Inside the desperate, chaotic escape from Pacific Palisades: ‘If you go any further you will die’

Beachfront homes are devastated by the Palisades fire on PCH in Malibu.

Jan. 8, 2025 3 PM PT

A dry wind was already stirring when the sun rose over Pacific Palisades on Tuesday, fitful gusts whipping palm fronds seaward and making eucalyptus limbs creek and groan. The forecast called for an all-out windstorm by midday over chaparral that hadn’t seen rain for eight months.

Fires were predicted all over Southern California. The air was eerie and electric, and residents in “the Palisades” could only pray that nothing ignited, because for all its wealth and beauty, this slice of coastal paradise had all the makings for an inferno.

Within three hours, black smoke billowing down from the hills blotted out the sun as locals fled, streets jammed with cars, and anxiety turned to flat-out panic.

The Palisades fire started out as a small brush fire around 10:30 a.m. near Piedra Morada Drive, but the Santa Ana winds quickly drove the flames — and a blizzard of embers — through the dry brush onto the neighborhoods below.

Darrin Hurwitz was working at his home on Las Lomas Drive, about a mile down the hill from the fire’s origin, when he noticed the smoke around 10:35. As soon as he saw it, he packed a bag with clothes for his two children, laptops, medications and a few pieces of art and family heirlooms.

He was on the road within minutes.

The larger streets such as Palisades Drive and Sunset Boulevard were already clotted with cars, so he used back roads to escape. Homes were already in flames. He figures he saw at least 20 burn.

“Things were moving so quickly. Within a few minutes there were multiple fires between the Palisades Highlands and looking out over the ocean,” he said.

Hurwitz was surprised by the lack of fire response. He said it took the better part of an hour before he began to see more than a sporadic number of fire engines.

A Southern California native, Hurwitz moved back from the East Coast to the Palisades two years ago. Since then, he has worried about the fire risk.

“There hasn’t been a day I’ve lived there where I haven’t thought, one, this is the most beautiful place in the world, and two, it may all go up in flames at some point,” Hurwitz said. “This is the price, unfortunately, we pay to live in paradise.”

While wildfires have become an almost annual reality for Malibu to the west, Pacific Palisades has largely been spared from disasters in recent years. But when the heaviest Santa Anas of the winter hit when the rains have yet to come, everywhere near that dry native vegetation is at risk.

Pacific Palisades has its own unique vulnerabilities, caught between the rugged expanses of Malibu and the tighter neighborhoods of Santa Monica, where condos and apartment buildings are crammed toward the beach. It might not be as prone to fire as Malibu, but it’s twice as dense, and in that mix of wild and urban, a wildfire can cause extreme damage.

By 11:30 a.m., schools were evacuated. It was the last time the buildings of Palisades Charter Elementary would ever hold students; overnight, the school was destroyed.

Just before noon, Gregg Champion, 56, sped his company car over to Start-Up Recovery, a drug treatment and addiction center that he runs. Staff members had evacuated all clients. Champion was running about 100 yards away from the door when he was stopped by a firefighter.

“If you go any further, you will die,” he said the firefighter told him.

Champion struggled to breathe. He could feel the heat from the flames and looked through the clouds of smoke and saw that the fire was between two houses.

“I was almost consumed by smoke,” Champion said. “I was very dizzy and I thought I wasn’t going to make it.”

Champion said a prayer to himself and then: “All right, God, we’re going to lose [my business], but I better make it down the hill back to my family.”

Firefighters guided him down the hill and he headed to his home on Grenola Street. He and his family gathered overnight bags and personal items and sat through an hour and a half of traffic before making it out of Pacific Palisades. They landed at one of Champion’s offices in Santa Monica on Tuesday afternoon and were trying find a hotel room.

“The best thing you can do is prepare to evacuate,” he said. “I have three beautiful daughters, an amazing wife and two dogs and I’m just going to be safe rather than sorry.”

At 10:15 a.m., Charming Evelyn found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. She doesn’t live in the Palisades, but she was house-sitting for vacationing friends in a home just west of Temescal Canyon when, during a Zoom call, she glanced out the window and saw smoke and flames on the hillside.

She had to go. But she didn’t have a car.

Breathing was getting harder, so she put on a mask and grabbed her laptop and her friends’ dog, a poodle mix named Cleveland, along with his food. She called a friend, who picked her up.

“It was terrifying to see that small plume of smoke grow into this huge plume of smoke while we were waiting,” Evelyn said. “I thought it was really close.”

On Wednesday, Evelyn confirmed that the house burned down.

Flames engulfed hillside homes with propane tanks outside and gun ammunition inside. Palisades suddenly sounded like a war zone. Palms were bending sideways and tree limbs were snapping now. Canyons became bellows, fanning flames and driving the smoke to the coast and over the Pacific.

The hissing wind pushed black smoke down Temescal Canyon, sending residents choking toward the beach.

Stories from celebrity residents started surfacing on social media. Eugene Levy was fleeing in his car. James Woods posted a video from his driveway of his neighbors’ houses swallowed in fire. Steve Guttenberg popped up on KTLA-TV at 1 p.m. with a public service announcement, urging fleeing residents to leave keys in their car when abandoning their vehicles.

“If anybody has a car, leave the keys in the car so we can move your car so that these firetrucks can get up Palisades Drive,” the “Police Academy” star said.

The neighborhood’s streets — narrow, snaking through hills and canyons — had become parking lots as panicked locals stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic bailed out of their vehicles and fled on foot.

Even the few main thoroughfares — Palisades Drive, Sunset Boulevard, Pacific Coast Highway — were gridlocked with stuck and abandoned cars.

Shortly after 1 p.m., Ellen Delosh-Bacher found herself stuck at the intersection of Palisades and Sunset. She was in downtown L.A. when she heard about the fire and was rushing to her Palisades home to get her 95-year-old mother, her caregiver and their two dogs.

As she sat in panic behind the wheel, the fire exploded right behind a Starbucks along the road. Cops began running down the street telling anyone stuck in traffic, “Run for your lives.”

Delosh-Bacher abandoned her car, keys still in the ignition, and ran the half-mile down to the beach.

She stood amid the nuclear orange smoke, trying to reach her mother.

“This is like an apocalypse,” she said.

By 3 p.m., bulldozers were moving in, pushing abandoned, keyless cars out of the way to clear the path for the firetrucks.

The dozer operators were gentle at first, trying not to damage the cars. But as the situation got more desperate, they had no choice but to ram cars into one another and flip them onto their sides.

Under the black smoke, evacuees now traveled only by the light of the fire.

As night came, two friends, Orly Israel and Tanner Charles, fought to save Israel’s hillside home.

Charles is a storm chaser visiting from Minneapolis, and they had spent the day documenting the fire.

“It was like what I would imagine hell would be like,” Israel said. “We’d hear so many explosions in the neighborhood, propane tanks exploding. It was just insane.”

When the fire approached Israel’s home, the pair tried to fight it off with garden hoses. Israel sprayed the backyard, Charles handled the front.

Palm trees burst into flames, showering the property with fiery debris. When the backyard was fully engulfed in flames, they decided they had to flee.

“Let’s get out of here. We tried our best,” Charles said in a video later posted on his X account.

After one last look at Israel’s childhood home of 20 years, the pair bolted. It didn’t survive the night.