Right now, only five miles from where I live in Santa Monica, there’s a fire raging in Pacific Palisades. The black cloud — painted by flashes of orange — reaches high into the sky, and can be seen for miles and miles. It’s a product of some kind of (currently unknown) ignition source coupled with intense Santa Ana Winds that have been punishing the LA Area all day. As crews work to contain the fire, one difficulty is actually getting first responders down roads blocked by abandoned cars, and making sure roads are clear for evacuations; this video shows a bulldozer with no choice but to shove those abandoned cars to the side.
Right away, I want to make clear that, though this article is about cars, and thus relevant to us as a car website, these vehicles don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Yes, we love automobiles and we hate seeing them damaged, but this Pacific Palisades fire is 1,200 acres in size [Update 3:16 AM Eastern: Now it’s over 2,900 acres], and has led to an order of evacuation for 30,000 people, per the New York Times. The people are what matter.
It’s terrifying, and as someone who saw this on my way to work today, I pray for the people in the Pacific Palisades community:
After I returned from work, I saw the flames from Santa Monica:
Anyway, the clip I’m referencing in the headline is this one from local news outlet KTLA:
KTLA’s @GeneKangTV reports from the perimeter of the #PalisadesFire where crews needed to clear vehicles using a bulldozer to make access for firefighters. Live coverage: https://t.co/ZEEfGXODEx pic.twitter.com/ziOctuFD7X
— KTLA (@KTLA) January 7, 2025
As KTLA reports, an actor named Steve Guttenburg used his platform to warn drivers not to take their keys with them when they feel they have to abandon their cars:
He told KTLA 5’s Gene Kang that he’s urging people who have left their cars on Palisades Drive to leave their keys behind so they can move the cars to make room for incoming fire trucks.
“What’s happening is people take their keys with them as if they’re in a parking lot. This is not a parking lot. We really need people to move their cars,” the “Police Academy” actor explained. “If you leave your car behind, leave the key in there so a guy like me can move your car so that these fire trucks can get up there.”
Palisades Drive.
“There are people stuck up there. So we’re trying to clear Palisades Drive and I’m walking up there as far as I can moving cars,” he revealed, pointing up to the hill where traffic was slowly making its way down.
Because I live under a rock, I don’t know who Steve Guttenburg is, but I can tell you one thing: I like the cut of his jib. What a badass!
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Anyway, far too many people failed to do what Guttenburg has been advising, and as a result, with no way to move the cars, officials had to bulldoze those vehicles out the way to clear a path for evacuations and emergency crews. Per KTLA:
Multiple drivers did not take that advice, however, and officials used a massive bulldozer to push stopped cars to the side of the road on Palisades Drive and create a path for emergency vehicles.
“If this is your car, unfortunately, it’s an emergency situation, and this is what they have to do,” KTLA’s Gene Kang explained from the scene.
The sound of that creaking metal in that smoke-filled video is pretty shocking. You can see multiple Teslas, a Mercedes EV, a Camry (which is getting crushed) , and lots of other fairly new cars, plus there’s an old Ford F-150 work-truck and an older Prius. The reporter says the cars line the street as far as his eyes can see, all just sitting there about to be plowed like a deep snow.
Here’s to hoping the drivers are OK, and that at this road gets cleared so fire crews can do their jobs and folks can escape as needed.
Update (3:16 A.M. ET): New footage from NBCLA includes an interview of a man named Adam Handler, whose Audi you can watch get absolutely crushed by Dozer Team 5:
Update (7:39 A.M. ET): According to KTLA, here’s what some of the cars look like now, so moving them with a bulldozer was both clearly necessary and not ultimately significant in terms of damage:
Top Image: NBCLA (YouTube)
When I was in grade 5, we got evacuated
out of my hometown because of a forest fire that took out 300k+ acres and got within a mile of the community. The Canadian Air Force had to fly us out in Hercules transports because there was no driving out. All the men under age 45 (IIRC) stayed behind to fight the thing. My dad was over 50, so he came with us.
We were in Winnipeg for over a week while the fire got closer and closer. Luckily, it never got to town. Wee got flown home to see perfectly healthy patches of forest next to blackened wastelands.
David, you and Elise stay safe. Get out if you have to.
I used to live in Huntsville, Alabama. A couple years before I moved in a major EF4+ tornado went down a busy street and through two major intersections during rush hour. This caused absolute mayhem and left a giant pile of cars.
