Mr. Osby said that winds were expected to pick up on Sunday and last through Tuesday, further complicating firefighting efforts in the region, and that they currently had no timeline for lifting evacuation orders or opening Highway 101, one of the region’s major thruways.
Scott StJohn, 42, an entrepreneur and fitness company owner, was evacuated from his home in Malibu on Friday morning with his family, believing that “there was no way the fire was going to reach all the way down to the beach.”
Ash from the fire and heavy winds rained down on the family’s car as they drove up the Pacific Coast Highway. The situation sank in when they looked behind them as they drove. All they could see, Mr. StJohn said, was “a blaze of orange.”
“What are we going to do?” he added. “We’re seeing posts and videos and literally the community is torched. Even if the house is still there, the community itself is in ashes. I don’t even know what it will be like if the house is still there.”
The hardest thing for them, Mr. StJohn said, was going to be bringing some kind of normalcy back for their children. “They don’t have school, they don’t have any of their clothes,” he said. “All we grabbed was our passports.”
At East Avenue Church in Chico, 200 people made temporary homes in church classrooms, in a gym filled with cots, air mattresses and couches, and in tents set up in a field on the property. As one of the few shelters in the area accepting pets, it was also teeming with displaced dogs.
Pastor Ron Zimmer recalled receiving guests shortly after the fire broke out, with many arriving in vehicles that bore the marks of the flames.
“We started getting cars where all the plastic in the outside was melted and the bumpers were gone,” Mr. Zimmer said. “Everybody came down and told horrific stories. We haven’t talked to a lot of people who think they have homes left.”
