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As the sun rose on Jan. 8, the sky orange from ash and smoke, Angelenos anxiously waited for news about the extent of the damage from the Altadena and Pacific Palisades fires.
It would take days to learn that the conflagrations had caused an unprecedented level of destruction, killing at least 28 people, destroying and damaging more than 18,000 buildings valued at more than $275 billion, and leaving a burn zone 2½ times the size of Manhattan. That for decades to come, the disaster would divide our history into a “before” and “after.”
Here is how those first 24 hours unfolded.
Tuesday, Jan. 7
10:35 am.
The winds were screaming through the Santa Monica Mountains by the time Sue Kohl and her daughter Courtney wrapped up a morning meeting. It was a clear, sunny day in Palisades Village, and the women weren’t too worried about a small fire burning a few miles to the north.
Courtney left the office to walk to Starbucks but returned almost immediately, telling her mother: Get in the car. We’re going now.
From the sidewalk, their clothes and hair whipped by the wind, the women could see flames and smoke — a lot of smoke — coming from the hills. Kohl realized: If the winds turn, this fire could go anywhere.
At home in the Alphabet Streets neighborhood, Kohl put her dogs and photo albums in the car. She left everything else she owned, thinking she’d be back soon.
11:13 a.m.
Los Angeles sent its first evacuation alert to cell phones in the northern and western Palisades, warning that a fire was burning along Palisades Drive, and those nearby “should get set for a potential evacuation.”
11:23 a.m.
Erin Kyle, her teenage daughter and her daughter’s best friend, who had spent the night at their town house in the Palisades Highlands, were speeding down the mountain, smoke billowing around them.
The sky was turning orange. Palisades Drive was the only way out of the neighborhood. Traffic slowed, then stopped.
As they got closer to Sunset Boulevard, flames burned on both sides of the road. Embers the size of matchbooks smacked into their windshield. To their right, the Calvary Christian School burned.
Some drivers pulled across the tree-lined median onto the northbound lanes of Palisades Drive, driving the wrong way to avoid the traffic jam. Others just abandoned their cars and ran, hauling bags and pet carriers.
“Mom, are we going to have to run?” her daughter asked.
Kyle told the girls that staying in the car was the best course of action. In truth, she wasn’t so sure, as she contemplated a list of several bad options: Leave the car, get hit by flying embers and struggle to carry everything they’d packed. Stay in the car and get burned alive if the fire moved closer.
If we don’t start to move in the next four minutes, she decided, we’ll get out of the car.
Miraculously, cars started to inch forward, but it would take Kyle and the girls more than an hour and a half to move 2.5 miles.
11:52 a.m.
Los Angeles County sent the first evacuation orders to a swath of the Palisades: “LEAVE NOW.”
Around noon
More than 7,500 miles away in Accra, Ghana, where it was around 8 p.m., Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass smiled for photos at a cocktail party at the U.S. Ambassador’s residence. Bass had flown to the West African nation Jan. 4 as part of a Biden Administration delegation to the inauguration of the Ghanaian president.
She’d left Los Angeles City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson as the acting mayor. Her staff said she spent most of the cocktail party on the phone dealing with the fire, and shortly after the photos were taken was hustled to a military base to board a flight back to the U.S.
12:45 p.m.
The Los Angeles City Council wrapped its first meeting of the year, which included more than an hour of wrangling over the $1-billion Television City project in the Fairfax district.
At the meeting’s end, Westside Councilmember Traci Park made a brief, urgent announcement: The Palisades fire was threatening homes and lives, she said. Mandatory evacuation orders were going out soon.
“Pack your bags, be ready to go,” Park said. “This is an emergency.”
12:54 p.m.
In Malibu, the Getty Villa’s emergency preparedness coordinator, Les Borsay, was nervous. The edge of the Villa property was on fire, and embers were whipping through the air like they’d been shot from a gun.
