Around 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 8, the smell of burning rubber hit my nose outside my apartment in AVA Toluca Hills, Los Angeles.
That’s when the adrenaline started to kick in.
Only 36 hours before, I was fine. I remember reassuring my roommates.
“Fires happen here all the time,” I said. “They know how to handle it.”
Myself, 15 other students and two professors were less than a week into Miami University’s Inside Hollywood study away program. Andy Rice, who’s been leading this program for the last three years, lived in San Diego and L.A. before moving to Ohio to work at Miami. He shared the same initial thoughts when we first saw news coverage of the Palisades Fire on the cafeteria TV in Panavision that Monday.
“It’s not the first time I’ve been in a city where there were fires,” said Rice, associate professor of media and communications and film studies. “When those things initially break out though, it seems to be the most scary, devastating images that flood the airwaves and then everybody across the country is like, ‘Oh my gosh, all of L.A. is on fire.’”
Rice said his main concerns were ensuring we, the students, weren’t scared while keeping a close eye on any updates and air quality. But at that time, the Palisades Fire was still small, the skies were blue outside and besides the more than 60 mph winds, everything seemed normal.
Just a few days before the fire, I captured this picture near the Hollywood sign of Smokey the Bear warning people that the area was a high fire risk.
Throughout Monday night and into the next day, things only got worse as winds carried burning embers across the city. Eventually, our little apartment complex was surrounded by three fires: the Palisades Fire in the West, the Eaton Fire in the East and the Hurst Fire in the North.
By Tuesday, the program was at a standstill. People across the city were calling off work in case they had to evacuate quickly, and the Miami alums we planned to meet canceled for the same reason.
Wednesday night, my three roommates and I sat on the couch and watched the local news coverage on TV, including Autumn Allen, a senior media and communication major.
“So at first, I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t really think it’ll be that big of a deal,’” Allen said. “But then we were literally just watching it get bigger and bigger while we were sitting there.”
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Anxiety was high.
Our bags sat in our rooms packed and waiting just in case.
Allen’s grandparents FaceTimed her around 8:30 p.m. A few minutes later, she got a notification on her phone. Another fire broke out.
She clicked the notification to see where it was. The Sunset Fire was just two miles away.
At that point, one of our roommates had already decided to leave with her cousin who lived close by. Rice was driving her to the cousins' house when we got the notification. They drove straight into an evacuation zone on the way there.
Rice immediately pulled over and messaged the group chat.
He wrote: “The alert went off while on the road. Coming back now.”
We got that message at 9:08 p.m. Nobody in the apartments received that alert. The evacuation notice wasn’t for our area.
Maybe we could stay?
But when my roommates and I walked outside and saw the permanent residents packing their cars, we knew it was time to go.
At 9:28 p.m., Rice gave us the go-ahead to leave.
Allen and I rushed past residents packing their cars under the bright street lights, the smell of burning rubber filling our noses.
That’s when the adrenaline hit.
We drove the rental car back to our apartment, loaded up our bags and started heading out. We didn’t have a destination when we got on the road. The plan was just to drive south away from the flames.
We got another message from Rice – we were meeting up at Dodger Stadium. Our car was the first to arrive.
It was dark when we pulled up to the closed stadium gate at 10:13 p.m. The panic had subsided because we were safe, far away from the fire, but now there was a new problem: where were we going to sleep?
The worry was that everyone evacuating the fires meant there wouldn’t be many hotel rooms available for 17 people on such short notice. When the rest of the group got there, Rice and Liv Warner, one of the students, started calling hotels to check availability.
It took a half hour of calling to find somewhere. The Courtyard by Marriott in Anaheim had just enough rooms for all of us.
The next day, the Sunset Fire was out, but we stayed another night at the hotel because we worried about the air quality at the apartments.
We returned to the apartments the night of Jan. 10, despite the area still being under a red flag warning. One of our roommates decided to drop the course and return home. She grabbed the rest of her stuff from our apartment and was gone before we got back. Over the next few days, two more students dropped the course.
Allen stayed because she said she’d been looking forward to the trip for two years and needed the class to graduate. She said even though she’d wished there was a better plan in place in case of evacuation, Rice and Hegarty did a good job keeping everyone safe and adapting to the situation.
“I’m glad that the trip was salvaged,” Allen said. “And I’m glad that things did end up working out for us at the end.”
We took a few hits in the days that followed. Not everything we planned came to be, but nothing we experienced there could compare to the devastation the people of L.A. faced.
When reflecting on the program this year, Rice said one positive outcome of going through a historical event like this is that it brought us closer together.
“I always learn things about the students,” Rice said. “Because the program pushes people out of their comfort zones. I was really impressed with the way this group bonded by the end.”
Despite everything, I’m glad I went on the Inside Hollywood trip this year. The people I met along the way made every hit, every scary situation, seem like just another obstacle we could overcome.
Visit this link to the American Red Cross to find out how to donate to help support victims of the LA wildfires.
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