The lobby of Shutters on the Beach, the luxury oceanfront hotel in Santa Monica that is usually abuzz with tourists and entertainment professionals, had by Thursday transformed into a refuge for Los Angeles residents displaced by the raging wildfires that have ripped through thousands of acres and leveled entire neighborhoods to ash.
In the middle of one table sat something that has probably never been in the lobby of Shutters before: a portable plastic goldfish tank. “It’s my daughter’s,” said Kevin Fossee, 48. Mr. Fossee and his wife, Olivia Barth, 45, had evacuated to the hotel on Tuesday evening shortly after the fire in the Los Angeles Pacific Palisades area flared up near their home in Malibu.
Suddenly, an evacuation alert came in. Every phone in the lobby wailed at once, scaring young children who began to cry inconsolably. People put away their phones a second later when they realized it was a false alarm.