The museum’s prized collection of Greek and Roman antiquities was sealed inside the galleries, the HVAC shut off and the doors taped to keep out smoke and ash. But flames were coming closer to the building that was once the home of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty and now housed labs and offices. The wood-shingled property didn’t have fire sprinklers.
Fortunately, the museum was closed to guests on Tuesdays and the evacuation of non-emergency staff went smoothly. What’s more, Borsay and several operations workers who didn’t normally work at the Villa had been on site that morning to test the fire systems.
As firefighters continue to battle multiple major wildfires, The Times has compiled a list of resources to help.
In another bit of good luck, a Los Angeles Fire Department helicopter swept by to drop water on the flames, six feet from the edge of the building.
12:59 p.m.
Through an N95 mask, a good Samaritan in the Palisades told a television reporter that he was trying to move cars that were abandoned in the road so firetrucks could get through but that some people had fled holding their car keys.
In a surreal moment, the reporter realized halfway through the interview that he was talking to actor Steve Guttenberg, who said he was trying to move every car he could — except for the Teslas, which he couldn’t figure out how to start.
1:38 p.m.
Evacuation orders expanded to the rest of the Palisades and north into the mountains to Mandeville Canyon Road: “Gather people and pets and leave immediately.”
2:20 p.m.
In the hills of the Palisades, near the Temescal Ridge Trail, Alex Emerick, 34, his younger sister, Rainier, and their parents grabbed garden hoses at their home of 33 years. The family had tried to evacuate when flames were visible from their driveway, but with traffic at a standstill in the neighborhood, they turned around.
They donned goggles and N95 masks and divided up, wetting down their shrubs and quashing small fires erupting in the front, side and back yards. The house across the street went up in flames. Because their bushes and trees bordered another property, putting out the spot fires in their yard may have helped prevent a “chain reaction of embers,” Emerick said, adding: “It’s like we were saving everyone’s properties at once.”
2:30 p.m.
Fire hoses snaked like spaghetti around the wheels of dozens of abandoned cars on Palisades Drive. Los Angeles County Fire Department bulldozer No. 5 pulled in and started shoving the vehicles aside to clear the road for firetrucks.
3:11 p.m.
In Dallas, at the end of a news conference before a game against the Mavericks, Los Angeles Lakers coach JJ Redick rubbed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose and told reporters that his family and his wife’s family had evacuated from the Palisades.
“A lot of people are freaking out right now, including my family,” Redick said. “From the sound of things, with the winds coming tonight, I know a lot of people are scared.”
4 p.m.
At a hastily assembled news conference on Will Rogers State Beach, Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley told reporters that the fire had grown from 10 acres to 1,261 acres in less than six hours and was threatening more than 13,000 buildings. The winds would “pick up and get worse” between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone warned.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, in Southern California for a morning event with President Biden that had been canceled, said it “didn’t take more than a text message” for Biden to approve full federal reimbursement for the state’s wildfire response. But, Newsom warned, the night would be worse: “By no stretch of the imagination are we out of the woods.”
5 p.m.
As the sun set, the last water drained out of a 1-million gallon tank tucked away in a cul-de-sac north of Palisades Village. That tank, and two others, help maintain water pressure in the highest hills of the Palisades. Gravity draws the water down into faucets, pools and hydrants below, and then the tanks are refilled with water pumped up from the city’s pipelines. Already, the firefight was straining that system.
5:35 p.m.
In Topanga Canyon, Zoe Nisman’s phone was blowing up with repeated notifications telling her to evacuate. She was also seeing a steady stream of messages from friends with news about beloved spots in Malibu — Reel Inn, Cholata Thai — that were gone.
“Everything I grew up with is burning,” Nisman said. “I guess it’s just time to pack.”
5:57 p.m.
As the power began to blink out in various neighborhoods, Angelenos unfolded sleeper sofas and made up guest beds for evacuees, listened to the wind rattling the windows, and wondered if they should pack a go bag.
