When the Palisades Fire broke out on Tuesday, tens of thousands of residents were abruptly forced to evacuate their homes, and the city roadways were clogged with people lining up hundreds of cars deep to get out.
Many of those evacuees were forced to ditch their possessions once more, leaving their automobiles in the streets as they fled for safety, after the fire started to spread at an uncontrollable rate.
Sandy Ivanhoe, one of several people who had to abandon their vehicle on Sunset Boulevard on Tuesday, said, “All of a sudden, we’re looking and the fire’s right there next to the car.” “Two policemen are running through cars yelling, ‘Get out, now!'”
Following directions, Sandy and her husband Elliot left their car and everything inside and walked to the beach.
They are now among the first locals to return to their communities, many of which are still lined with the burned-out cars that were left behind, as the fire continues to spread farther into the Santa Monica Mountains.
Using a bulldozer to push the cars aside and make room for their equipment, firefighters had to carve a path up numerous roadways at the price of dozens of cars.
The Ivanhoes claim that the essential items they brought with them before leaving their house were misplaced, so they concluded that everything they had taken was gone.
But it was the exact reverse.
“I get a call from your station, from a reporter, who says to me, ‘I have bad news, your car has been bulldozed,'” Ivanhoe remembered. “‘I don’t care, is it on fire?’ I asked. Is the vehicle in good condition?
They were able to recover the possessions they had been upset about just hours earlier, and it turned out that everything was OK.
They weren’t the only ones who wondered if their automobiles had been destroyed or bulldozed before they left on Thursday.
When the fire was first reported, Shelley Wagner had hurried to the scene to save her mother, who was 99 years old. Both of them had to abandon the automobile, just like the Ivanhoes. In a similar vein, they are once again in control and are doing their best to cope with the massive tragedy.
Wagner remarked, “It’s like little angels are around,” “In the deepest, darkest tragedy, of which there are many to be told in this.”
She attributes her car’s return to a letter she put on her dashboard explaining the reasons behind their desertion and who to contact in the event that the vehicle survived the fire.
“It was just a bright moment … in what has been just, really, a terrible, terrible couple of days” she stated.