The 24 Hours When L.A. Went Up in Flames

What most people seem to remember about the morning of Jan. 7 along the coast of Pacific Palisades was how pleasant it was: just a clear blue sky stretching over the art galleries and coffee shops and the bike path along the sand.

Two and a half miles inland, up in the Palisades hills, the wind had begun to pick up. Skyler Raskin, 19, was on the phone with her aunt when she looked out the window and noticed that the trash bins had blown all the way down the hill and into the street.

What Ms. Raskin did not know was that a small fire had begun to burn in the dry brush in the ridge above her house, and it, too, was being buffeted by the rising winds.

Within an hour, Ms. Raskin would be evacuating with her 14-year-old brother and dogs ahead of a roaring blaze that swept through much of the Palisades.

In a region with a long history of natural disasters, the infernos that began on that January day have produced one of the most catastrophic days Los Angeles has ever faced, leaving at least 27 dead, thousands of homes destroyed, billions of dollars in losses and a sense that the nation’s most populous county may never be the same again.

Even as some of those fires continue raging almost two weeks later, a clearer picture is emerging of the missteps and missed opportunities that contributed to the tragedy that day — and in the days that followed. To reconstruct the events, The New York Times conducted dozens of interviews and examined hundreds of witness videos and photos, emergency dispatch recordings, evacuation timelines, satellite images, emergency alert data, and internal fire department messages to trace both the path of the fire and what emergency workers did to slow it.

The review showed a series of planning failures, delayed evacuations and significant shortfalls in firefighting resources that together hampered efforts to limit the spread.

Fire dispatch transmissions suggest that firefighters did not arrive on scene until about 20 minutes after the first 911 call in Pacific Palisades, a possible missed chance to stamp out the blaze while it was still small, the review showed.

About 40 miles east in Eaton Canyon, where a second fire that spread through the community of Altadena killed 17 people, residents reported the first sign of fire at 6:10 p.m., but the first evacuation order didn’t go out until 7:26 p.m. — after residents started leaving on their own. An entire nursing home was forced to evacuate before the authorities arrived.

Firefighters repeatedly called for reinforcements, only to be told that none were available. Hydrants went dry. One firefighter was forced to fill a trash can with water from a pool.

Looming over it all was a weather challenge that firefighters had rarely encountered in decades of Southern California wildfires: a lethal confluence of wind and drought that might have doomed any response.

Kristin Crowley, the Los Angeles fire chief, said she was extremely proud of the work that crews did and continue to do. “Our firefighters are doing an incredible job,” she said.

In the days after the fire, Anthony C. Marrone, the Los Angeles County fire chief, hammered the same message over and over: The flames were too ferocious and the winds too intense to stop the infernos of Tuesday night, Jan. 7. “There’s nothing you can do to suppress the fire at that time,” he said in an interview.

Asked how he would advise preparing to avoid a similar situation in the future, he was blunt. “I don’t have the ability to make this not happen again,” he said.

Here is the story of how that first day unfolded:

From the beginning, there had been warnings that this winter day would not be typical for Southern California, where it often rains in January. There had been no serious precipitation in months, and forecasters cautioned that the Santa Ana winds coming in off the desert could reach an astonishing 100 miles per hour as they blew through the dry, brushy hills.

Dr. Rick Barbers, whose house in Pacific Palisades backed up against the Santa Monica Mountains, had strategized for years how to protect it. He fastidiously culled dry brush along the property line and covered flammable parts of his home with stucco. He hired a plumber to install a Wi-Fi -enabled sprinkler system on his roof.

So, in the morning calm of his Jan. 7 commute to work, Mr. Barbers was not worried about the forecast.

The Palisades, rising up from the coast near Santa Monica, had a long history of fire danger and had just seen a small brush fire a week earlier, on New Year’s Day.

Mindful of the “particularly dangerous situation” flagged by the National Weather Service, the Los Angeles Fire Department activated nine extra fire engines into a handful of vulnerable areas across the city ahead of the fires, a much less aggressive defense than what had been done in the past, when as many as 50 engines were sent out during high-wind events to be ready for fires. None of the extra units were sent to Pacific Palisades.

It was at 10:29 a.m. when the first 911 call came in: A fire had broken out high on a sandy ridge in the Palisades, in the same area of the earlier fire on New Year’s Day.

Chief Crowley fired off texts to neighboring department chiefs, who offered to send help.

