David Pierce shouted to his wife, Jane Pierce, to pack, as embers rained down on their block in Altadena.
Ms. Pierce set to work on finding the 15 items on the list pinned to their bulletin board — a list they had created after surviving a fire decades earlier and included computers, eyeglasses, spare car keys and of course, their yellow Labrador retriever, Tegan.
While she packed, he ran from neighbor to neighbor, pounding on their doors. He frantically called the couple who live behind them, and who were out of the country, to get the code to their gate, so that he could grab Candy, their 80-pound Belgian Malinois.
The Pierces — he a retired lawyer, 63, and she a retired neonatal nurse, 62 — shoved Tegan and Candy into their respective SUVs.
But as they sped away from the fire, Mr. Pierce was consumed about the animals he couldn’t grab: five koi that they had bought a quarter century ago.
The Pierces were still newlyweds in 2000, hoping to start a family, when they headed to a local store and bought the baby koi — no more than three inches long — for $5 each. They placed them in the pond they had built for them in the backyard of their home, which sits on a block directly facing a steep mountain face.
The couple grew attached to the koi, a bond that so many other evacuees shared with their pets. At least 27 people have died, and the death toll is likely to rise, in the catastrophic fires that began Jan. 7. Thousands of people have lost their homes and their neighborhoods. In the face of such devastation, the unlikely rescue of animals trapped inside the inferno has been a rare bright spot.
In a mobile home park in Sylmar, Calif., one woman grabbed a hammer to smash the window of a neighbor’s house to retrieve a yapping dog. In Pacific Palisades, a couple led their horses down a burning hill.
For the Pierces, the koi have been the steady presence that they needed in difficult times. Before they bought the fish, they got two dogs, both of whom died nine years after the arrival of the koi. They got a third dog, who lived to the age of 10. Then a fourth dog, then a fifth.
The fish, a type of carp that can live for decades, outlived all the dogs except the last — Tegan. The koi continued to grow even as the children that the Pierces had hoped for never came.
“We don’t have kids. That’s why maybe they’re so special to us,” he said.
Koi are among the more unusual friendships between man and animal — the fish can’t be petted or accompany an owner on a walk, but they are a calming force: “We have a hammock next to the pond. When I’m feeling stressed, or about to undergo a medical procedure that I don’t really want to undergo, and I have to think of a happy place, I think of the koi pond,” Mr. Pierce said.
The day after the blaze started in Altadena, the Pierces returned to check on their three-bedroom home, expecting the worst. Two of the homes directly facing theirs had burned to the ground and were still smoldering. But their own home had survived — a luck of the draw that they feel deeply conflicted over, as they wrestle with having retained so much, even as beloved neighbors lost all.
They hugged and consoled their friends, and then Mr. Pierce headed into the backyard to check on the koi pond. He braced himself.
“I just didn’t want them to die,” Mr. Pierce said, his eyes turning red as he blinked back tears.
A layer of ash covered the body of water, clouding the view. Then Mr. Pierce spotted movement. He began to count: There was the yellow one they had named Pearl, sliding past the orange-and-black koi named Tiger. There was Zipper, and Pongo, a beauty that looks like a butterfly. And then he spotted Bandit, the most special one of all — a white koi with a red band across its head — a species that is prized in Japan because it resembles the Japanese flag.
With their house intact and the koi alive, the Pierces decided to stay put, even though the power and the gas had been cut off and checkpoints were erected to prevent people from entering the disaster zone.
Their neighborhood was placed under a mandatory evacuation order and every street leading to their home was cordoned off, with police tape strung from pole to pole, guarded by National Guard in fatigues. Residents who have remained inside were warned that if they leave, they will not be allowed back in.
For several days starting on Jan. 8, there was no running water. To flush the toilet, Mr. Pierce went to get buckets from the koi pond. When a spot fire broke out at his neighbors’ home, he ran with a watering can from his garden.
On Jan. 9, two days after the fire, he went to fill another bucket, and that’s when he noticed that something was terribly wrong: Pearl was on her back, her fins rigid, pointing toward the smoky sky. Three others were on their side. Only one, Bandit, appeared to still be alive but was struggling to breathe. Mouth open, gills moving in and out.
Because there was no power, the pond’s filtration system had been shut off. Mr. Pierce ran to his garage and got an extra pump, then plugged it into a generator and attached a hose. It blew air into the pond, spraying water several feet into the air.
“I got the first fish out, the one that I know is still alive, and put him in the bubbles — literally in the bubbles — to get oxygen to his gills. And I can feel him moving,” he said.
Then he moved the other four into the path of the fizzy water. Slowly, he noticed their gills starting to move. Pearl, whose eyes had turned gray, was the last to recover.
They have changed her name to Phoenix. “She rose from the ashes,” said Ms. Pierce.
From then on, Mr. Pierce struggled to sleep. During one of his frequent checks, he saw a form on the side of the pond. Zipper had jumped out of the sludge-filled water. “He’s covered with dirt and debris and ash and he looked gray. And I just thought he was dead,” said Mr. Pierce.
Again, he rushed to place the koi in the bubbles. Against all odds, the fish began to move.
Mr. Pierce realized he couldn’t keep this up; he needed help. He called Jose Hernandez, who specializes in maintaining fish ponds, who has been cleaning the couple’s koi pond for nearly two decades. What he was about to ask him to do was not easy: Could he drive to the checkpoint — a spot where residents were being turned away — and wait for him to try to bring the koi?
Mr. Hernandez, 59, began working for a contracting company that built koi ponds about 30 years ago. He eventually left that company and struck out on his own — his specialty is looking after the koi of Angelenos.
He said he could hear the pain and desperation in Mr. Pierce’s voice. Koi can live up to 50 years, he said, explaining that he advises his customers to put the fish in their will. “It’s like their kid,” Mr. Hernandez said.
About five hours later, Mr. Hernandez managed to get to a checkpoint. He parked his Chevy Silverado truck next to a National Guard armored personnel carrier and waited for the Pierces to bring the koi from their home to him, a distance of just three blocks but which seemed insurmountable.
Mr. Pierce had found three large tubs — the kind that he and his wife fill up with ice and drinks when they tailgate at the Rose Bowl — and filled them with the dirty water. Then came the hard part. The koi — each one shaped like a torpedo, at least 18 inches long and weighing around 3.5 pounds — proved trickily slippery. He tried to scoop them out with his fly-fishing net, but each time, the fish flopped back into the pond. He put on his waders and finally managed to get them into the tubs.
But the Pierces had another hurdle: actually getting them to their car.
Though the tubs had rope handles, the Pierces — both of them avid backpackers who have climbed Mount Whitney multiple times — struggled to carry the containers that they estimate were at least 100 pounds. Even if they managed to tote them to the street, how would they manage to lift the water-filled containers into their car without tipping them?
Suddenly, a utility van drove by their deserted street and they ran after it and begged the driver to help. The three of them got the buckets inside their car and then slowly and deliberately inched their way down the road to the first checkpoint.
Without hesitation, two soldiers grabbed the rope on either side of each bucket and walked them across the forbidden line to Mr. Hernandez’s waiting truck. On a side street, Mr. Hernandez moved each koi into its own sturdy plastic bag of clean water, then packed them into boxes. He headed to his home in Pico Rivera, some 15 miles to the south.
Mr. Hernandez said he had a hard time finding a tank to buy because so many other koi owners have also evacuated with their fish. Los Angeles pet stores are low on stock, he said.
He came up with what he could: something akin to a kiddie pool.
Once the koi were safe, Mr. Hernandez sent Mr. Pierce a text message: “the fish ok.”
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