Fortunately, it just missed a big crane company who had had their employees shelter instead of go home. After the storm passed, the crane company set to work and setup every crane they could. People showed up at their door and told them they knew how to operate a crane or a forklift and they were set to work. Even with the cranes, it took all night to clear the pile and get to everyone, but these cranes and forklifts, along with skilled operators and riggers saved lots of lives by getting to injured trapped in these cars much quicker than if they relied upon tow trucks.
Which gets to my question about the use of a bulldozer. Why not a giant forklift or a mobile Crane? Either could pick up a car, throw it in the ditch and get another one much quicker than this bulldozer can shove a pile of them.
I’d wager the bulldozer is the safest and quickest option in this case – no rigging, no picking up heavy vehicles several feet up in the air to stack them.
The bulldozer is a fire department vehicle and is probably more often used to perform other jobs, so it’s also available when needed.
Looks like it is a fire department vehicle. Bulldozers can be highly effective at putting out fires. It looks like it is actually configured to knock down trees based on the roof protection and blade design.
But in this case, having more heavy equipment available would be an advantage. Forklifts in particular can move a car in seconds.
The bulldozer is used to make fire breaks. There is probably a firefighting reason for it to need to go up that street, it just happens to be clearing its own way and a path for other emergency vehicles. I saw another video on the ‘dozer that said it has a 16’ blade, so it needs some space to come through.
The drivers abandoned the cares when the trees around them were bursting into flames, so it’s entirely possible these cars are just burned-out shells by the time they’re removed – no need to worry about a little body damage.
This. The fire service dozer was in the area already trying to get access to an area where it could cut fire line. It was probably diverted to clear the street so fire engines could make access.
They’re absolutely burned out shells at this point.
If you can’t get a fire engine in, how would you get a crane or giant forklift in? The ‘dozer was already there for fire-fighting purposes.
Hopefully with daylight, they can get aerial resources working and stop the fires’ (there are three currently burning in LA County) progress.
I’m going to go with sometimes the imperfect tool you have right now is better than the perfect tool that will take some time to get.
Much like your story, the bulldozer was possibly nearby while it might have taken a significant amount of time to get cranes or large forklifts on the scene and the road had to be cleared ASAP.
I wonder if those repo guys that are famous on social media taking cars from driveways in 5 seconds while the owner is getting their gun ready, would help in this situation to lift cars out of the way faster.
I have no problem with what the bulldozer is doing other than that it does not seem very good at it. Where’s the piece of shit predatory tow truck drivers when they could be helpful.
State law should allow retrieval fees of $1,000 + daily storage charges in this situation. The tow trucks will have everything cleared out before the bulldozer arrives.
Holy hell David, stay safe, and everyone else too. It’s been insane watching how fast this has exploded.
This is just a devastating fire and I hope they can make progress today. Just horrible. I hope everyone can stay safe.
I thought Evel Knievel showed us the way to solve this problem decades ago.
You know what I would break my promise to never Pay Per View if someone was going to jump a fully loaded pumper truck over 40 cars.
Fire trucks weigh more than motorcycles, so they can jump farther because of the inertia. That’s just physics.
Deadset. With that many eucalypts in the background…you might be safer living in Adelaide.
Also… that’s a tiny fire by area in my experience so to see it on the news in Oz is slightly insulting but also might be a bit of America bashing by local news editors OR a slow news day…
The big problem is these three fires popped up in heavily populated areas, and the area is being slapped around by 80-100mph winds. So they have massive evacuations ongoing, a lack of firefighters because of off season, and all aviation resources are grounded from wind risk.
Edit: Sort of imagine a 3000 acre wildfire erupting in the middle of Sydney in the middle of a cyclone with no rain.
Yeah, a heavily populated area with a ton of very flammable vegetation and only a few roads in and out. I drive through this area with some regularity and, while it is (was) beautiful, it seemed deeply unsafe to me from a fire risk perspective. This is a case where I would have preferred to have been wrong.
Yeah, it’s a tiny fire compared to many we had when I lived in Colorado- 200000 acres plus. But those were in sparsely populated areas. Kommkat is absolutely right in the comparison he makes.
Yep the eucalyptus are all over there. They were brought to California because they’re fast growing and were going to be used for railroad ties. But nobody thought about the density of the wood and it’s no good for that application. Eucalyptus burns like gasoline. Oil. David is pretty safe, he is in Santa Monica. Riviera country club might go up in flames
I wonder which Insurance company will be the first to say that if you abandon your car of your own free will, you have no claim? Most cars have push button start now. If you’re running for your life, who’s going to take the time to fish out their fobs, take off their house keys, and then throw the fobs back in the car?