Chief Marrone of the county Fire Department showed up at the command center himself and ordered a full ground and air mutual aid response. As the day wore on, the county would send three additional engine strike teams.

The wind was already intensifying, and it didn’t take long before smoke and embers were tumbling down the hillside toward the Highlands neighborhood.

Alan Feld, who lived near where the fire started, said the initial blaze had been limited to a fairly small area for the first 15 minutes or so, and might have been stopped. But by the time the first two fire engines got there, he said, it had already spread toward the houses.

“I remember saying to my friend, ‘They can get this, they can get this. They just have to get here,’” he said. “Because, I mean, we were almost crying at that point, saying, ‘They’ve got to get here now.’ And they just didn’t come.”

Aerial crews were on scene just before 10:50 a.m., with the first engines pulling in around the same time, according to radio dispatch transmissions. Fire department officials would not confirm when the first engines arrived, citing the continuing investigation of the fire.

By the time the units arrived, there was a line of fire tearing downhill, headed right toward a neighborhood of tightly packed houses.

“This thing is going to make a good run,” one crew member said.

By a little after 11 a.m., the aerial crews warned that nearby homes would be hit within minutes.

Still, no evacuation order had been issued — the first one would not come for another hour.

Instead, there was growing chaos. At 11:14 a.m., fire commanders were struggling to figure out where to locate a command post. By 11:21 a.m., the fire had been burning for more than an hour, but there were no crews in place to run operations on the western flank, where the wind was starting to push the flames. “We have no other L.A. City resource in place,” a dispatcher reported.

Mr. Barbers, his heart pounding, had rushed home from work to find the fire already on the edge of his neighborhood. His street was deserted — everyone had fled — but there was no sign of firefighters. In desperation, he pointed his garden hose at his well-constructed house but could already see flames rising beside the house next door.

Across the Palisades, an inferno was developing. One group of firefighters reported that fire was taking hold in houses all around them. Four people climbed into a pool to escape the advancing flames; escalating winds tossed burning embers far ahead of the fire, igniting new areas.

As the fire spread, more people were loading key possessions into their cars and trying to leave.

Ramis Sadrieh drove quickly to his parents’ home from work to evacuate them and gather medications, cash and important documents, and saw his 80-year-old neighbor, Mark Shterenberg, standing in the street as he left. Mr. Shterenberg said he was staying behind to look after his house. He would let Mr. Sadrieh know how his family’s was faring.

The first broad evacuation order, covering a wide swath of the Palisades, came at 12:07 p.m., nearly two hours after the fire had first begun tumbling down the hillside. “Gather people and pets and leave immediately,” it said.

Video shows that by 12:51 p.m., an enormous plume of smoke was billowing across the Palisades. CL-415 firefighting planes dropped load after load of ocean water on the flames.

Those who tried to escape found streets gridlocked. Sunset Boulevard, a key route in and out, was so clogged with honking cars and panicked residents that people were told to abandon their vehicles and flee by foot.

Video captured by Aaron Samson at 1:08 p.m. showed fire approaching the congested escape route. As Mr. Samson guided his older father-in-law from their car toward a sidewalk, he said, “We’re having to walk, this is crazy. There’s a fire right outside our car.”

1:08 p.m.

Mr. Samson and his father-in-law were forced to abandon a car on foot after they hit heavy traffic with fires burning next to the road.

Aaron Samson @Storywinning, via Facebook

A mile away, fire was also raging near Las Lomas Avenue, but there were no firefighters in position to fight the blaze. There was only the howling wind and the crackling of flames churning through empty houses.

A few blocks away, Mr. Barbers was still alone in his front yard with his garden hose. As flames spread to more and more homes, he got in his car and left the house behind.

By 2:32 p.m., the fire had churned through two miles and grown to 700 acres, racing toward Pacific Coast Highway.

Gathering for a news conference at Will Rogers State Beach, Chief Crowley and other officials described the scale of the fire: 10,000 houses threatened, 250 city firefighters on scene. The county Fire Department had deployed an additional 100 personnel. Aerial crews were fighting rising winds but still in the air, dropping water and fire retardant.

The winds were about to get worse, officials warned.

On the edge of Pasadena, where brushy canyons rise up into the San Gabriel Mountains, Max Belin noticed something out the window of his dining room at 6:10 p.m. It was an “explosion” of bright white light, he said.

