One family’s harrowing escape from the Palisades fire: ‘We gotta go’
The first thing Miles Soboroff noticed on Tuesday morning was the wind.
It was about 8 a.m., and he was sitting in front of his computer at his in-laws’ home on the west side of the Pacific Palisades in the Marquez Knolls neighborhood. He and his pregnant wife, Shana Tavangarian Soboroff, have been temporarily living there while building a house nearby.
Five people have died, more than 2,000 structures have burned and at least 130,000 residents are under evacuation orders because of the wildfires burning across Los Angeles County. “We are absolutely not out of danger yet,” Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley said.
“The trees were blowing really hard, and the wind was really loud,” said Soboroff, 39, co-founder of Zab’s Datil Pepper Hot Sauce. “I was nervous about it.”
Part of Soboroff’s anxiousness stemmed from an incident just a week earlier: He and his wife awoke around 1:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day to a brush fire burning on a nearby ridge. It grew to eight acres before it was put out by the Los Angeles Fire Department.
“It was pretty scary,” he said, “and it wasn’t very windy at all.”
This time, though, the wind blew ominously.
Soboroff was on a Zoom call for work around 10:20 a.m. when he smelled smoke. He excused himself from the meeting and went out on a balcony, where he spotted a fire burning in roughly the same spot where the conflagration had been a week earlier. This blaze was bigger.
In the catastrophic Palisades fire, one of the city’s iconic thoroughfares was severely damaged and large swaths of homes were reduced to smoldering rubble.
“I didn’t hear any sirens or anything,” he said. “It was really windy and really dry, and the wind was pushing in our direction.”
Soboroff had a sobering message for one of two sisters-in-law who were also at the house: “I think we gotta go.”
He called 911 and was told that firefighters were already en route. By the time he hung up, he heard their sirens.
Soboroff then called his wife, a real estate agent who was meeting with a client — another local — for coffee at Palisades Village. Initially, Shana said, she wasn’t sure what to make of the fire, given that the one from a week earlier had been relatively minor.
“We kind of shrugged it off — until my husband seemed really serious about it,” she said.
Soboroff said his wife suggested she could come home to retrieve some of their belongings, but he told her, “No, we are not doing that.”
They ended the call. It was time to go. But first he had to get the pets. Soboroff grabbed his in-laws’ dog, Bambi, and his own, Zab. He also scooped up the kibble, along with laptops, his car keys and some toiletries.
“We were probably out of there in four or five minutes,” he said.
Five people have died, more than 2,000 structures have burned and at least 130,000 residents are under evacuation orders because of the wildfires burning across Los Angeles County. “We are absolutely not out of danger yet,” Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley said.
By noon, the couple had made it to Soboroff’s parents’ home in West L.A. Steve Soboroff, the former president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, said that once his son and daughter-in-law arrived, he and his wife departed for their house in the Coachella Valley.
“We left to make room for them,” said the elder Soboroff.
A prominent real estate figure who previously served as CEO of the Playa Vista development, Steve Soboroff said each of his five children, among them NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff, had evacuated their L.A.-area homes.
“This isn’t just a fire,” Steve Soboroff said. “You contain a fire, build a ring around the fire. This is like a thousand fires. It’s just impossible. I think back to the Great Chicago Fire. I don’t know anything here that’s ever been like this, because of the density. It is just a worst-case scenario.”
For Miles Soboroff and his wife, there was another move to make. As the fire grew Tuesday, they decided to decamp to a friend’s house farther away, in Venice.
On Wednesday, Soboroff, who grew up in the Palisades, wondered what else he could’ve taken from his in-laws’ home if he’d had more time.
He lamented the possible loss of his wife’s wedding and engagement rings.
She’d left them at the house after taking them off — for the first time ever, he said — because her hands were swollen due to the pregnancy.
Five people have died, more than 2,000 structures have burned and at least 130,000 residents are under evacuation orders because of the wildfires burning across Los Angeles County. “We are absolutely not out of danger yet,” Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley said.
On Wednesday afternoon, Soboroff learned that his in-laws’ home had been destroyed in the fire. A sister-in-law’s property was burned, too. He still didn’t know the fate of his new house, which has been under construction for about 15 months. He and his wife thought about the nursery they’d built for their unborn child, due in about a month, and wondered if it was still standing.
“Our entire nursery ... we don’t know,” Soboroff said.
And there was more grim news, this time from Shana’s client: Her home had burned down.
“We are not clear on the state of anything,” Soboroff said.
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