The burned down house is probably going to need new door locks when you get back.
Just toss the whole key ring on the seat.
Even if you have a traditional key, the force of habit and muscle memory is strong in a moment like this when you’ve been turning the car off, pulling the key from the slot and putting it in your pocket in more-or-less one move for 20 years.
I’m not sure I totally understand.
So like…. if 4 cars block the road out of somewhere, it forces EVERYONE to abandon their cars who is trying to get out… right?
Whoever jumped out first should be the one responsible for everything else, imho.
Why the F did they jump out of their cars in the first place?
Fear of impending firey death?
You can’t expect people to act rationally in a disaster. Bush/wild fires are properly scary, and can be very disorientating.
Not sure how it works over there, but here we have a leave early, leave now (which is door knocked) or a too late and stay and defend.
Ok, but these people seemed to do neither, the leave and then get someplace scary, then block the entire road and exit their vehicles. That type of behavior could get a lot of people killed. I just don’t understand blocking the road during a disaster.
Speculation: if the road is going toward the fire, you can either a) drive forward and hope you can turn off and/or around before you hit too much smoke and/or fire or b) ditch the car and run another, less constrained, direction on foot.
Driver said the trees were bursting into flames.
I assume people get stuck in traffic as all the neighborhoods dump onto streets where some may be officially closed or not officially closed but impassible because of fire.
When you can’t count on roads, the car becomes a liability.
Sure, but what kind of asshole sees the one open spot to get past everyone, and drives into that spot, then gets out of the car?
You know where the fire is, right?
I’m assuming behind them, since they were driving away from it? If it was in front of them, why were they driving towards it? And when they got near it, why didn’t they turn around and drive the other way?
I was mainly referring to California, and how maybe some socal residents (not all, mind you) are more than a little bit self-centered.
People make poor decisions when they panic. If you think you are about to get burned to death you’re not going to think about how your immediate efforts for self-preservation could cause problems for others.
The traffic through this area is terrible even without a wildfire. With the extreme winds fanning the flames, there really wouldn’t be any way to flee in your car even in normal traffic, let alone this evacuation traffic. There are very few roads out of there. That’s why I mentioned above that I have thought for years that Pacific Palisades was a very unsafe place to live.
You clearly have not been in the Palisades or Topanga.
It’s not a new generic suburban developer landscape with huge wide boulevards and 4 lane wide streets.
Sunset is 4 lanes wide – but it’s narrow, with minimal shoulders and typically does not have a center dividing/turning lane.
Topanga is 3 lanes wide with minimal shoulders.
The main roads up in the hills & canyons are the width of three cars – and when there’s a car or truck parked on one side of the street, that barely leaves room for two cars to pass.
When you get on the smaller streets, which are the width of two cars, when one is parked on the side of the road, you have to wait for the person coming downhill to pass before you can go uphill.
These streets are not meant for everyone to leave all at once.
We had similar occur in the Oakland Hills for those fires back in 1991.
100% this. If you’ve never been to the area you can’t really comprehend how much of a PITA it is to get around there in normal times, let alone a full-blown evacuation. The constant construction in the area doesn’t help either. Brentwood is the same way.
Same with the Hollywood Hills, Bel Air, Holmby Hills, Upper Beverly Hills, Laurel Canyon, Beechwood Canyon, Los Feliz, Encino, Hidden Hills, Tarzana, Calabasas, Sherman Oaks…
…and its not just construction. It’s the older kids, gardeners, pool guys, nannies, maids, personal trainers, dog walkers, interior decorators, food deliveries, realtors – almost every house has 3-6 cars in the driveway/parked out front at any given time.
People forget that LA is a city that’s over 100 years old – and these areas & roads were never intended for dense luxury residential development.
Can you imagine if a big fire broke out along Mulholland, in Franklin Canyon, Stone Canyon or Griffith Park??
Now Runyon Canyon, Nichols Canyon, the Hollywood Hills and Laurel Canyon is on fire –
My Husband, who lives in a high-rise on Holloway in WeHo – South of Sunset, is now being evacuated.
This is incredibly BAD folks.
I actually have been there a few years ago, but I don’t understand how that changes anything.
I just don’t understand why someone would stop IN the road as opposed to on the side of it. They should be charged with something.
Do not buy another truck this week.
Fire is serious stuff, fortunately for me I live on the desert side of town. The East side of the Cascades is forest fire country so I keep Inciweb bookmarked. There were evacuation orders near me, lots of smoke and we canceled two trips because of fire this summer.
