Los Angeles wildfires

As news-aware blog readers will have realised, we have been in Los Angeles during the exact timeframe of the most destructive wildfires to ever hit this city. It's currently Friday morning (we arrived on Monday) and the two biggest fires are still raging, new ones keep popping up, 180000 people have been evacuated, thousands of homes have been destroyed and at least ten people have died.

We are safe and currently at LAX, on track to fly out to Tokyo in a couple of hours. But here's how things played out from our perspective...

Tuesday

This was my birthday and our planned first day at Universal Studios. Right from when we woke up that morning, it was incredibly windy. During the day at Universal Studios, both restaurants we visited — The Three Broomsticks and Mel's Diner — as well as the Despicable Me ride were affected by power outages caused by wind but managed to get things up and running again. I don't remember it feeling too windy while we were actually in the park... I guess we were sheltered by the buildings around us.

As we left the park that night, the palm trees in CityWalk were bending quite a lot. As we drove home, some traffic lights and street lights were out, and there were branches on the roads. I had to clear some rubbish off the road so we could get to our driveway, and we had to work hard to hold the gates open. A sheet of iron was flapping off a shed nearby, and I protected my head with my arm in case the iron took flight.

In the caravan, our wifi was down but our power was fine. Our host messaged from his home down the street, where he had no power. At some point we became aware that the Palisades, Eaton and Hurst fires had started that day and were raging out of control. The closest one was about 20 miles away.

Wednesday

This was to be our one downtime day between our two big birthday days at Universal Studios. We hung out in the caravan until mid-afternoon, monitoring the news and evacuation zones, and wondering what we could do that was safe and wouldn't take us near fires or get in anyone's way.

During the day, people started checking in on us and I answered that the sky was blue in our suburb (North Hollywood). We also got an email from Universal Studios at 10:20am saying they were closed that day but still intending to be open the next day.

Our evening plan got cancelled, so we ended up visiting a second-hand bookstore, going to see Wicked and then going out for Thai for my belated birthday dinner. When we eventually left the caravan for that outing, we saw that the sky was NOT blue in the other direction!

Around 6pm on Wednesday, a new fire started in the Hollywood Hills. This one was the closest to us, only 4 or 5 miles away. We made sure all emergency alerts were turned on on our phones. At 8:30pm we got an email from Universal Studios saying they would not be open the next day, so there would be no second day at Universal Studios for us!

We got the boys to pack their bags to a sufficient state of readiness that would allow us to quickly evacuate in the middle of the night if we needed to, while simultaneously reassuring them that we were safe and it was very unlikely we would need to evacuate. I didn't get enough sleep due to staying up until after midnight to keep an eye on things.

Thursday

We woke to the news that the Sunset fire, the one closest to us, had been contained overnight. It smelled smoky when we opened the door of the caravan, and there was ash on our car. Air quality ranked extremely poor!

We now had a free day and a 9th birthday to celebrate, so we looked into what we could do. Our first idea of a VR escape room didn't work out as they were closed due to power outages, so we ended up doing an hour of PC gaming at a store in a mall not too far away, followed by Domino's for lunch (J's request, but alas, they didn't have BBQ Meatlovers!), another hour of gaming for the boys, cookie dough and ice cream for afternoon tea, and sushi dinner with B's cousin. For this outing, we put all our bags into the car in case we couldn't return to the caravan, and carried our passports on us all day.

While the boys were doing their second hour of gaming, B and I learnt the location-based emergency alert settings on our phones were working. An evacuation warning was sent to almost 10 million people by mistake, including us! Our phones made a noise and a message came up — it was different to a text message and we couldn't find it again once we swiped it away. But we both managed to get a screenshot of the retraction a few minutes later! In the meantime, there was some confusion and kerfuffle in the mall around us as everyone tried to figure out what was going on!

Friday

The sky was clearer this morning as we headed to the airport. We really hope they get the remaining fires under control ASAP. Our experience was nothing compared to those who've faced a truly harrowing ordeal and/or lost everything.

(We are now in the air and I'm publishing this post using the one-hour-free in-flight wifi. Japan, here we come!)