At 4.30pm last Tuesday afternoon, a dark grey smoke cloud loomed over North Mount Holyoke Avenue in Pacific Palisades, obscuring the setting sun.
The blazes which would become the most destructive wildfire in California’s history were racing up a nearby canyon.
The streets were almost deserted, the air choking, and most people had already evacuated. My team and I spotted an elderly woman at the end of a driveway.
“I don’t drive, I don’t have any relatives,” she said. “What do I do?”
It was 84-year-old Liz Lerner. She grasped my arm as the wind almost blew her off her feet. A neighbour showed up shortly afterwards, loading his Tesla with bags, and agreed to give Liz a ride to safety.
A week on, she’s in hospital in Los Angeles and wants to tell the dramatic story of her escape and what came next.
“I thought I would die right there on the sidewalk,” she says. “I thought that was the end of my little life. I really thought that there’s nobody coming by here and I’ll just be a skeleton they find.”
As Liz was being driven by her neighbour, down the hill from Pacific Palisades to the coast, all around the neighbourhood, trees and buildings were catching fire.
“As we drove through the windy streets to get out, it was greyer and blacker and darker,” she says. “I felt a great heaviness pushing on my chest at that time. I’m gasping and gasping just trying to get some air. I was having a heart attack, I found out at the hospital.”
Liz is also being treated at Kaiser Permanente hospital in LA for smoke inhalation.
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On the TV in her hospital ward she has been watching some of the news reports about the fire which has ravaged her community. She knows her home has been destroyed and wants to see pictures of it. “Wow,” she says, open-mouthed as she looks at a photograph. “There’s nothing left, nothing at all.”
It is a house her dad built in 1949, which she inherited and has made her own. Then she notices her wrought iron gate is still partially standing. “My gate,” she exclaims. “I designed that. I would like to get it back.”
Liz’s daughter, Skye, died 10 years ago and precious reminders of her life have also been lost with the fire.
“I saved all the paintings that she did in first grade. I lost all of those, all the stories she wrote, the birthday cards with the scribbles on them. It’s those normal things, that’s the worst of it.”
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Because of the wildfire risk in her area, Liz says her home insurance was cancelled several years ago.
“I have no insurance, absolutely none, and no documents and no cheques and no credit cards. I don’t even have a pair of shoes.”
Liz hopes to be discharged from hospital soon, to a retirement home where she will share a room with another elderly woman. Her life is forever altered and she will never return to the place she once called her “forever home”.
The rebuilding of the decimated Pacific Palisades will happen, but for Liz it will take too long.
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