Just after midnight on New Year’s Day, Francine Sohn was awakened by a phone call from a neighbor who sounded hysterical. “There’s a fire on the hill,” the neighbor told her.
Sohn, 72, looked outside and saw a small brush fire dangerously close to her Pacific Palisades neighborhood in west Los Angeles. She watched as firefighters doused the flames, waiting to see if she should flee. But that wasn’t necessary: the wind was a brisk but manageable 15 mph, and the fire was under control before dawn, with no homes damaged and no one injured.
A week later the same thing happened: another small fire was noticed in the same area. But this one turned into a monster.
Francine Sohn at her home with the canyon behind her.
The Palisades Fire, now one of the most destructive natural disasters in Los Angeles history, started in the backyard of Palisades Highlands, a remote and affluent community overlooking the coast between Malibu and Santa Monica. Residents and hikers first saw it as an unassuming thicket looming in the dried-out undergrowth.
But fanned by 60-mile-per-hour winds, the flames quickly rolled down the mountainside and roared through neighborhoods, growing to more than 20,000 acres and consuming more than 5,000 structures. It is now one of six wildfires burning simultaneously in Los Angeles County, forcing 180,000 people from their homes and killing at least 11 people.
NBC News spoke to nearly a dozen people who witnessed the early stages of the Palisades Fire on the morning of January 7 and watched it grow and move faster than they had ever seen, leaving a path of destruction they couldn’t imagine loved – even in a place where forest fires are part of life.
Sohn was already on edge that morning after seeing warnings from authorities that dry winter winds were forecast in drought-parched Los Angeles, increasing the risk of wildfires.
Then, as she left her home on Piedra Morada Drive at 10:30 a.m. for an art class at the local recreation center, a neighbor yelled at her from across the street. She looked behind his house and saw fire in the brush less than a mile away. The neighbors’ family had already called 911.
Sohn didn’t wait for someone to tell her to evacuate.
“I ran into the house, woke up my boyfriend, threw my dog in the car, along with as many photo albums as I could carry,” she said, “and got him out of there.”
At about the same time, Beni Oren was walking in the brush with friends near Skull Rock, a local landmark, when they smelled smoke. They turned around and were confronted by flames about 100 feet away, Oren, 24, said.
The sight of the flames caused Beni Oren and his friends to flee.
They ran in panic and changed direction when they realized the wind was blowing the fire their way. A growing plume of smoke rose over the canyon as they reached safety. “It was a bizarre experience, where I realized: f—, is this all on fire?” Oren said.
Firefighters quickly rushed in, sirens blaring. On radios they described it as a 10-acre forest fire on a ridge, and they planned to use planes to quell the rising flames. It was just after 10:30 am. The danger was already clear.
“It’s 100% in line with the wind. It has the potential to reach over 500 acres in the next 20 minutes,” a person on the Los Angeles County Fire Department radio reported, according to a recording. “We have the potential for structures to be threatened in the next 20 minutes.”
Someone replied: “It’s pushing straight towards Palisades.” A few seconds later he added, “This thing is going to have a good run.”
Fire spreads by wind at 11:04 am
Alarmed residents of the Palisades Highlands, who watched the growing fire from their backyards and patios, came to the same conclusion.
Stephanie Libonati was home with her mother and brother on Piedra Morada Drive when she saw flames and smoke about three-quarters of a mile away and screamed, “Fire!” Her mother called 911, and Libonati and her brother ran outside to warn neighbors. They started packing their photos, passports and other valuables and made a plan: leave in three separate cars, meet outside the city and then continue to her grandfather’s farm in Santa Clarita.
The Libonati family.
By the time they left, the fire appeared to have doubled in size, said Libonati, 26. Firefighters had also arrived and told her brother to stop wetting their back deck and get out of there.
“It sounded like a fire pit,” she said. “You could hear the fire crackling and everything burning. And the smell was terrible, ash blowing into our faces. It was just so fast. You saw it spreading further and further.”
