These three dropped into a gnarly situation.
A Los Angeles man navigated flame-engulfed neighborhood backroads with his two longtime surfing buddies in a desperate bid to save his family home, armed with nothing but a garden hose and a few plastic coolers full of pool water.
Chris Clinton, 49, was at home in a tent-like yurt that he rents in Topanga on Jan. 7, when a friend called to tell him that his mom’s neighborhood in Pacific Palisades was in flames and he should go check it out.
At first he wasn’t worried, as fires in the area were nothing new, but once he drove down the hill toward Topanga Canyon Boulevard and saw a gigantic smoke plume, the gravity of the situation hit him like a ton of bricks.
When he arrived at his childhood home, his mother, Kathy, 79, was already packed.
“Her car is filled with s–t. She was ready to go… But I said no. We need to turn all the sprinklers and hoses on. And we’re gonna water everything down.”
Clinton said he grabbed a garden hose and doused the home as best he could, even putting a sprinkler on the roof, a trick he learned from his late father decades ago.
“I remember as a kid my father watered down everything on the roof… I was probably like 8 years old. We all evacuated and my father stayed back,” he said.
After about 15 minutes, the water spigots suddenly went dry, at which point Clinton knew he had to high-tail it out of there and get his mother to safety, urged along by a panicked call from his sister from New York.
He got in his truck and instructed his mother to follow close behind in her Honda, as hurricane-force winds fanned the flames and sent white-hot embers flying in every direction.
As they attempted to wind their way out of the Palisades, he spied familiar neighborhood touchstones along the route cloaked in flames, from a local church and movie theater to his old high school.
He said fire was the only source of light at times during the perilous 20-minute drive — which was so hot he worried his car was about to explode.
“There is nobody around. There are no cars anywhere. By this point it’s dark out. And the only thing that is lighting s–t up are these massive fires. Otherwise it’s dark,” Clinton recalled.
“And my mom is behind me, so I am trying to go slow. So she doesn’t get spooked, and I don’t lose her. It’s scary that she’s driving by herself.”
Once they reached the bottom of the hill, he said he saw fire trucks and people milling around on the outskirts of the neighborhood.
“And you’re like, what the f–k? Why aren’t they doing something? Why aren’t they up there? I didn’t fully understand it… All I know is that I didn’t see anybody fighting the fires.”
Stay up to date with the NYP’s coverage of the terrifying LA-area fires
Finally the pair reached safety at the Venice Beach home of Clinton’s friend Nimai Keston, where they spent the night. Clinton said he thought by now his family home was surely destroyed.
When a third pal, Germano Assuncao, showed up the next morning, Clinton’s friends convinced him to head back up the hill to survey the damage.
“Chris was so depressed, he was like, oh the house is probably already burned. And I was like, there is only one way to find out. We gotta go… I told them if you guys don’t go I’ll go by myself,” Assuncao told The Post.
So the three surfer pals made their way through the flames as the wildfire ripped through the neighborhood, spying homes and other buildings completely ingulfed and telephone poles on fire toppling into the street.
“Everything is so eerie. Power lines down. And we’re just going up. And everything is either on fire or gone,” Clinton said.
The men arrived at the Charmel Court residence just in time to extinguish some backyard spot fires and douse the miraculously undamaged home with water.
“We were so close. So close. We made it just by the skin of our teeth. So close,” Clinton told The Post.
“There were a bunch of little fires in the backyard… And we had just had a party for my friend, and so I grabbed the coolers… and we’re just filling them up with water from the pool and putting out all these fires,” he said.
Assuncao, 39, and Keston even hopped a fence when they noticed the backside of one of Clinton’s neighbor’s houses was smoldering, forming a three-man bucket brigade to snuff out the flames.
Asked why he took such a death-defying risk to protect the house — which his father purchased for $90,000 in 1972 — Clinton said it was because he knew they were on their own after seeing no emergency personnel in the neighborhood.
“There was nobody. I don’t know where everybody was. There was no one,” he said.
Over the next few days, the water eventually was switched back on, and Clinton’s friend lent him a Starlink internet device, which restored access to the internet, though they remained without power.
The men quickly soaked any renegade spot fires and kept an eye out for potential looters. Assuncao and Keston eventually made their way back down the hill but Clinton stayed behind.
Now that the National Guard has swooped in, he’s unable to leave because he won’t be able to get back into the house.
He said every home on the lower part of the hill has been obliterated, and more than half of the houses in his immediate vicinity were destroyed, leaving just a few dozen unscathed.
“Most of the fires are out. Right now I don’t see any smoke. But it’s wild to walk around… the National Guard is here. There are f–king tanks and hummers and cops on every corner.”
“It’s f–king Afghanistan here… It’s Pacific Palestine.”
