Man Recalls Jumping Into a Cistern to Escape the Palisades Fire Saving Himself and His Dog!

• Lewis Marvin dramatically evacuated from his family’s property in Tuna Canyon as the flames from the Palisades wildfire approached
• In addition to losing the home, Lewis lost some of the property’s animals, including birds and goats
• “I feel like I just have to be in acceptance,” he tells PEOPLE. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

A 46-year-old who survived the Pacific Palisades Fire by jumping into a cistern to save his life and his dog remains shaken up from what he experienced.

“From what I saw…it’s kind of like oblivion out there,” Lewis Marvin, a property manager who resided in Topanga Canyon, told PEOPLE on Tuesday, Jan. 8. “It’s beyond belief. It looks like a bomb has hit.”

At the time, Marvin was doing landscaping work on his family’s property in Tuna Canyon when he noticed through his glasses that the ground turned yellow, the same color as the sky’s reflection.

“I thought it was kind of unusual,” he recalls. “And I walked to see what was going down, and then I realized there was a fire. It didn’t stop me from working, but I started getting kind of scared and I started freaking out.”

He looked down at the Pacific Coast Highway, which is about 1,700 feet from sea level. When he noticed the fire had crossed into Tuna Canyon, he wondered how much time he had to escape. Meanwhile, he saw the flames approaching and gusts of embers and high winds.

“I’ve had some experiences in brush fires before,” he says. “Our system was, at last resort, that we would go into a cistern and climb down. There’s a kind of like a survivalist cistern that was built by Ward Industries for a cattle drive in the ‘40s.”

“At that point, when I climbed up this precipice slope, I got to the top where the cistern was,” he continues. “I jumped down into the water reservoir there and my baseball hat flew off and I was breathing a lot of smoke. The smoke came pouring in and I was standing against a cement wall. I popped my head up a few times to get air, and then I decided just to run down a path and down the side to a road, and I grabbed the dog [Milo] from the outdoor patio.”

Afterward, Marvin put Milo into his truck and hightailed it out of the property. “It got kind of treacherous with this road because it’s a two-mile dirt road, and so I felt kind of like there’s only so much I want to put my vehicle through. When this fire came up with a gust of flame and embers, I just gunned it. I just drove through the fire and kept going. Some of the fire trucks and the paramedics were getting trapped there. Boulders were falling onto the road. I moved boulders and rocks so that they could have more access to this road.”

The Tuna Canyon property consisted of a home that was built in the early ‘70s with the help of many artists. It was destroyed by the fire. Also gone are an outdoor pavilion, patio, and art installations done by some very famous artists.

“I don’t know where to go from here,” said Marvin, who was staying at Los Angeles’ West Recreation Center along with other evacuees. “I don’t know that we will be able to rebuild any of it.”

While he and his dog survived, some of his other animals — among the birds and goats — at the Tuna Canyon property didn’t make it.

“I’m very much into fostering animals,” he says. “One of [my goats] died in the fire, a beautiful cashmere goat, and it was making me sad because I’ve had these goats for a long time. I had fostered them. I was just with them yesterday. And so one of them survived, but it was not in critical condition.”

Further exacerbating his situation, Marvin’s mother, who is in her 70s, experienced a fall in a separate incident and is currently in the ICU. “She does [know what happened at the property],” Marvin says. “I’ve been talking with them on the phone, communicating with them. And my sister’s here from the East Coast.”

So far, Marvin says his Topanga Canyon home is safe. Also on his mind are his friends, including the mother of his child, who has resided in the area for a long time.

“She lives on the border of Topanga State Park and has many horses,” he says. “It’s a sad situation because these horses are just sitting and there’s fire going on. The fires are not more than five miles from their home. They’re off a distance from the state park. The fire right now is towards the end of Pacific Ridge….It’s a waiting game. I feel like I may return there now in a day or so.” 

He says that the experience has affected his mental state, and the idea of rebuilding feels overwhelming.

But while he feels sad, he also says he wants to emphasize the positive. “I’d like to understand that fire is very cleansing,” Lewis says. “The path of fire and its destruction can be cleansing. It can cleanse the land and the land ultimately may appear to be a lot more beautiful. But the manifestations that we have achieved. They’re history now. That they’re now a part of history.”

Click here to learn more about how to help the victims of the L.A. fires.

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