He saw flames burning at the base of an electrical tower up in the dry slopes of Eaton Canyon, and called 911. Then he rushed to tell his fiancée and his neighbors that they needed to evacuate. Several people in the neighborhood also saw fire near one of the power structures, though exactly where it started remains unclear.

Chief Marrone, the county fire chief, was still near Pacific Palisades with many of his firefighters, helping colleagues with the city fight the fire there. But now Altadena, an unincorporated area that was his responsibility, was at risk.

He opened a navigation app and set directions to Eaton Canyon. He soon found himself stuck in freeway gridlock.

6:25 p.m.

While preparing to leave his home, Jeffrey Ku, a resident of Altadena, recorded a growing fire at the base of an electrical tower in Eaton Canyon.

Jeffrey Ku

The county swiftly shifted gears.

At around 6:40 p.m., the county Fire Department’s incident commander ordered 10 strike teams — a total of 50 engines — to the Eaton fire, according to the dispatch log.

At 6:36 p.m., a county helicopter arrived on scene. But the winds were so violent that crew members were yanked up off their seats and struggled to control their aircraft. They were accompanied by two copters capable of carrying hundreds of gallons of water.

At 6:45 p.m., the battalion chief in the lead helicopter canceled the water drops, sending the two other helicopters back to base. Winds had reached close to 100 m.p.h.

6:59 p.m.

Andy Tangalin recorded a Leonardo AW-139 firefighting helicopter flying across the Palisades. Shortly after, flight tracking data shows it began flying toward the Van Nuys Airport, where it remained grounded for the night.

Fire commanders established a series of command posts — first in the back of an S.U.V. on New York Drive, a major east-west artery in Altadena. As he arrived and assessed how fast the fire was spreading, Robert Garcia, the fire chief at nearby Angeles National Forest, ordered the command post moved several miles back, to Charles S. Farnsworth Park on the northeast edge of the community.

The fire chiefs of several other cities that hug the foothills — Arcadia, Pasadena and Sierra Madre, as well as Los Angeles County — gathered in person to plot strategy. They needed to fall back again, they decided, and set up an even larger command center. They moved into the Rose Bowl, a large stadium that could provide the size and logistics that the firefighting effort was clearly going to need.

Things quickly were getting out of control.

Firefighters realized that their own station at the base of Eaton Canyon, Station 66, was about to be overrun with flames and pleaded at 7:06 p.m. for support. Another voice came on and called for 20 fire engines and 10 strike teams. “I’ll take anything right now,” the firefighter said.

Not long after, a hill behind the Pasadena Park Healthcare and Wellness Center, a nursing home just south of Eaton Canyon, was engulfed in flames that appeared to be several stories high.

Staff members called 911 and the local fire department, and when they couldn’t reach anyone, they began moving the center’s 93 residents out on their own. Many were in wheelchairs or bed-bound, already in pajamas and sleeping gowns for the night. Staff members scrambled to ferry them all out, the nurses clutching fire extinguishers, the residents wearing N95 masks. Rhea Bartolome, the vice president of operations, scribbled on a clipboard to track whether everyone was accounted for.

Everyone gathered at a nearby 7-Eleven, the parking lot bathed in the red glow of a smoke-choked sky. Velma Wright, a 102-year-old resident, sat in a wheelchair, wrapped in blankets, her hair swirling in the wind.

Ms. Bartolome crouched down in front of her. “We’re going to get you to safety,” she said.

A series of private ambulances arrived to transport everyone away.

Residents near the mouth of Eaton Canyon had already begun throwing possessions into their cars and heading out; a video shows heavy smoke and sparks swirling around a house at 7:16 p.m. — 10 minutes before the first evacuation order was issued.

7:16 p.m.

Smoke and sparks billow around a home near the mouth of Eaton Canyon.

Cynthia Cardenas

Houses were burning, but there were few resources available to help carry out evacuations. At 8:28 p.m. the Pasadena water department asked fire crews for help because of fears that the blaze could reach 150-pound cylinders of chlorine gas.

By 9:01 p.m., with the fire pushing into the center of Altadena, a fire crew radioed in for help. “I need additional resources. I need an additional five type-one engines. I have homes being impacted.”

The dispatcher replied that only two engines were available.