6:11 p.m.
Matthew Logelin, 47, was making buttered pasta with parmesan for his daughters, ages 3 and 5, when he heard a loud bang behind his home on Canyon Close Road in Pasadena.
He ran outside to check on two towering pine trees in his back yard. They hadn’t ignited, but then he saw flames — no bigger than a camp fire — burning beneath a Southern California Edison transmission tower on the mountain in Eaton Canyon behind their home.
The fire, first called the “Close fire,” after Logelin’s street, would soon be renamed the Eaton fire. Logelin, the grandson of a state fire marshal, knew what to do: call 911, warn the neighbors, pack the car.
6:26 p.m.
Stretched thin by the Palisades fire and hurricane-force wind gusts, the Los Angeles Fire Department made a rare request to off-duty firefighters: Call in with your availability to work.
The request, the first of its kind in nearly two decades, was an indication of just how serious the fire had become. Complicating matters, a garbled version began to circulate on X and Instagram, where posts claimed the LAFD was “begging anyone with firefighting experience” to call the department’s downtown operations center. The phone line was soon flooded with calls.
7:26 p.m.
Altadena residents east of Lake Avenue were ordered to evacuate. Gusts of up to 100 mph carried burning embers two miles from the blazes. All helicopters were grounded. As Los Angeles headed into a night of unprecedented wind and fire, firefighters could get no help from the air.
7:55 p.m.
In Altadena, Christian Manoukian, 27, was searching desperately for his grandmother outside the Terraces at Park Marino, a nursing home and memory care facility off Lake Avenue.
A staff member had called his uncle 15 minutes earlier, warning: There’s a lot of smoke inside. The facility is in danger. Please come if you can.
Nurses were evacuating the building at a sprint, pushing patients in hospital beds and wheelchairs down two long blocks to the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. The wind snatched at blankets and face masks. Embers whipped through the air. People yelled in Tagalog, English, Spanish and Armenian over the blaring sirens.
“This word is overused, but it was the height of chaos,” Manoukian said.
Manoukian and his uncle found his grandmother and drove her to a nursing home in Highland Park that agreed to take in Altadena residents. Other patients were loaded into ambulances and Pasadena city buses. The nursing home was ablaze less than an hour later.
9:20 p.m.
Every time Steven Seagle, 59, checked the hillside behind his house north of Altadena Drive, the Eaton fire was closer. The flames were chewing through the mountains at more than 100 yards per minute, or more than three miles an hour.
“I’ve never seen anything move that quickly,” Seagle said. “I knew we weren’t coming back.”
His wife and kids and cat had already departed. But Seagle stayed behind to shut off the gas and collect a few more items: his foster son’s glasses, his foster daughter’s photo album, the rings that had belonged to his wife’s late mother. Seagle, a comic book author and artist, also grabbed his portfolio.
Coverage of the fires ravaging Altadena, Malibu, Pacific Palisades and Pasadena, including stories about the devastation, issues firefighters faced and the weather.
But he left behind his favorite painting, by artist Suzanne Jackson. At 4 feet by 6 feet, the frame was too big to fit in the car. (Hours too late, he realized that he could have cut the canvas from the frame.)
Seagle’s last stop was the towering Moreton Bay fig that had shaded the property for decades. You’re the reason we moved here, he told the tree. I hope you can make it. Then he drove away.
10 p.m.
The level-headed experts who usually told John Harabedian that everything would be fine were instead warning of hurricane-force wind and desperate firefights.
Harabedian, the newly elected representative for Altadena and Pasadena in the state Assembly, was in Sacramento for the first week of his first legislative session. In his room at the Sheraton, texts from family, friends and constituents were pouring in. His wife and kids were evacuating. His friends’ homes were burning.
We could lose Sierra Madre, Pasadena, Altadena, La Cañada — everything along the foothills, Harabedian thought. Nothing will ever be the same.
