THE SOUTHLAND FIRESTORM: A SPECIAL REPORT : EYEWITNESS : CARRIE SUTTON: Beach resident : ‘Surreal. Even Now When I Think About It, It Was Very, Very Strange’

Without the Pacific Ocean for succor, Carrie Sutton of Santa Monica could not have made it through Tuesday night, a time of heat and fear, fire and noise. As Sutton, 35, raced toward her parents’ beach house on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu--the home where she spent her childhood--”there was fire everywhere,” fire that eventually breached PCH, threatened the family home, burned the lot next door. *

I came straight here and my dad already was starting to think about a plan. But he wanted to see how exactly the fire came over the hill, so he could figure out really what to do. They were gone for a while. And when they got back, we had 15 minutes to get everybody situated to fight the fire.

The firemen told us how to dress and what to put on our faces. They said to put on thick socks and jeans and, if we had boots, to wear them, and long-sleeved T-shirts and jackets. They gave us some gloves. And they told us to put either glasses or goggles on and a hat on and a wet towel over our faces.

My brother and my dad were on the roof, and my mom was out here on the upper deck and I was on the lower deck. You couldn’t really see, but we kept saying that every two minutes you should just call out your name so that you could hear that everybody was safe.

Two women, neighbors of ours, Ruth and Blackie, were in the ocean completely. It was really low tide, so a bunch of people had moved stuff onto the rocks and there were boxes and things and crates sitting out there on the sand. There were people in the water. There were people down on the sand. When the fire came over here, it was really intense.

That used to be a house up there, across PCH. That house kind of like exploded and burned for a really long time. As you can see, the fire crossed here and then exploded. It was just literally a rain of embers.

Ruth had watched this. She thought everything had burned. She thought her house had burned because you couldn’t see anything. She was just hoping that this house would be OK. We saw it was, so I went into the water to get Ruth. She’s old, Ruth is. And I told her that it was OK to come back up. The wind was so intense, and the sound. . . .

It’s kind of surreal. Even now when I think about it, it was very, very strange, and Ruth was really, really scared. And she didn’t know even about her house at that point. It’s a weird feeling. You have this intense heat over here and then the ocean. But that was kind of a saving grace, knowing that if you had to leave you had a place to go. The people up in the canyon, I don’t know how they stood it because it was unbearably hot. They had nowhere to go.

Then the Templemans drove up in their motor home with their pig and their goat and their chickens and their dogs in it, and they spent the night here. There were four different families here. At one time there were about 10 people sleeping here and a lot of people in and out. This was one of the only phones for some reason that was working. So the Templemans drove up with two huge bottles of Canadian Club whiskey and tons of bread and meat. And everybody was making sandwiches and drinking shots of whiskey--which is probably why we don’t remember what happened from 8 p.m. to 3:30 a.m.

We’re trying to get my parents to move. How much can this old house take? It’s one of the oldest ones on the beach. They just don’t want to move. I guess it’s the comfort of being here so long or something. I’m really concerned. My brother was talking about the mud problem this morning. We’ve always had terrible mudslides here, and that was when this whole hill was intact. That’s really going to be a problem.

What now? I don’t know. For us, we just clean up the dirt and hope for a decent winter here for my parents.

(Note: The Templemans learned late Friday night that their home was destroyed. On a lighter note, Sutton said, their pig was the star of the Agoura Animal Shelter.)