Stay sake David, as a fellow transplant (been here 20+ years now) fires like this still scare the shit out of me.
I hope you are safe and unscathed. When this is over and back to whatever we call normal these days, I look forward to your posts on scouring the interwebs for an amphibian to add to your fleet so next time your lover and you can just drive out into the ocean and wait it out.
Also, it seems odd that the inserted autoplay video is of Torch driving a tank. Just sayin’…
That’s why I bought my Range Rover. It’s an amphibious exploring vehicle with air intake valves.
an actor named Steve Guttenburg
Dang, I feel old. David, go watch Short Circuit. Then you’ll know who Fisher Stevens is too.
Also David, I don’t know where you guys live in SaMo, but I heard they are now evacuating the area north of San V. Please be careful tonight and if they tell you to go, GO. Since you just (sorta) moved to SoCal you may not have seen how quickly fires can spread around here, especially with the Santa Anas and how dry everything is currently. Santa Monica can get hugely gridlocked even though there are multiple ways out. Be safe. If you need to leave I’d head down to Ocean and take that to Venice and the Marina and down further south.
Yep. Here is the live evacuation map for Santa Monica:
https://experience.arcgis.com/template/6bc2f1430edc40d39e866f05706aa49c/?draft=true
Thank you, and thank you Jonah. I’m right off Wilshire. It’s getting close!
Did you install Watch Duty yet?
Gather all the Puffalumps (well, your equivalent of the Puffalumps) and be ready to GTFO if they make that call — just in case. Hope y’all stay safe.
Oh, let’s not talk about Fisher Stevens in Short Circuit. Straight up racist portrayal right there. Instead, watch Fisher Stevens in Hackers which is only insulting to hackers, the internet, and people who like good movies.
Agreed, especially as seen through the lens of the present. However, I still love the line “Come on, come on! We’re wasting valueless time here!”
Steven Fischer, his real name, not so interesting now is he?
I’ll just quietly turn to dust over here, as is appropriate for someone of my age.
Didn’t he build a press and make some bibles or something?
All I know is that the Stonecutters made him a star
You are 12 hours too late to make that joke first, but classic Simpsons references are always appreciated, I suppose.
They also held back the electric car.
Mythbusters would have had that cleared much faster.
Steve Guttenberg? He starred in “Cocoon,” the movie that helped launch the career of Tawnee Welsh. I had no idea there was such a thing as wildfire valet parking attendant. Only in CA. That’s a career in ashes.
He was the hot ticket for about 5 minutes, and then faded with astounding speed and depth.
Wow what was that Mazda truck you took a picture of? The paint on it held up nicely for its probably old age.
I had two takeaways from this article: a nice red B2000 and that David doesn’t know who Steve Guttenburg is.
To be fair, I had to look Guttenburg up, too. Dude seems like a good guy for pitching in advice like that, though.
It’s LA there are probably fancy spas that work on a vehicle and its owner at the same time.
David, now that you’re in California, get the Watch Duty app and set it to alert you about any fires in your area.
(And now that you’re married, your first responsibility should be to make sure your wife is out of harm’s way.)
https://www.watchduty.org
This is really good advice. I’ve never lived in ca, but we have our own weather/nature risks to deal with in Central Texas. Not to be paranoid, but having those warnings is critical as is a contingency plan and make sure your wife and family are all on the same page.
Be safe
As a Search and Rescue volunteer a couple counties north of LA whose team is responsible for managing evacuations, this makes me sad and frustrates me to no end. Yes, people get caught off guard occasionally and have no choice but in general they’ve probably received a reverse 911 call, Nixle alert, had a deputy or SAR vehicle drive their street blaring the two-tone siren which means evacuate, heard from their friends, and seen it on TV by the time they finally decide they should evacuate when they see the flames a few blocks away. Not to mention this wind event and accompanying Red Flag Warning has been all over the news and social media for days.) I’ve seen it personally multiple times.
For goodness sakes people (who live in fire prone areas), pay attention, have your stuff and a plan together, and get ready when you come under an evacuation warning and leave when you get an evacuation order.
Problem is a lot of these canyon areas have choke points or just a single road to access- for example look at the neighborhood off of big rock drive in Malibu. A fire like this that blows up quickly and moves fast can easily trap people or just move faster than people can evacuate.
Now the discussion of if it’s smart to live in a place with limited evacuation routes is one we definitely need to have, but people like the views…
You’re right on both points.
(And I did disclaim the first in my comment.)
Are you in Santa Barbara or SLO county?
Santa Barbara
Everything’s going to be okay, the Stonecutters are on it.
