Pacific Palisades native saves mothers house from LA wildfires with two surfer buddies: Made it by the skin of our teeth

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 ...