Two Friends’ Rush to Save a Pacific Palisades Family Home From the Fire

It seemed as if the sky was raining fire on Orly Israel’s home. With embers whipping through the air, trees blazing and alarms blaring, Mr. Israel raced through the yard, hosing down bushes in a desperate attempt to save the house.

Mr. Israel, 30, had returned to the house in the Alphabet Streets neighborhood of Pacific Palisades on Tuesday evening with a friend after evacuating that morning with his brother and parents. “You could see it from the bedroom window,” he said of their view from the house on Tuesday morning. “You could see the flames coming down the hill.”

Ordered to evacuate, his family rushed to pack the cars with their most precious possessions — books, memories, a crate of notebooks and journals for Mr. Israel. “The embers were just flying through the sky,” said Mr. Israel, who said he moved into the house on his 10th birthday.

After leaving, Mr. Israel and a friend watched from a distant vantage point as the fire approached his family’s neighborhood. They decided to go back to try to protect the house, driving through “thick and black” smoke that limited their visibility to several feet.

Wearing swimming pool goggles and N-95 masks, they sprayed down spot fires and moved flammable furniture inside. But the intense heat and swirling embers pushed them back.

“It wasn’t even safe being there at all,” said Mr. Israel.

“His whole backyard was basically on fire,” said Mr. Israel’s friend, Tanner Charles Schaaf, a content creator who chases storms. But he had never seen anything like this before, he said.

“I just stood there and was like, it’s over,” Mr. Schaaf said. “We can’t fight it.” He recorded a video and prayed as the two men gave up their efforts and ran out the front door into an apocalyptic-looking night.

As they fled the house, Mr. Israel saw a large tree with flames licking its trunk in the front yard. “When that tree falls, it’s going to destroy our house,” he said. In videos sent by other friends in the neighborhood, he said, it looked like every home on the street was on fire.

“I’m thinking about my family. I’m thinking that any future plans I had that are totally out the window,” he said, adding that he had felt unprepared for the ferocity of the fire. Hours later, he said, his eyes were still stinging from the embers, and he didn’t know what his family would do next.

“It’s just, wait for the bad news that the house is completely gone, and then wait until they let us come pick through the rubble,” he said. “And then, I don’t know. I have no idea. Do I move to another state where they don’t have fires?”

“What happens to the city?” he added. “Neighborhoods are going to be completely gone.”