Rhonda Taylor got back to her Palisades home around 1 a.m. Monday and was getting ready for bed when she saw images of a fire on the TV. Taylor assumed it was burning somewhere in the Valley, and even if it was closer, she reasoned, the blaze that broke out in the Palisades last week hadn’t prompted an evacuation of her neighborhood. She fell asleep.

Taylor woke around 3 a.m. to her phone ringing and the smell of smoke. Her throat was parched and her head hurt. She answered to a city of Los Angeles phone alert, telling her she needed to leave.

Although she already had what she called her “apocalypse bag” in the car, Taylor was so nervous she grabbed extra toiletries, toothbrushes, clothes and water. She put her Pomeranian, Bu, in his carrier, grabbed a 36-by-24-inch painting of her two children and swaddled it in pillowcases, and loaded her car. As she drove to an evacuation center in Westwood, through smoke so thick it was like a deep fog descending on her neighborhood, Taylor cried, thinking of all the things she hadn’t had the time or the space in her car to gather in the night.

1 / 25 Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, L.A. City Councilman Mike Bonin and California Gov. Gavin Newsom look at a home along Tigertail Road in Brentwood burned by the Getty fire. (Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times) 2 / 25 California Gov. Gavin Newsom, from left, with Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin and L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti tour a home along Tigertail Road in Brentwood on Tuesday that was burned by the Getty fire. The National Weather Service issued a rare “extreme red flag warning” for Southern California through Thursday evening, saying winds could top 80 mph and be the strongest in more than a decade. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 3 / 25 Traffic on the 405 Freeway flows as flames roar up a steep hillside near the Getty Center in Los Angeles. The Getty fire has forced evacuations and burned more than 600 acres. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times) 4 / 25 The Getty fire broke out shortly before 2 a.m. Monday along the 405 Freeway near the Getty Center and spread to the south and west, threatening thousands of homes in Brentwood and other Westside hillside communities. (KTLA) 5 / 25 Firefighters try to save a home from the Getty fire on Tigertail Road in Los Angeles on Monday morning. (Christian Monterrosa/Associated Press) 6 / 25 A firefighting aircraft drops fire retardant on the Getty fire in Mandeville Canyon near the Brentwood Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times) 7 / 25 A man walks past a burning home during the Getty fire in Los Angeles on Monday morning. (Christian Monterrosa/Associated Press) 8 / 25 The sun rises over smoke-filled canyons above the Getty Center and a burned home on Tigertail Road as the Getty fire burns in Los Angeles. (Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times) 9 / 25 Firefighters head out for brush work along Sepulveda Boulevard in the Sepulveda Pass as the Getty fire as it burns in Los Angeles. (Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times) 10 / 25 Firefighters try to save a home on Tigertail Road during the Getty fire in Los Angeles on Monday morning. (Christian Monterrosa/Associated Press) 11 / 25 Firefighters work heavy brush along Sepulveda Boulevard in the Sepulveda Pass as the Getty fire burns in Los Angeles. (Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times) 12 / 25 A firefighter sprays down hot spots on a home along the 12000 block of Sky Lane on Monday in Los Angeles. (Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times) 13 / 25 From left, Betsy Landis, 90, and her neighbor Nola Hyland, 79, who both evacuated from their homes at the end of Mandeville Canyon, talk with Rochelle Linnetz inside the Westwood Recreation Center on Sepulveda Boulevard that was turned into an evacuation center. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times) 14 / 25 An L.A. firefighter keeps down flames at a burned home in the 1100 block of Tigertail Road in the Brentwood Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times) 15 / 25 Alex Holbrook, a student emergency medical technician at UCLA, talks with Sylvia Snow, 95, inside the Westwood Recreation Center on Sepulveda Boulevard, which was turned into an evacuation center. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times) 16 / 25 The sun rises over a smoke-filled canyon above the Getty museum as the Getty fire burns in Los Angeles. (Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times) 17 / 25 L.A. Fire Department arson team conducts an investigation near a utility pole of a possible area of origin of the Getty fire along the 1700 block of North Sepulveda Boulevard. (Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times) 18 / 25 Barn manager Stephanie Nagler leads a horse named Howie Doin to a horse trailer while helping to evacuate around 120 horses from the Sullivan Canyon Equestrian Community near the intersection of Rivera Ranch Road and Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times) 19 / 25 A helicopter makes a drop on the Getty fire, which was threatening thousands of homes in Brentwood and other hillside communities on the Westside of Los Angeles on Monday morning. (Gray Coronado/Los Angeles Times) 20 / 25 Aerial view of homes shrouded in smoke from the Getty fire. (KTLA) 21 / 25 Barn manager Stephanie Nagler, left, holds a rabbit named Chi Chi while helping to evacuate animals, mostly horses, from the Sullivan Canyon Equestrian Community near the intersection of Riviera Ranch Road and Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood. (Los Angeles Times) 22 / 25 Firefighters work the Getty fire as it burns homes along Tigertail Road in the Brentwood Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times) 23 / 25 Los Angeles firefighters mop up after a home was destroyed by the Getty fire along Tigertail Road in Los Angeles. (Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times) 24 / 25 Firefighters work in heavy brush along Sepulveda Boulevard in the Sepulveda Pass as the Getty fire burns in Los Angeles. (Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times) 25 / 25 A firefighter watches flames approach the Mandeville Canyon neighborhood during the Getty fire on Monday morning. (Christian Monterrosa/Associated Press)