Once they started driving, the family was immediately separated, their paths interrupted by flames, traffic and panic. As she drove through Palisades Village, a shopping district at the bottom of the hill, Libonati saw people on the side of the road filming the inferno above. “Nobody ever expected the fire to reach the village,” she said. “That never happened.”
They eventually met, hugged and continued to the ranch.
The exodus continued, turning from a trickle into a mad rush. Palisades Drive, the only main road leading straight down the hill to Sunset Boulevard, was packed with cars. Some tried Fire Road, an alternate evacuation route during emergencies, but it wasn’t long before that thoroughfare was encircled by flames, residents said. The sunset came to a standstill.
Many panicked drivers abandoned their cars on the road and fled on foot, forcing emergency services to bulldoze the vehicles aside so fire trucks could get through. Firefighters told residents in some parts of the neighborhood to stay put temporarily because there was initially no immediate danger and no easy way out.
The wind picked up, swelling the flames and pushing the embers into the air and further down, creating new hot spots. The fire consumed the mountainside and swept through the Highlands, the village and the rest of the Pacific Palisades, then west along the coast to Malibu.
Colin Fields and Vanita Borwankar, who live on Palisades Drive, leave in their car after receiving a text message about possible evacuations. By the time they left their apartment at 11 a.m., the fire was going downhill, but the standoff forced them to turn around. They walked back up the hill to Fields’ parents’ house at the edge of the canyon, where Fields and his brother sprayed hoses against advancing flames and signaled flare-ups to firefighters.
Colin and Dylan Fields try to protect their property from the flames approaching Pacific Palisades.
Fields, 34, who grew up in the area, said he always felt it was only a matter of time before a major fire broke out. “But nothing like this. This was literally a disaster movie,” he said.
Divided over whether to evacuate, some residents stayed as long as they could, dousing homes with garden hoses and buckets of water from swimming pools as planes dropped retardant on the mountainside.
Around 5:30 p.m., a fire truck escorted Fields and Borwankar, along with others in a parade of cars behind them, down Palisades Drive to Sunset Boulevard, en route to safety. Uncontrolled fires raged on both sides of the streets. “The heat,” Borwankar said, “made it feel like an oven.”
Some even stayed in their homes later – and then were forced to flee when the fire got too close.
It was midnight when firefighters ordered Suha Tabsh, an anesthesiologist, and her elderly mother to leave their home on Calle Victoria and help them navigate around a railcar parked in the driveway. “Cinders fell on our car like tennis balls,” said 75-year-old Tabsh.
“Everything around us was on fire,” she said of the drive out of the neighborhood. “Everyone was praying.”
“I thought they could put it out,” Don Griffin, 78, said of the firefighters he saw battling the Palisades Fire shortly after it ignited in the canyon behind his home. But the fire spread along a fire evacuation road, pictured here, and down the hill into Palisades Village.
Many homes in the Palisades Highlands burned to the ground. But others remained standing after the fire’s initial onslaught, with what seemed like a coincidence: one side of a street was destroyed, the other still standing. Residents of Piedra Morada Drive, including the Libonatis and Sohn, said their homes had survived so far, even though they were the closest to the fire to begin with.
The cause of the Palisades Fire remains under investigation, Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley said at a news conference Thursday. The fire department did not respond to NBC News’ questions about the department’s response and preparations, or whether the Jan. 1 Gorge fire was related, other than to say Crowley told reporters that local fire stations were fully staffed and that personnel had been pre-ordered deployed in the Palisades area due to the threat posed by high winds.
The full devastation of the fire is still emerging, but some residents are already saying it could have been worse.
“I’ll tell you the luck,” said Don Griffin, 78, a resident of the Palisades Highlands for 12 years. “If this had happened at three or four in the morning and no one noticed, we might have had a lot more fatalities.”
Griffin took this photo at 11:57 a.m. Tuesday, when winds had pushed the fire near neighboring homes.
Sohn, who is sheltering in a hotel, said neighbors have exchanged news about whose homes were lost and which are intact. She said she’s surprised her house didn’t burn down. But that offers her little comfort, given the destruction of her community.
She recently told a friend that their house was gone.
“It’s heartbreak,” she said.
This article originally appeared on NBCNews.com.
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
