When James Perry, 42, got the first emergency notification of the Franklin fire at 11:45 p.m. Monday, he and his wife were already packing up their belongings.
The couple had already received an email from their 5-year-old’s school, the Sycamore School, just down the road from their Los Flores home, letting them know that the grounds would be closed as a precautionary measure due to the fire.
At 11:20 p.m. they lost their electricity. Without cellphone service or a Wi-Fi connection, Perry said his family relied on the emergency notifications to prepare and, by the third alert, get themselves out of their home — just a canyon over from the growing fire zone.
“As soon as we came down [Los Flores Canyon Road] near Duke’s Malibu we saw the halo of the fire, smoke and the light,” Perry said. “That’s when we realized it was closer than we thought.”
The family of three spent the night at a hotel in Santa Monica and are currently looking for another place to stay.
This isn’t the first fire that Perry and his family have experienced. They were previously living in Topanga Canyon and evacuated from that home for two weeks during the devastation of the Woolsey fire.
“We’ve been OK, but I’ve had a lot of friends who have had to rebuild and redesign their lives,” he said.
Living in a potential fire zone has changed the way Perry and his family live, he said.
“We don’t have anything expensive on site, and we keep our important documents off site and have printed [copies] with us,” he said. “It’s a scary one. We love living where we live, but it feels like [fire incidents] are happening more often.”
The huge difference between the Woolsey and the Franklin fires is the emergency notifications. Perry said he didn’t receive any virtual warnings last time.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said the fire burned some cell towers in the area, affecting service. The scope of the outage is unclear, but people in the area reported having trouble making calls.
The eastern half of Malibu was ordered evacuated. The rest of the city and portions of unincorporated Los Angeles County were under an evacuation warning affecting roughly 18,000 people. More than 2,000 structures are covered by the evacuation order, and an additional 6,000 are under evacuation warnings.
Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said during a news conference Tuesday morning that a “minimal number” of homes had been destroyed, though he did not have an exact count of structures damaged. He urged residents to limit the use of lawn sprinklers to maintain water pressure for firefighters.
