As smoke crept closer to Darrin Hurwitz’s Pacific Palisades home in California on Tuesday morning, he started packing up the most meaningful items in his house: a few family heirlooms; a couple of pieces of art; and his two daughters’ favorite stuffed animals.
There wasn’t time to grab much else. The nearby Palisades Fire — one of several wind-whipped blazes raging across Southern California — suddenly surged, threatening Hurwitz’s most valued possession: his family’s lives.
“Within minutes, 10 to 20 minutes, there wasn’t one fire. There were multiple fires, as embers were sort of crisscrossing the area,” Hurwitz told MSNBC’s Chris Jansing on Wednesday. “The ferocity of the fire led us to think that we needed to get out of our house, and get out of our house very quickly.”
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The fires’ explosive growth across large swaths of Pasadena, Altadena, Sylmar and Pacific Palisades has taken many by surprise, stretching emergency services to capacity and leaving residents with little warning to evacuate. More than 80,000 residents were abruptly forced to evacuate, with some abandoning their cars on the Pacific Coast Highway and escaping on foot.
The region’s three main fires were at zero percent containment as of Wednesday afternoon, fueled by dry conditions, and have killed at least five people, according to authorities. The Palisades Fire has torched the largest area at more than 15,800 acres, followed by the Eaton Fire, which has charred 10,600 acres. The Hurst Fire has burned 505 acres, according to CAL FIRE’s website.
On Tuesday morning, Hurwitz was home working when he started seeing plumes of smoke outside from the Palisades Fire. His children, ages 9 and 11, were at school about a mile and a half away, he said, and it quickly became clear that he needed to go pick them up.
Hurwitz packed up a few more possessions, including clothes, a laptop, and the family’s pets: a rescue dog, Lily, and a hamster, Wolfy. As he and his wife left the house, Hurwitz realized how much they were leaving behind. But, he added: “Our possessions and our house are one thing. Our lives, our pets’ lives, our kids’ lives are what were paramount. And we didn’t want to take any chances.”
The family is staying with relatives in Ventura, about 60 miles up the coast. They fear that their house is one of the approximately 1,000 structures destroyed by the Palisades Fire, though they won’t be able to see the extent of the damage until they return.
Other evacuees faced similar decisions about what to pack as they fled the flames. Mallory Sobel, who lives in the Pacific Palisades Highlands neighborhood, said she left with just a bag of emergency supplies and her family’s passports. She was tempted to gather photos, too, before she embarked on what turned into a 2 1/2-hour drive to get out of the neighborhood, where homes were shrouded in thick smoke.
“Of course there were lots of things around the house I wanted to keep, but it was all too intense,” Sobel said. “I needed to leave.”
In nearby Topanga, Rabbi Mendy Piekarski rushed to evacuate people from a Chabad Lubavitch synagogue and cultural center Wednesday. He and his colleagues called the parents of 25 students who attended preschool there, and within an hour, all the kids had been picked up and driven out of the evacuation zone.
Piekarski said he and his wife loaded the Chabad’s sacred Torah scrolls into their car before leaving the building, wrapping the bundles of parchment in tallit, a fringed garment worn as a prayer shawl.
“We cherish them very much and they’re very valuable, so we made sure to bring them to a safe location outside Topanga,” he said. “We would have loved to take other holy objects, like prayer books, though we didn’t have enough time. It was about taking the most important things: our family and the Torah scrolls.”
He would have liked to take more.
“But safety is the main thing,” he said.
Hurwitz agrees.
“Our possessions don’t define us. We’re defined by our family relationships and by our experiences,” he said. “At the same time, we recognize that, especially for our kids, it’s just a lot of upheaval.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com