My scariest fire experience a few years ago

This likely was around 2009 or 2010 in Santa Barbara near Montecito where we were trying to protect my wife's father's house in Montecito from burning down. So, a friend who was a retired Naval Fire Captain and I got into my wife's relatively new Lexus then and went up into the hills to see just how close it was coming to us.

However, since neither the fire captain (who was from Ventura County) and I who was from the SF Bay area knew the fire rules for Santa Barbara county that all the locals would know. It seems like people were told to open their living room curtains and to turn all the lights on  to show the fire and police that they had already evacuated their homes. However, since we didn't know this we thought it meant that people were still in their homes and hadn't evacuated already or we wouldn't have been at all where we were in the hills above Santa Barbara and Montecito. So, as we drove higher into the hills we noticed that there were NO firemen or policemen which seemed pretty odd to us considering how near the fire was to us. Then we decided we needed to get away from the fire because it was getting too dangerous where we were so we tried to go down out of the hills the way we went up and realized everything on both sides of the street were on fire. The houses were all on fire on both sides of the street and then gas mains were exploding in front of houses with flames 25 feet high which was pretty scary too. I finally realized we weren't going to make it through all this and spun the car around while burning rubber in a 180 degree turn to get out of there. At this point we were really scared because we didn't know a way out of there back to where it was safe. So, we went to the nearest fire station which was being evacuated because it was going to burn down they knew at that point. We told them we didn't know any way to safety and the remaining fireman on duty told us to go one last way to safety that they were going to use soon themselves. He said it was paved and dirt but it was a way to survive the fire and they were going to use this road too to escape.

So, we found this one way left to survive so we took it. But, when you don't know the rules in a fire area you might wind up burned up in serious situations like this one. So, we learned our lesson that time and lived to tell about it.

My wife was really mad at me because her almost new Lexus smelled like smoke inside and outside for the next 3 months time. But, at least we survived the whole thing and lived to tell about it.