As massive wildfires engulf the Los Angeles area, Montrealers living in the Californian city are bracing for the worst, their eyes fixed on the smoke-choked skies, many preparing to flee at a moment’s notice while others have already cleared out.
Isabel Dréan, a film director and producer originally from Montreal, lives in Agoura Hills, not far from the Palisades fires currently burning. She has seen this before, having been forced out of her home in 2017 during the Woolsey Fire.
“So now we are ready. We are packed. Our cars are packed with our belongings and ready to go,” said Dréan, citing concern about the strong winds, despite the fire still being a good distance away.
“The fire travels super fast and often jumps. This is where the danger is, and that’s why everybody is on watch.”
Thousands of firefighters are battling at least four blazes that have killed at least two people and destroyed more than 1,000 structures across the Los Angeles area as of early Wednesday morning. A pair of Quebec water bombers and their crews are also in California, helping fight the wildfires.
Everything is dry in the Santa Monica Mountains, Dréan explained, and fires start easily as embers carried by the wind touch down. The winds are so strong that planes aren’t even being used in her area to fight the fires, she said.
“We’re thinking of maybe leaving early, before the evacuation, because we live in a small town and there’s only two ways out,” she said. “It’s a paradise here, but when this happens, it’s very problematic to escape.”
Skies darkening ‘like an eclipse’
Jamie Ross, a visual artist and filmmaker, lives between Montreal and Los Angeles. While in California, he lives in Westlake, not far from Hollywood. On Tuesday, he said he was in a car headed into the city and the “smell of smoke was palpable.”
Arriving in Altadena, where thousands of hectares have already burned, Ross said there was a wall of fire.
“From the highway, you could just see multiple fires breaking out, completely uncontained,” Ross said. “We woke up this morning and the sun is bright red. It’s like an eclipse outside. It’s terrifying.”
Actor Yanic Truesdale, known for his role in the television series Gilmore Girls, lives in Silver Lake, a neighbourhood near East Hollywood. He said everything was relatively normal until last night.
“The wind is just insanely, insanely strong,” said Truesdale, who is from Montreal. “The fires just really expanded quickly and we lost power.”
Electrical infrastructure near his home burst, sending sparks into the air for hours. He said he wasn’t sure if his neighbourhood was going to catch fire, so he left for the night to stay with a friend.
“It’s wild. It’s ongoing,” he said. “The sky is completely black. As if it’s going to be a storm and rain heavily, but it’s just smoke.”
Truesdale has decided to leave the area with friends. He said he is looking for available hotel rooms in Orange County.
Poor air quality, fear of traffic jams
Former Montrealer Evara David moved to Los Angeles about three years ago and works as a corporate attorney there. She lives in the Santa Monica area, about a 10-minute drive from the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood.
At work on Tuesday, about 10 minutes in the opposite direction, she noticed what she thought were clouds forming in the distance. She and her colleagues quickly realized it was smoke, but they thought maybe a large building was on fire at first.
“From there, for the rest of the day, the sky just went darker and darker and darker,” said David.
Evara David says when she returned to her Santa Monica, Calif., home after work on Jan. 7, the area was covered in smoke. Although there was no evacuation order for her neighbourhood at that point, she had reason to flee.
She headed home around 5 p.m. where her mother was visiting. She went to the roof of her building and saw flames in the distance. It looked bad, but it was still far off, she said. Then evacuation warnings started affecting neighbourhoods nearby and she decided to flee.
In some areas, she said, people were abandoning their cars in stand-still traffic. She didn’t want to get caught in that, and the air quality was worsening. She said she was getting a headache.
She left with her mother and dog around 9:30 p.m. They headed to Orange County and got a hotel room.
“We wanted to get out before the hotels starting booking up and before there was a huge amount of traffic,” said David, noting a turning point for her was getting text messages from experienced friends in the area telling her to get out.
“This was an unprecedented event for me.”