The night was far from over. At around 10:10 p.m., a new brush fire was reported in the San Fernando Valley, the densely populated suburbs north of the Santa Monica Mountains, after a power line hit the ground in high winds. It was a blaze that could have opened a major new front in the firefight, though it was largely contained, in the end, at about 800 acres.

At the Palisades fire, which had exploded to about 3,000 acres, firefighters saw that water pressure was faltering. Three water storage tanks that help feed higher-elevation properties had been filled to hold 1 million gallons each, but the area’s reservoir, which can hold many millions of gallons more, was offline for maintenance.

So much water was being pulled out of the system, from firefighters tapping hydrants and from destroyed homes leaking water, that hydrants began running dry.

Mr. Shterenberg, the neighbor who had stayed back to try to defend his house, had texted Mr. Sadrieh at 9 p.m. that there was no longer any water in the neighborhood. At 10:38 p.m., he texted again to say he was trying to get through the gates at Mr. Sadrieh’s parents’ house to try to save it. It was the last time anyone would hear from him.

In the smoky darkness, many residents said they were uncertain where it was safe, and where it was not.

Dalyce Curry, 95, a former actress who appeared in the 1956 film “The Ten Commandments,” had traveled to the emergency room earlier that evening for a round of tests. Dalyce Kelley, her granddaughter, was driving her back to her cottage in northwest Altadena, and they could see the smoke and pulsing light of the Eaton fire from the freeway.

Yet while an evacuation order already had been issued for the area around Eaton Canyon, where the fire had begun, everything seemed more or less normal in Ms. Curry’s neighborhood, she said. As they pulled up to her house shortly after midnight, the neighbors were home and the power was on. There was no evacuation order.

Ms. Curry prepared to settle into her lounge chair, and Ms. Kelley started making her way to her own home about 30 miles away in Pomona.

At about 2 a.m., neighbors later told Ms. Kelley, the power went out in Ms. Curry’s neighborhood. Some residents of the area began leaving voluntarily, but there was still no formal evacuation order for the area.

The fire was taking a toll on crews. One member fighting the Eaton blaze was rushed to the hospital, and two more were injured in the Palisades. And the problems were multiplying: The Hurst fire in the Valley had grown to 500 acres, forcing evacuations.

Gas mains were breaking, and firefighters urged Southern California Edison, the electric utility, to shut down power in the Eaton Canyon area so they wouldn’t have to step over live power lines. But they ran into trouble. “I just met with Edison’s reps,” one firefighter reported over the radio. “They’re not going to be able to guarantee shutdown in here. They’re short on manpower. So we’re just going to have to treat everything as live and be heads up.”

(Edison said it had cut off power to three distribution circuits near where the Eaton fire started and had hundreds of workers on duty. “We were adequately staffed,” the company said in a statement.)

As the fire spread deeper into Altadena, jumping block to block, emergency managers broadened their evacuation orders to much of the community at 3:25 a.m. That one included Ms. Curry’s cottage on Krenz Avenue

She had a cellphone, and authorities were blasting alerts to such devices, but Ms. Curry rarely used hers. A neighbor went to knock on her door but got no response.

By 4 a.m., wind gusts in the mountains over Altadena reached 100 m.p.h.

Flying firebrands whipped into the face of Robert Robledo, a 45-year-old engine captain for the Forest Service who was battling the Eaton blaze. Wind gusts nearly knocked him off his feet.

They were “some of the most extreme conditions I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Robledo said later. With resources stretched, he started turning to garden hoses at times to douse embers and at one point emptied out someone’s trash can and filled it with water from people’s pools to throw at fires.

In the lower foothills, along the edge of Angeles National Forest, the power in Jeannette MacMahon’s neighborhood had gone out in the late afternoon. She texted her 77-year-old neighbor, Kim Winiecki, to see if she wanted to be picked up.

“I said, ‘Kim, I’ll come get you now.’ You know, she hated the wind. But she didn’t want to leave her house,” Ms. MacMahon said.

“I feel calm,” her neighbor texted back.

At 4:30 a.m., about an hour after an evacuation warning went out, Ms. Winiecki rejected another neighbor’s offer to help her leave. She said that she would walk out if she needed to go.

But she never left.

“Maybe there was a part of her that thought the fire wouldn’t hit her house, but the embers are flying and lighting the trees on fire,” Ms. MacMahon said. “She chose to stay. There’s no way she could have walked out. She decided this was her time.”