By then, the Getty fire was raging, burning homes and making a run for Brentwood and points west.

Taylor says she’s grown weary of the lingering fear of fire, the possibility that she will need to get up at a moment’s notice and leave her home behind, the worry that sets in when her gas tank hits half-empty.

Taylor loves her house and the views it commands of the ocean. But she wonders if it is worth living, as she puts it, “on the edge of fear.”

Roberta Shintani and her son, Kevin, were also woken at 3 a.m. Their roommate told them the police had come by and said they needed to go. Two years ago, when flames lashed the hillsides above the 405, Roberta and Kevin had prepared to evacuate but ultimately weren’t required to. This time, they had to go.


Roberta gathered up some clothes and her laptop, Kevin grabbed his guitar and, with their two daschund mixes — Mowglie and Baloo — they made their way to an evacuation center in Westwood.

The streets were choked with cars. Debris whipped through the air. The sky, which was glowing orange when they woke up, “went from bright to extremely bright in a very short amount of time,” Kevin said.

It was a surreal scene, Roberta said, seeing the Westside streets jammed with cars, the sky orange, at 3 in the morning.

Kevin noted that Lakers star LeBron James, too, had been displaced — although he had tweeted he was looking for a hotel room well before Kevin and his mother left their home.


“He must have had an inside scoop,” he said.

Robert Lempert was awoken by a neighbor banging on the door of his Palisades home at 3:30 a.m. The Rand Corp. researcher had received several “panicked messages” from his mother-in-law, who lives in a neighborhood under evacuation. Lempert and his wife loaded up their cars with “go bags,” had his mother-in-law come over and waited for the order to evacuate. As of 10 a.m., they were “still in wait-and-see mode.”

Lempert, an expert on climate risk management, says there’s a growing awareness in his Westside neighborhood that these large-scale fires aren’t anomalous. The Getty blaze, and a smaller one in the Palisades last week, are vivid demonstrations of this “new normal,” Lempert said.

“It’s one thing to look at the risk maps and show them to your family,” he said. “It’s another to get a knock on your door at 3 in the morning.”


Lempert and his neighbors have taken steps to mitigate a fire’s ability to blow through their streets, chiefly by removing dry brush that can become kindling for firebrands, which he described as “a wind-driven sea of matches.”

For their part, Lempert and his wife have cut down some trees on their property and trimmed others, placed screens over their vents and installed metal skirts beneath their deck to shield it from embers.

“You see it slowly taking place,” Lempert said. “But the question is, are we doing it fast enough?”


Fires have a history of blasting out of control in the lush hills surrounding Danny Cahn’s home. In 1961, when Cahn was a preschooler, residents were forced to flee an inferno that swept through Bel-Air and Brentwood, razing 484 homes.

Life has never quite been the same since, Cahn said, the “big one” roared though, propelled by Santa Ana wind conditions that left a number of L.A.'s rich and famous homeless.

“There’s always a threat hanging in the air around here,” Cahn, 62, a retired film editor, said while snapping photos of helicopters and planes dropping loads of pink retardant and clean, white water on flames less than half a mile away. “I can recall six or seven major fires in my lifetime.”


It happened again early Sunday morning, when Cahn and his wife were awakened by the smell of smoke wafting through a bedroom window.

“We immediately packed up our belongings — and I sent my wife and Great Dane off to stay with relatives,” he said. “I’m ready to go too — but not yet. Right now, we have the best firefighters and air attack crews in the world taking care of things.”

By 1 p.m. Monday, Cahn had taken hundreds of photos amid what had become an almost familiar smoky spectacle: firetrucks, sirens blaring, racing to hot spots along two-lane neighborhood roads and the deafening sounds of aircraft flying just a few hundred yards overhead.

“When the smoke clears and the fires are out,” he said, “it’ll be a wonderful place to live — until the next wildfire.”