'It looked apocalyptic': Vancouver actress details nightmare few days in L.A.

A blaze creeping closer to a home once deemed safe in a residential Los Angeles neighbourhood. (Courtesy: Abbie Jenkins)

There was a time when the city of Los Angeles conjured rosy recollections of glamorous parties and sun-drenched adventures with friends, but for Vancouver actress Abbie Jenkins, only one scene now springs to mind. The memory of careening down the highway in a friend’s car, with flames erupting in the rear view mirror.

When Jenkins (A Good Doctor, Yellowjackets) travelled from Vancouver to L.A. a few days before the year’s end, to visit a close friend living in the city’s Glendale neighbourhood, she expected it would be a Tinseltown trip like all other Tinseltown trips that had come before.

Within days, the city would be battling the two most destructive fires in its history. Blazes that would go on to take the lives of at least 16 people, destroy tens of thousands of homes, and place over 150,000 residents under evacuation orders.

“It doesn’t feel real, it’s like something out of a movie. You never imagine you could end up in a situation like this,” says Jenkins.

Already accustomed to wildfires in B.C., Jenkins says she wasn’t unnerved when she spotted a blaze in the distance while driving to the region’s west coast beaches on Tuesday. 

It was only when fierce winds began whipping the iconic palm trees and signs “started flying off of shop fronts,” that the severity of the situation became clear.

“I saw smoke creeping along the beach and oceanfront, and we decided that we needed to get out of there,” she explains.

More than just wealthy celebrities affected

A few hours later and Jenkins was safe in the confines of her friend’s home, but others in the area weren’t so fortunate.

“Our friend called us at about 9 p.m. that evening to tell us his business partner, another close friend, his house in the Palisades was gone. Just burned to the ground.”

He had learned his home was affected after spotting it, exploding with flames, in Palisades Fire video coverage doing the rounds on social media. Another, a camera operator, described how he lost tens of thousands of dollars in camera equipment he had been storing at a friend’s house, a place he presumed to be safe.

“Everyone keeps talking about how it’s just rich celebrities who have lost their billion dollar homes, but it is also average people who have worked really hard to just be living, temporarily staying or even working in L.A.,” says Jenkins.

She touches on the people who work in the film sphere, an industry gruelling enough, who aren’t showered with the large paycheques the A-list actors in the area are.

Many of those affected include young people in the industry who have moved to L.A. in an attempt to kickstart their career, often already alone after leaving loved ones behind to chase their Hollywood dreams. There’s the large portion, the majority, of city-dwellers who are working blue-collar jobs to make ends meet, the others whose crumbled neighbourhood homes have been in their families for generations.

“Regardless of their financial situation, it's their home, their valuables, their photos on the wall and the memories created there that can never be replaced,” she says.

A rush to escape

The next morning, Wednesday, Jenkins arose to the smell of smoke.

“I ran outside and the sky was completely grey, ash was sweeping through the garden,” she recalls.

“It looked apocalyptic.”

Emergency alerts began pinging phones, and the threat of fire became more prominent. Her friend’s house, situated in a high brush area in the Glendale neighbourhood, would be ravaged if the fire blazing mere metres away made its way across the adjacent highway.

“We packed up, grabbed some valuables, and got in the car,” she says.

The hours that followed saw the two driving the progressively busier roads of L.A.’s residential neighbourhoods with no plan or place to go. Each time they would settle into a home deemed safe, a new evacuation alert would ping, or a neighbour would inform them of an outbreak that had cropped up close by.

At one point in the evening, a neighbour texted a picture taken from his own home as a warning, showing flames almost licking his living room windows.

“All of the neighbours were fleeing with suitcases to their cars. It was such a jarring sight. We kept turning onto the freeway, and in the rear view mirror we just saw flames on the hill, blazing,” she said.

Devastation connecting a community 

Come nightfall, a friend of a friend would welcome them to her family home in the city’s Larchmont village, cook them dinner, and allow them to rest in their spare bedroom. Days later, Jenkins says she’s still astounded by the generosity of others experienced that day.

“These amazing people, some we had never met, were offering up their own houses to us for the evening to give us some comfort and safety,” she says.

“Amongst the chaos was this speck of family and community.”

Jenkins was able to board her planned return flight from Los Angeles to Vancouver the following morning, safely, but experiencing “insane turbulence” as the plane travelled through the billowing cloud of smoke now lurking over the city. The friend she had been visiting was able to return to her home in the Glendale area that same day, for the time being.

The returning passengers had escaped a fiery nightmare, but all were acutely aware of the disaster zone they were leaving behind, she says.

“The atmosphere on the plane was very sombre,” she explains, describing how one young man had broken down and cried as he departed the plane and greeted his family at the arrivals gate.

Now home, Jenkins’ thoughts are with the Los Angeles community who are still in the thick of it, hatching their own escape plans or volunteering to help. The friends she sees “at food banks or in the back of their trucks, dishing out stacks of diapers.”

For now, Jenkins is poring over GoFundMe pages and charities to help from afar, and recommends others, who are able, do the same.