On Tuesday, Jan. 7 around 10:45 a.m. local time, Monique Marez was in a meeting at work when she received an alert from her Ring Camera about the Los Angeles fires.
“I look outside and literally the whole entire mountain’s on fire,” says Marez, 43, who works in fashion and luxury as a senior client advisor for St. Laurent. “Then all of a sudden you just start to hear sirens and firefighters.”
She got an evacuation alert and called a neighbor who told her smoke was coming in. Then they planned to flee the area.
Marez works only seven minutes from her home. But Sunset Blvd. was gridlocked. It took about 90 minutes to get close to her neighborhood before a police officer insisted she abandon her friend’s Tesla Model S that Marez was driving.
“It’s catastrophic. People are running, the smoke had already come in and it was really heavy. And I …