Driving through dark smoke, residents and reporters tried to stay ahead of the fire.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.In a matter of seconds, everything went black. Then the flames flared from right outside the car window.
Turning down a side street through a neighbourhood, it was eerily quiet except for the popping. To the left, a home caught fire, massive orange flames dancing behind a white picket fence. One or two residents who had stayed behind stood watching it, paralysed. Pausing at a stop sign, a few cars tried to go left, into the smoke-shrouded orange glow. Flames danced from below, right by the high school. Deciding it was too dangerous, one turned around. Another home had just caught fire.
“We told them, ‘you need to go now’,” he yelled over the blare of engines. “When I say on top of them, I mean,” he paused, gesturing with his hands at how close the flames were to cars. They couldn’t get people down the hill fast enough, and the sudden, mass evacuation created a “bottleneck” in neighbourhoods where there were minimal options to flee. “It was an emergency, for their safety we had to get them out of the cars,” he said.At that point, it was 3pm in the afternoon.
“So you have two sides with people in the middle, and what are you going to do with them?” Adams said. In a situation like this, he went on, “You have to know the area, the little routes and backroads where people can go.” He picked one and sent cars that way.As he moved the new line of evacuees down to Pacific Coast Highway, Bryan Espin, a community lead officer in the Palisades who has been on the west side of Los Angeles for 18 years, agreed that the evacuation was “out of control”.
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