COTD
Unfortunately they are a bit busy right now trying to control Greenland.
Similar problem to hurricane evacuations in south Florida- So many people overwhelming the road system that an evacuation would take days. And then the gas stations run outa fuel…
Except in Florida, you can only go north. The most you can go e/w is about 2 hours, which solves…not a lot. You can go anywhere but west in Cali.
You can also go south, depending on the track. South was a viable option for that hurricane last year that made landfall near Tampa Bay.
Of course 20/20 hindsight helps.
My mom used to live in a seniors only trailer park near Naples. Those old folks were smart- Days before predicted landfall they’d caravan up to around I-10 and take up residence in most of a motel. Ideal place to hunker- They could go east, west, or north if needed,
lol. Going south from Tampa was a really bad idea, for both of the back to back hurricanes. Sarasota got pummeled, so did basically every city/town down to Naples on the Gulf.
It’s really easy to be trapped in SWFL when all the airports close and all the roads are parking lots. In the case of Milton, your only shot would have been to get to Miami (way many days in advance), or get out of the South all together. Easier said than done.
Hiding from a hurricane in Miami seems like doubling down on a bad bet.
I meant South as in “generally south” not just directly south. So southeast would be an option. I would expect someone escaping a Gulf hurricane to avoid the Gulf coast in general even if they went north.
IIRC West Palm Beach was barely touched apart from some random tornado action on the fringes of Milton. I remember distinctly because I was hoping for Mar a Lago to get smashed.
Two things:
“You can go anywhere but west in Cali”
I beg to differ, sometimes west is the ONLY way to go.
I was in San Diego for one of the worst fires in California history, the Cedar fire:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedar_Fire
Take a close look at the satellite photo on that Wiki page and you’ll see that fire pretty much surrounded the city and was making its way west to the sea. Thanks to lots of Australian gum and eucalyptus trees that fire was hot, fast and unpredictable, easily jumping freeways including IIRC highway 15. The smoke reminded me of the worst days of living in the 1970s LA smogbowl.
Fortunately for me at the time I was living a few blocks from the ocean and the beach so worst case I had clear access to the one place the fire could not follow.
I getcha. Sometimes when you are trapped, you are trapped. I was more speaking in a general sense, that when a whole boatload of people need to split town at once, there seems to be a lot more options out that way.
I was on the 15 when that fire jumped over it and saw an arch (rainbow? firebow?) of flames. It was otherworldly, going from daylight to pitch blackness and then seeing oncoming headlights going southbound on both sides (and the median) of the 15. One of the most terrifying experiences of my life. I then rushed home to pack a go bag and got evacuated about an hour later. That was the day I learned that wildfires are nothing to underestimate and I got real lucky.
Glad you made it out.
I lived in Tierrasanta and the fire didn’t cross the 52 until we were able to evacuate. Basically, we were fortunate that the wind didn’t change directions until later in the day. We had some damage in the complex but nothing like places further east/northeast of us.
I was in PB. Not too near the fires but we got all the smoke.
Need to get out of the neighborhoods first, which is the problem.
Yeah, except you typically have a week’s warning that a hurricane is likely to hit your area. You have a lot more time to evacuate in the event of a hurricane than you do from a wildfire.
Too bad they don’t have the big V-plows there as that would clear a path quicker than the bluff blade of a bulldozer.
Just chain some of the cars to the blade in kind of a triangular shape.
Ya gotta “run what ya brung”.
Yeah, definitely set up for cutting fire breaks and not plowing cars.
Steve Guttenburg
There’s a name I haven’t heard in a very long time, want to say maybe mid 1990s?
Stonecutters stopped pushing him.
That’s what they want you to think.
I thought NYE 1990 came about and he just kind of turned into a mist and disappeared like a phantom.
Apparently he’s actually been working steadily. Huh. Goes to show I don’t watch much of the stuff coming out.
While it was definitely his era, he wasn’t in The Stuff!
Wow, yeah, he’s had quite the career starring in things I didn’t see post-’80s.
He had a significant role in season 2 of Veronica Mars in like, 2005, so that was the last I saw of him. Veronica Mars is great!
So’s Party Down. He had a one-episode guest spot (like maaaaaany other people). Great little show if you can find it!
Speaking of plowing, the ‘Gute is reportedly hung like a donkey.
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
(thanks for lightening the mood on a seriously scary article, although honestly, since he’s hanging around and helping clear cars for emergency vehicles/evacuees to get through, I’d have nominated him as a Big Balls of Steel Haver regardless)