The flames came suddenly in the middle of the night, and the evacuation orders swiftly followed. Thousands of residents were told to leave their homes immediately and flee for their lives as wind gusts quickly turned a fire into a raging inferno in the hills above Malibu, Calif.
But some people stayed behind, using garden hoses in an attempt to protect their homes and themselves.
Alec Gellis, 31, said that he had just returned home from an evening out late Monday and began to lie down when he suddenly heard car horns blaring in the street.
“It was really bizarre,” Mr. Gellis said of the commotion. “So I went outside, and I noticed the sky was red.”
Mr. Gellis said that he scrambled to connect a gas-powered generator, a water pump and a hose to soak his home and put out embers with water from his swimming pool.
“Within 30 minutes, the fire was fully surrounding us,” he said. “Everywhere you looked, there was fire. It was so insane.”
Mr. Gellis said his goal was to douse everything he could to keep the fire from spreading to his home and two other houses in his Serra Retreat neighborhood. It’s the same area from which Dick Van Dyke said he safely evacuated.
“If you leave, the house burns because the embers float and destroy the house,” he said. “If you’re there with a hose, ideally a high-powered hose, you can wet everything down, make everything kind of fire resistant from those floating embers, and then save the property.”
On Tuesday, a wide stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway through Malibu was shut down to through traffic, and the normally bustling shops and restaurants felt like a ghost town.
Fire trucks were parked in the lot of the Malibu Pier on Tuesday afternoon and television crews stationed themselves along the highway, with views of smoke billowing from the canyons and hills. Some homes up the mountain had partially or entirely burned overnight.
Some residents of Malibu Canyon Village, a complex with more than 100 condominiums along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, also doused walls, roofs and adjacent vegetation on Monday night using fire hoses and garden hoses, said Kathleen Higgins, a restaurant caterer who lives there. At the time, the fire was moving down the canyon and turning nearby wetlands into a charred wasteland of burned palm and date trees. Embers were landing on the roof of the complex.
On Tuesday, a thick smell of smoke lingered in the air, and gray plumes rose from parts of the hillside behind the complex. Evacuation orders remained in place. But Ms. Higgins, who was spraying vegetation near the units, called several men and women who stayed up all night watering down the condos “absolute heroes.”
Michael Brunet, 50, a former volunteer firefighter in Santa Barbara, was visiting his girlfriend, Monika Kozdrowiecka, 48, at the Malibu Canyon Village condominiums on Monday night. They learned of the fire after the building lost power around 11 p.m., which triggered a fire alarm. The warning siren was still sounding in the complex more than 13 hours later on Tuesday.
While some residents immediately evacuated, Mr. Brunet and a few other people sprayed water in and around the complex for hours.
“We didn’t know if this place was going to survive,” he said. “It could have been ugly.”
At a news conference on Tuesday morning, Sheriff Robert G. Luna of Los Angeles County stressed the importance of following evacuation orders.
“It saves lives,” he said, “and it actually impacts the lives of our first responders, because if they have to come in to save a life, they’re putting their own lives at risk.”
But for many in Malibu, the decision to evacuate was difficult. Luigi Bian, 72, said he looked out his window around 11 p.m. Monday, shortly after the fire started, and saw the flames along the ridgeline and the thick smoke in the hills of Malibu Canyon.
Around 1:30 a.m., Mr. Bian left with his 17-year-old cat, Pryia, and headed toward his son’s home in Los Angeles.
About five miles into the drive, he turned around and made his way back to his condo.
“It’s hard to go,” Mr. Bian. “Your stuff is your whole life.”
On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Gellis, who hadn’t slept since the fire began, was still hosing down his home and parts of his neighborhood. As helicopters passed above, Mr. Gellis said he had already drained about half of the water in his pool.
“Everything’s super lush today,” he said, “because it got such a good watering last night.”
The post Many Evacuated, but Some Malibu Residents Broke Out the Hoses appeared first on New York Times.
