As LA Fires Rage, Harrowing Evacuations Play Out on Traffic-Choked Roads

Californians pay hefty fees for electricity in large part because of wildfires. Read KQED’s coverage here.

On Tuesday morning, Vidda Brough heard a large crash outside of her home. Hurricane-force winds swept through her street in Pacific Palisades, an affluent residential neighborhood with sweeping views of Los Angeles. Spanish tiles flew off of Brough’s roof, crashing to the driveway below.

When she stepped outside to investigate, she smelled smoke. When she went back inside, she looked out a window facing the hillside behind her house.

Orange flames roared in her backyard.

Brough built her dream home, one that she and her husband had designed together, more than 40 years ago. During the Old Topanga Fire in 1993, her husband stayed behind to protect the property with a garden hose. Brough, a retired public school teacher, had never seen anything like the blaze that threatened her home.

“I realized I needed to get out,” she told KQED.

More than 80,000 residents of Los Angeles County were under orders to evacuate as of Wednesday afternoon, including 30,000 Pacific Palisades residents, after a destructive series of fires broke out Tuesday and exploded in intensity Wednesday morning.

So far, at least five people have been killed, and more than 1,000 homes, businesses and other buildings have been scorched, making this one of the most destructive firestorms in recent history.

Brough said she was shaking as she got in her car. She managed to drive down a winding road to scenic Sunset Boulevard. As she drove, she stayed on the phone with her son, Branden, whose presence helped keep her calm, she said.

Police officers routed her west, towards the Pacific Palisades Highlands neighborhood. But after about a half mile, she said first responders rerouted her east. Eventually, she made it to her brother’s house in South Pasadena, where she reunited with her husband. The trip took eight hours.

In the foothills northeast of Los Angeles, the deadly Eaton Fire has grown to more than 10,000 acres, burning through Altadena and Pasadena, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department. Evacuation orders expanded to include communities in eastern Glendale, La Cañada Flintridge and northern Monrovia. In the San Fernando Valley, the Hurst Fire has burned nearly 1,000 acres near the suburban community of Sylmar.

And in the Pacific Palisades, the Palisades fire has consumed over 11,000 acres, moving westward along the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu.

Dozens of cars were abandoned along Palisades Drive and Sunset Boulevard as people fled on foot because of the traffic jam. Responders with the Los Angeles County Fire Department were seen pushing cars aside with a bulldozer in order to create a path for emergency vehicles.

Kenichi Haskett, a section chief of L.A. County Fire in Palisades, described navigating the Palisades as similar to some of the hillier neighborhoods in San Francisco.

“It’s a foothills community where we had to evacuate 25,000 people who all jammed into the road together and created a bottleneck,” Haskett said. “Many left their cars and ran or walked away, which is not a bad idea, but it left a traffic jam and was difficult for our firefighters to get out.”

Unfortunately, encountering gridlocked roads is not uncommon during emergency evacuations in California, especially in cities with limited evacuation points. During the catastrophic Camp Fire in 2019, over 25,000 Paradise residents attempted to evacuate the area only to get caught in a massive traffic jam.

According to wildfire evacuations expert Tom Cova, many towns only have one or two evacuation routes that residents can use to leave during an emergency. The problem occurs when thousands of people attempt to evacuate at the same time, leading to road congestion.

“It’s like being at a concert, the density of these communities, and if you leave early, you just stand up and walk out,” Cova, a professor of geography at the University of Utah, said. “But if you delay your departure, if you’re spending a lot of time gathering things and maybe hesitating whether or not you’re at risk, then you’ll find yourself in the midst of the main travel pull.”

Cova said many of the cities and towns being impacted by these fires grow organically with little consideration for how roads would need to operate during emergencies.

“Unfortunately, gridlock is not new to Los Angeles,” said Paul Friedman, chief technical officer of Streetlight Data, a San Francisco-based traffic analytics company. “Due to urban sprawl, poor urban planning, poor zoning laws, houses are very spread out and people need more road capacity per person.”

He continued: “If you just have one hour to get everybody out, you’re going to have problems. These roads are not designed to empty a community in one hour.”

A 2019 study published by Streetlight Data identified 100 communities in the country that have the fewest evacuation routes, and California had 14.

There are only a few things city officials can do to avoid issues of gridlock and congestion during emergencies, Friedman said. The first would be to issue evacuation and emergency warnings earlier in order to give residents more time to leave. The second would be to transition more two-way roads into one-way roads. The California Highway Patrol did a similar thing in Santa Cruz after the CZU Lightning Complex fires in 2020, Friedman said.

Evacuation might be the gravest danger associated with wildfires, according to Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at UC Berkeley. Stephens said that while evacuating an area may sometimes be necessary, doing so can leave people exposed to smoke and fire.

“All it takes is one accident, a smoky road or maybe a power line down, and essentially, you’ve just blocked that evacuation route,” Stephens said.

However, for people in L.A. County who are currently facing evacuation notices and imminent fire warnings, the experts interviewed by KQED urged residents to listen to law enforcement and city officials and to follow all warnings and instructions.

“If you’re in a warning area, you need to be ready to go. An order means you need to go,” Haskett said. “We want people to heed the evacuation orders and be ready to go once that evacuation order has been issued.”

Brough is waiting to see whether she will have to evacuate again — and when she will be able to return home. Although she always has a bag packed for emergencies, when she fled, she left without her purse and her wedding rings.

Her son went online to find evidence of whether or not the home his parents built was still intact. Carter Evans, a CBS journalist who lives in their neighborhood, went live on Instagram in a video where first responders handed him a garden hose to help fight flames. In the video, Brough’s son could see his parents’ home still standing.

Not everyone has been so lucky. Ed Stark, who lives less than a mile from Brough, received a fateful email on Wednesday afternoon from his neighbor: Stark’s house had burned to ashes.

“There were no fire trucks around,” Stark, 75, told KQED. “We were unable to get back and remove anything. We have nothing from the house but the clothes on our backs.”

Stark, a trial attorney and an adjunct law professor, said he and his wife had just started fixing up their house. He had 25 years of articles and course materials saved on his laptop and iPad that were incinerated.

“We are grateful that we are alive and that our children are alive. And God forbid, had we lost a loved one, it would be much worse,” Stark said. “But it’s like getting hit in the head with a hammer. It’s just a shock to the entire system.”