10:25 p.m.
The power was flickering at the Oakridge Mobile Home Park in Sylmar, and Amy Condit was on edge.
The winds were the strongest she’d ever felt, stronger even than 2008, when the Sayer fire destroyed 480 of the park’s 600 homes. She’d made a mental list of what to pack.
A gust of wind landed like a punch. The sky lit up light blue, a moment of daylight in the night.
“I would have sworn it was a nuclear bomb, except the color was wrong,” Condit said.
She looked up the mountain beyond her back yard and saw flames erupt at the base of a power transmission line. Then they started to race toward her.
Condit screamed to her mother to call 911 and hurried to collect a few belongings: documents, pillows, a cuckoo clock. The wind tore her cat, Precious, from her arms.
When an evacuation alert arrived 15 minutes later, Condit was ready. That blaze would soon be called the Hurst fire.
11:11 p.m.
Live images of flames devouring Palisades Village filled the 11 p.m. broadcast on KTTV. Developer Rick Caruso called in, and in eight minutes, he gave voice to the shock, grief and anger that had engulfed the neighborhood.
The hurricane-force gusts bearing down on Los Angeles hadn’t been a surprise, Caruso said, but the city still hadn’t been prepared. People who lost their homes and businesses were “paying the ultimate price” for L.A.’s mismanagement, he said, including hydrants in the Palisades that were running dry.
Coverage of the fires ravaging Altadena, Malibu, Pacific Palisades and Pasadena, including stories about the devastation, issues firefighters faced and the weather.
“Why isn’t there water in the fire hydrants?” the anchor asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“You’re right — that’s a good question,” Caruso said, and twisted the knife against Bass, who beat him in the 2022 election: “Why don’t you call the mayor, who’s out of the country, and ask her?”
Wednesday, Jan. 8
2:58 a.m.
In Altadena, home health aide Kimberly Barrera, 26, was on the phone with 911, begging for help evacuating a cancer patient from Canyada Avenue. Her patient was weak from radiation treatment, could not stand on his own, and weighed more than 300 pounds.
When Barrera told the dispatcher she would need assistance, the dispatcher sighed, told her to wait, and then hung up. The fire was crawling up the back yard and the house was filled with smoke. Barrera knew they didn’t have time to wait.
Just leave without me, her patient told her. You’re coming with me, or we both stay here, she responded.
Barrera wrapped a gait belt around the man’s waist. On the count of three, she told him, you’ll put your arms around my neck and I’ll lift you by the belt.
“For a moment, I had superhuman strength,” she said.
He slid into the wheelchair and they raced out of the house. The sky was bright red.
3 a.m.
The third and final water tank in the Palisades, a squat steel cylinder in Temescal Canyon, ran dry.
3:30 a.m.
Evacuation orders had just gone out to Altadena residents west of Lake Avenue, seven hours later than residents farther east.
Leisa Alexander, her husband and her mother-in-law scrambled into their car on Laurice Avenue, only to find themselves hemmed in on both sides on Marathon Road. In front of them, a tree had fallen into the roadway and caught fire. Behind them, broken power lines whipped in the wind.
Peering through the thick smoke, Alexander’s husband reversed the car under the power lines and drove east. Homes on both sides were on fire. They could feel the heat in the car.
After a report from The Times, officials have called for an external review into delayed evacuation alerts in western Altadena, during the Eaton fire.
Alexander wondered why an evacuation order hadn’t arrived earlier, and whether people without smartphones would know to leave. Thank goodness she and her husband had been there with her 84-year-old mother-in-law, she thought. If we hadn’t gone up, she wouldn’t be here.
Finally, they spotted an ambulance. Follow it, Alexander told her husband. They fled south.
4:36 a.m.
Phones in Los Angeles buzzed with an alert: FAST MOVING WILDFIRE IN YOUR AREA. AN EVACUATION ORDER HAS BEEN ISSUED FOR THE YOUR AREA. LEAVE NOW.
