames