Los Angeles —When wildfires threaten neighborhoods, the official directive is always the same: evacuate immediately.
But now, fire officials in Los Angeles County are starting to break from that long-standing message, saying some residents may be able to stay back and fight to protect their homes amid a growing threat.
“We’ve always told people that when the evacuation order comes, you must leave,” L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone told CBS News. “We’ve departed from that narrative. With the proper training, with the proper equipment, and with the proper home hardening and defensible space, you can stay behind and prevent your house from burning down.”
Marrone’s stance may signal a shift in how officials talk about wildfire response.
After the flames ripped through the Pacific Palisades, clusters of homes still stood because residents stayed behind to save them. Some had professional equipment, while others used buckets.
Cort Wagner evacuated his family and grabbed a garden hose.
“If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would say I couldn’t have saved anything. But the truth is, you can save stuff. I mean, I saved multiple homes with garden hoses,” Wagner said.
CBS News’ Los Angeles-based correspondent Carter Evans was covering the Palisades Fire on Jan. 7, when it became clear that his family’s own home was under threat and firefighters were overwhelmed. Evans and his wife, Lauren, also a reporter, defended their home, drawing on decades of experience covering wildfires.
The couple chased every ember with garden hoses for 14 hours and helped put out spot fires at nearby homes.
For Marrone, these stories point to a hard reality: “There are not enough firefighters or fire engines to adequately defend every structure.”
“And there will never be,” he added.
Staying behind isn’t for everyone — especially those with health problems or if there’s no escape route. To do it safely, L.A. County Fire created a community brigade. Firefighters trained residents like Keegan Gibbs, who lost his home in a wildfire.
“That was the motivation that kept driving me to going, ‘How do we solve this at the community level, instead of looking to other people to try to solve it for us?’” Gibbs said.
As Marrone explained, “We’re losing in the thousands of structures in these impossible firefights, in situations that we’ve never experienced before. Something’s changing and we need to change with it.”
Carter Evans has served as a Los Angeles-based correspondent for CBS News since February 2013, reporting across all of the network’s platforms. He joined CBS News with nearly 20 years of journalism experience, covering major national and international stories.
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