The alert, sent in error, marked the end of a long and sleepless night for many, as Angelenos waited for the sun to rise.
5:44 a.m.
The United Airlines flight carrying Bass back to Los Angeles pulled away from the gate at Washington Dulles International Airport.
6:18 a.m.
A fourth fire ignited in the Sepulveda Basin, near the intersection of the 405 and 101 freeways. Strong winds whipped the 30-acre blaze, known as the Woodley fire, south toward Burbank Boulevard.
6:30 a.m.
Eric Danneker and his wife Melissa sat in shock in a grocery store parking lot in Pasadena. The couple had fled La Paz Road in Altadena around midnight. A friend had just told them their home had burned.
The adobe-style home, built in 1925, had housed three generations of Melissa’s family. Eric grew up across the street. Everything they owned was with them in their cars: paperwork, clothes, and their dogs, Dreamer and Dribble.
Melissa thought of all the mementos and family heirlooms they had left behind. “The recipes,” she said. Her voice broke.
6:59 a.m.
At sunrise, miles from the fires, many Southern Californians found eerie remnants drifting down onto their yards and balconies: fragments of newspapers, a charred slip of a signed divorce settlement, a faded photograph of a couple holding a newborn.
7:50 a.m.
In Malibu, smoke mingled with fog along the coast as television news crews began surveying the damage, broadcasting burned-out stretches of the iconic coastline and husks of beloved restaurants like Gladstones, Moonshadows and Reel Inn.
Celebrity hotel heiress Paris Hilton learned from watching KABC-TV that her Malibu home, where her son had taken his first steps, had burned. That moment of loss, she said, is something that “no one should ever have to experience.”
8 a.m.
A media briefing initially planned at Zuma Beach was changed to downtown amid threats of high wind and fire. Ferocious winds had stretched firefighters thin overnight, and the fires, which had already destroyed more than 7,000 acres, were burning with no containment.
Firefighters were prepared “for one or two major brush fires, but not four,” said Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said.
9 a.m.
More than a dozen employees had spent the night at the Getty Villa, patrolling in pairs to squash small fires with handheld extinguishers. The sound of the fire, crackling and popping, struck Borsay as weirdly familiar, like the YouTube yule log video he put on at Christmas.
The buildings survived the night. Now, it was time for Borsay to check on the collections.
The Villa was showing a special exhibit about Thrace, an ancient region spanning modern Bulgaria and parts of Greece, Turkey and Romania. Thrace’s tribes were wealthy and sophisticated, cited in “The Iliad” as allies of the Trojans who arrived in gilded chariots. Bulgaria loaned more than 150 objects to the exhibit, which took six years to organize, and the fire had become front-page news in the Balkans.
Gusts of wind had left ash rippled in waves across the terrazzo floors outside. Borsay peeled the blue tape off the double doors to the gallery and stepped inside. He couldn’t smell smoke. He couldn’t see dust. The golden antiquities gleamed gently under their spotlights.
The gallery was immaculate.
11:14 a.m.
At a fire station in Santa Monica, LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley told Biden and Newsom that the Palisades fire had grown to 10,802 acres overnight, an increase of more than 1,000%, in less than 24 hours.
11:16 a.m.
United Airlines Flight 667 pulled into a gate at Los Angeles International Airport. Bass exited to the jet bridge, where she was approached by a reporter for a British television network who had been on her flight.
Bass looked away, saying nothing, as the reporter asked whether Bass had a response to fire officials who said they were “stretched to the limit and running out of water.”
The reporter pressed on: “Do you owe citizens an apology for being absent while their homes were burning?” And again: “Have you nothing to say today?” No answer.
Times staff writers Nathan Solis, Andrea Chang, Connor Sheets, Dan Woike, Julia Wick, David Zahniser, Matt Hamilton and Ian James contributed to this report.
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