In the Palisades, firefighters watched as Palisades Charter High School started to catch fire. An apartment complex became engulfed. Crews that had been on the fire for hours were drained and were running short on even basic supplies.

“Some of the guys haven’t eaten since yesterday,” one said over radio communications.

Skyler Raskin, who had evacuated with her 14-year-old brother, had managed to make it to a family -friend’s house, only to have to evacuate again when the fire drew near.

She finally joined her parents at a Santa Monica hotel. Through the long night, a series of warnings from a smoke alarm company kept coming through to her parents’ phones. “Our house just burned down to the ground,” she said.

Around 4:15 a.m., Mr. Sadrieh awoke to a call back from the emergency dispatcher he had called earlier in the night, asking for them to try to get Mr. Shterenberg out. They were calling to confirm the address he had given them almost five hours earlier.

It was clearly too late, Mr. Sadrieh said. “He went down with the house.”

In Altadena, the evacuation orders now covered more than 52,000 residents. But Ms. Kelley had long since gone to sleep, confident that the fire would not spread from where it was when she had left her grandmother — three miles away, across thousands of homes — and confident that the authorities would evacuate her if that changed.

Then, at 5:30 a.m., Ms. Curry’s landlord texted people who knew her: “Did anyone get Dee Dee?”

Ms. Kelley, still asleep, did not see the message for another 90 minutes.

As the sun began to rise, the scale of the disaster was becoming clear: Flames had consumed schools and places of worship, working class mobile homes and celebrity mansions, state parks and landmark restaurants. Thousands of people were displaced. Many were missing.

And the fires were still spreading. Internal fire department documents show that crews had little expectation of containing the Palisades blaze and hoped to simply help direct its spread. “Keep the fire West of the Interstate 405,” the plan said.

A little after 7 a.m., Ms. Kelley awoke to see a stream of messages from her grandmother’s neighbors. She called the sheriff’s department and the fire department and 911, hoping for help to check on Ms. Curry. Getting no response, she got in her car and raced toward Altadena, driving once again into the thick smoke.

She was stopped by a police barricade.

“Officer, my 95-year-old grandmother is at home,” she recalled pleading with him. The officer would not allow her to pass but agreed to do a welfare check. He soon called with news that Ms. Curry’s home was gone.

Ms. Kelley rushed to the Pasadena Convention Center, where evacuees were gathered. She moved through crowds of people, scanning faces, hurrying to those who she thought from afar might be her grandmother. None were.

7:45 a.m.

Marina Solis, who went to check on her home, captured footage that showed flames had ravaged businesses along Lake Avenue in Altadena.

Marina Solis/@Marinaasolis via TikTok

Over at the Palisades, some 22 hours after the fire there had started, flames were still devouring homes, consuming mansion after mansion on the bluffs above Sunset Boulevard. Nick Price, 49, was trying to defend his home. He begged firefighters for help.

“We have no water,” one of them replied as flames threw embers across the canyon.

“Help! Help!” Mr. Price screamed through a handkerchief to another firefighter nearby. “I need more water!” Desperate, he dropped to his knees. “I love you,” he shouted, over and over, begging him to save his home from the inferno that already had burned through his fence and part of his yard.

The second firefighter helped put out the bulk of the flames, then left Mr. Price to stamp out embers with buckets of water from his neighbor’s pool.

In Altadena, someone else was defending his own neighborhood: Isaac Baeza, a captain with Cal Fire, the state firefighting agency. Mr. Baeza was off duty, but then the fire spread to a house near his home, just a few blocks from Ms. Curry’s.

It was around 9 a.m., and Mr. Baeza and a friend began working to clear fuels from around nearby houses to keep the fire from spreading, convinced that saving the street was doable.

But then a small fire ignited in the wood pile near his own house. He grabbed the garden hose and turned on the nozzle. Nothing came out.

Desperate, he called one of his friends who was on duty.

“My house is on fire and it’s going to burn. I need you to come. Do you have water?” Mr. Baeza pleaded.

“We’re coming, dude, we got you,” the firefighter replied.

Flames continued to rage higher, singeing Mr. Baeza as he scrambled to keep the blaze from spreading. He had just climbed into his vehicle and was preparing to flee when his friend called back.

“Hey man, we can’t get there,” the man said. There were too many other crises to address.

Mr. Baeza started the truck and drove out of the neighborhood, watching in the rearview mirror as his home went up in flames.