John Ward and his wife, Dawn Holder, were already packed and ready to go on Tuesday afternoon. The fire was then a 30-minute drive away, in the Pacific Palisades, and there were no evacuation orders.
But the winds were fierce, and their mobile home park in the suburb of Sylmar had burned to the ground once before. So when a neighbor pounded on their door late that night, they were ready to flee the Hurst fire.
“We knew to get ourselves prepared, because it had happened before, in 2008,” Mr. Hurst said.
The winds ultimately blew in a favorable direction: up the mountain, not down into town like the Sayre fire had in November 2008, destroying nearly 500 homes in Oakridge Mobile Home Park, where they live.
But on Sunday afternoon, people in Oakridge were still uneasy, though they were no longer under evacuation orders.
Fortune and firefighting had spared them the kind of losses that were all too familiar to some residents. But with winds expected to pick up again this week, they were still on high alert and channeling anxious energy into action.
Vanessa Simon was at home making calls on Sunday afternoon, trying to figure out what to do with the U-haul box truck parked out front. Oakridge residents had filled it with clothes, child car seats, diapers, blankets, food and other items for fire victims. Ms. Simon, 47, and her husband were calling churches, shelters and other places that might accept the goods.
Residents had gathered in Oakridge’s community room to collect and sort through the mass of donations — and to process an arduous week.
“Everybody that was there just came together so beautifully,” Ms. Simon said. “We hugged; we cried.”
On Sunday, the sky was blue over Sylmar, a largely Hispanic and working-class suburb of about 80,000 people, many of whom keep horses.
Under the bright sun, there were fresh reminders that the community was on the front lines of Los Angeles’s catastrophe.
Patches of burned vegetation ended disconcertingly close to backyard fences. Large swathes of red fire retardant painted the mountainside behind Rancho Cascades, another Sylmar neighborhood.
Fire safety has been a top local concern for a long time, said Kurt Cabrera-Miller, the president of Sylmar’s neighborhood council. Sylmar has only one fire station and has been pushing for more. In 2023, the Los Angeles City Council approved a second station, which has yet to be built. Santa Monica and Burbank, communities with comparable populations, have five and six stations respectively, Mr. Cabrera-Miller said.
Perhaps no place in Sylmar is more attuned to the dangers than Oakridge. When Hope Watterson, 62, moved into the park, she received an emergency preparedness packet with an image of a burning mobile home.
Ms. Watterson, an elementary schoolteacher, could see the flames from her front porch on Tuesday night. She jumped into her car to join the frantic evacuation, by a route that had recently been added. When Oakridge was gutted in 2008, there had been only one way out.
Mr. Ward, who lives a few blocks from Ms. Watterson, was sitting in a rocking chair on his front porch on Sunday as his neighbor Sebastian Aguayo pulled into the driveway across the street.
Mr. Aguayo, 19, the man who had pounded on Mr. Ward’s door on Tuesday, walked over to say hello. It was a normal neighborly exchange, but both knew the circumstances could change.
Mr. Ward still had his valuables packed and ready to go, and so did Mr. Aguayo.
