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When James Perry, 42, received the first emergency call about the Franklin fire at 11:45 p.m. Monday, he and his wife were already packing up their belongings.
The couple had already received an email from their 5-year-old’s Sycamore School, just down the road from their home in Los Flores, informing them that the school grounds would be closed as a precautionary measure due to the fire.
The power went out at 11:20 p.m. With no cell phone service or WiFi connectivity, Perry said her family relied on emergency notifications to prepare and decided to evacuate their home by the third alert. It’s just a ravine away from the area where the fire is spreading.
“As soon as we come down [Los Flores Canyon Road] “I saw fire, smoke and a ring of light near Duke’s Malibu,” Perry said. “That’s when we realized it was closer than we thought.”
The family of three spent the night in a hotel in Santa Monica and are currently looking for another place to stay.
This is not the first fire that Perry and his family have experienced. They previously lived in Topanga Valley and had been evacuated from their home for two weeks during the devastation of the Woolsey Fire.
“We’re doing OK, but we also have a lot of friends who have had to rebuild and redesign their lives,” he said.
Living in an area where fire is a possibility has changed the way Perry and his family live, he said.
“We don’t have anything expensive on site. Important documents are kept outside the site and we print (copies) of them and have them with us,” he said. “It’s scary. We love living where we live, but it feels like (fire incidents) are happening more frequently.”
The big difference between the Woolsey Fire and the Franklin Fire is the emergency calls. Perry said he did not receive a virtual warning last time.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said the fire destroyed some cell phone towers in the area, impacting service. The extent of the outage is unknown, but people nearby are reporting difficulty making phone calls.
Evacuations were ordered for the eastern half of Malibu. Evacuation orders were issued for the rest of the city and parts of unincorporated Los Angeles County, affecting about 18,000 people. More than 2,000 structures are subject to evacuation orders, and another 6,000 are under evacuation advisories.
Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Malone said at a news conference Tuesday morning that he did not have an exact number of damaged buildings, but said “minimal” homes were destroyed. He urged residents to limit the use of lawn sprinklers to maintain water pressure for firefighters.
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