Getty Fire off 405 Freeway has destroyed several homes
LOS ANGELES – The cantilevered palaces of Los Angeles’ elite were under siege. “Apocalypse bags” were packed. Lebron James fled with his family and couldn’t find a hotel room. News copters filmed the fire copters, as drivers on the 405 Freeway sailed through the fiery vortex and lived to Instagram it.
The Getty fire broke out along the freeway by Getty Center Drive after 1:30 am Monday and blew up to more than 600 acres under Santa Ana winds, destroying eight homes and damaging five in Los Angeles’ Brentwood section. Thousands of people were ordered to evacuate some of the priciest enclaves on Earth.
In a week of fires up and down the state, the Getty was not the biggest or most destructive. But fires that break out in the Sepulveda Pass and roar up to the rich and famous – the last one, two years ago, went to the other side of the 405 in Bel-air – have a way of becoming more than natural phenomenons. They become shared experiences that unfold in wall-to-wall TV coverage and dramatic social media images that speak to the city’s character and inherent dangers.
Chad Ebert, 43, evacuated his Brentwood home and watched the flames in the predawn dark.
Wood exploded, flaming debris lofted into the wind.
“It’s very surreal,” Ebert said “It’s like a scene out of a movie.”
Diana Rodriguez, a second-year business major at Mount Saint Mary’s University, just above the Getty Center, was studying for her Principles of Management class when the lights flickered out for about a minute at 1:30 a.m. Monday. Five minutes later, she smelled smoke.
Then, around 2:30 a.m., resident assistants banged on the door of Rodriguez’s dorm. The students needed to gather their things and evacuate.
Rodriguez grabbed her laptop, phone, camera and chargers, stuffed her backpack with snacks and water, and left her dorm in pajamas.
The sky was blood red: “Really, really red and orange – pretty, but a little freaky, too,” she recalled.
Ashes floated in the air. Her eyes stung from the smoke.
They put on masks and followed a road down the mountainside. Some students griped about having to evacuate; others were laughing “either because they didn’t know what was happening or as a coping mechanism,” Rodriguez said.
The students were picked up about halfway down the mountainside by ambulances, which took them to the school’s Doheny campus and an evacuation center in Westwood.
Winds were driving the flames south and west, deeper into Brentwood’s canyons, toward Pacific Palisades. The steepness of the canyons drew the flames up in monstrous lashes.
Rhonda Taylor woke around 3 a.m. to her phone ringing. Her throat was parched and her head hurt. She picked up an alert from L.A. County, telling her she needed to leave her Palisades home.
She already had what she calls her “apocalypse
bag” in the car, but grabbed extra toiletries, toothbrushes, clothes and water. She put her Pomeranian, Bu, in his carrier, swaddled a painting of her two children in pillowcases and loaded the car. As she drove to an evacuation center in Westwood, through smoke thick like a deep fog, Taylor cried, thinking of all the things she hadn’t had the time or the space in her car to gather up.
Taylor said she’s grown weary of the dread of fire, and worries that one day she will need to leave her home behind for good.
She wonders if it is worth living, as she puts it, “on the edge of fear.”
When a neighbor banged on the door of Robert Lempert’s Palisades home at 3:30 a.m., the Rand Corp. researcher woke to news of a fire burning near the Getty Center and several “panicked messages” from his mother-in-law, who lives in a neighborhood under evacuation. Lempert and his wife loaded up their cars with “go bags,” had his mother-in-law come to their house and waited for the order to evacuate. As of 10 a.m., Lempert said they were “still in wait-and-see mode.”
Lempert, an expert on climate risk management, said there is a growing awareness in his Westside neighborhood that these large-scale fires aren’t anomalous. He and his neighbors have taken steps to mitigate a fire’s ability to blow through their streets, chiefly by removing dry brush that can become kindling for firebrands, which he described as “a winddriven sea of matches.”
“The Getty blaze, and a smaller one in the Palisades last week, are vivid demonstrations of this ‘new normal,’ “Lempert said. “It’s one thing to look at the risk maps and show them to your family,” he said. “It’s another to get a knock on your door at 3 in the morning.”