Local woman recounts harrowing tale of evacuating Palisades Fire, nearly being burned alive
Patty Phillips is grateful to be alive after narrowly escaping being trapped in her car as the Palisades firestorm rained down on her neighborhood.
Phillips has lived in Big Rock for 32 years and has been evacuated numerous times over that time. On the Tuesday night of the fire, Phillips and her husband, James Sarantinos, were packed and ready to go as they closely monitored the advance of the Palisades Fire toward Malibu.
“We face the ocean, so we couldn’t see any smoke, and when we went down to look, we didn’t see any fire,” Phillips recounted.
The couple was monitoring the WatchDuty app and broadcast media “which was a false sense of security,” she stated. They didn’t hear that the fire had jumped Topanga Canyon.
“We were going to wait ’til it got closer and thought that would give us plenty of time. The media never said it was in Malibu!” Phillips told The Malibu Times. “We didn’t evacuate then because we were watching it on TV and on the app thinking they will notify us once it hits Topanga.” Phillips said she thought, “I’ve been through this. I’m going to be OK. I’m ready to go.”
Now she said, “I regret that I didn’t leave sooner, but I’m also upset at the media and WatchDuty that they never notified us because it was a false sense of comfort. We never in our wildest dreams thought that fire app and the media wouldn’ttell us it was in Malibu.”
After her husband and neighbors went to check on the fire, “they looked like they’d seen a ghost. They said, ‘We’ve got to get out!'”
They had a plan to drive out and meet at the bottom of their box canyon, but that plan went horribly wrong when the fire started bearing down on Phillips’ car with her dog inside. “There’s flames everywhere. It was the most frightening thing I’ve ever been through,” Phillips recounted, but things turned even worse. “There was so much smoke, it was like a white-out condition. You can’t tell what’s up, down, or where you’re going.”
Without visibility, Phillips stepped on the gas to escape the flames, but in the panic, she somehow missed her turn, hit a dirt road, and got stuck on a boulder.
“I couldn’t go and I’m on the side of a cliff with the flames below me and hot red ash is passing my car with a fire below,” she said.
With flashers on, honking her horn, and praying, Phillips, with dog in tow said, “I was sure my dog and I were going to burn to death and I’m like please let me die from smoke inhalation, please don’t be burned alive and I’m constantly trying to call 911.” She pleaded with an operator, “I’m going to be burned alive. Please rescue me!” Turns out the boulder she was stuck on kept her from reversing. Had the car been able to do that, it would have rolled off the hill into the flames. Phillips and her panicked dog were stuck for a terrifying 20 to 30 minutes.
By the time her husband and neighbors got to the bottom of Big Rock, they realized Phillips hadn’t made it. “My husband was screaming, ‘Where’s Patty!’” she said.
In a desperate attempt to save his wife, Sarantinos, recovering from five broken ribs, “started begging a fireman to come up and rescue me,” Phillips said. He finally found a firefighter from the Valley. Phillips said the hero fireman warned her husband, “‘We might not make it out alive, but I’ll take you up there.’ He risked his life to save me.”
When the two finally reached Phillips’ stuck car in thick smoke they grabbed Phillips and her dog. The unknown firefighter said “run for your life,” Phillips recounted, and “we ran and got in his truck and he said, ‘don’t take anything.We’re gonna be lucky if we make it out of here alive.’”
Phillips said the three ran to the firetruck until Koda’s paws got singed. The former Dog of Summer is going to be OK, and so is Phillips, who claims, “I never gave up. I never stopped trying to save myself. I never gave in between praying and calling 911 and trying to figure out every option. I mean, I’m petrified and I’ve still got a lot of trauma because when you’re sitting in a burning area in your car, stuck, I didn’t know it was stuck on a boulder. I just wouldn’t go.”
Now Phillips is hoping to find the name of the brave firefighter who risked his own safety to rescue her. And she wants to thank him personally.