Meryl Streep was forced to make a quick-thinking escape from $4M home amid LA fires... and it involved wire cutters

Meryl Streep had to get crafty when escaping the fires in Los Angeles earlier this month.

Turns out the 75-year-old Oscar-winning actress had to cut a hole through her fence that would fit a car so she could drive away from the flames.

The Death Becomes Her star could not leave by her driveway as a tree had fallen and blocked that route.

The Hollywood stalwart needed to leave another way. So she created one. She ended up driving her car through the fence and into her neighbor's backyard and down their driveway.

The star reportedly bought a home in Pasadena, California - which was near the Eaton fire - in 2017 for almost $4M. 

Her nephew Abe Streep shared the story this week in a New York Magazine article that described the mayhem. He also talked to other stars like Meryl's Only Murders In The Building co-star and rumored boyfriend Martin Short as well as Sixth Sense actor Haley Joel Osment.

'Evacuation mandates were sent across the city,' wrote Abe in the publication.

'My aunt Meryl Streep received an order to evacuate on January 8, but when she tried to leave, she discovered that a large tree had fallen over in her driveway, blocking her only exit,' the author wrote. 

'Determined to make it out, she borrowed wire cutters from a neighbor, cut a car-size hole in the fence she shared with the neighbors on the other side, and drove through their yard to escape.' 

It sounds like a plot point out of one of her more scary movies and not a real-life situation that an A-lister in Hollywood would experience first-hand. 

When Abe talked to Short, who is Meryl's costar on Only Murders in the Building, he got a full update.

Short, 74, lives in Pacific Palisades. 

The actor said than when he fled his house he grabbed his most treasured material items: family photo albums.

Osment also shared his evacuation story.

He had difficulty driving out, however, as there were so many abandoned cars in the road from people who gave up leaving by wheels and instead went by foot. It took him one hour to get to safety.

Short said his house did not burn down but the home of one of his sons was consumed by fire. And Martin added he has no intention of relocating.

He was not in the Palisades but rather near the Eaton Fire in Altadena. His house burned down and he intends to rebuild.

Osment lost 500 records and a piano his parents gave him on his 18th birthday, he shared. 

The Sixth Sense actor told New York Magazine that he wondered if it could have been prevented. 'Not to cast blame or anything, but I just want to know, when this is all investigated — was there a decision to just let the whole neighborhood go?' Osment asked.

Abe also talked to Jeff Lipsky, a photographer whose family's house managed to survive the fire. 

He said, 'I don't ever want to see my house again. It's a toxic-waste dump...My community is gone. It's just a curse that my house is there.'

Human-driven climate change made the devastating Los Angeles wildfires more likely, an international team of scientists has found.

Wildfires in the Californian city started on January 7 and spread quickly, killing at least 28 people and destroying more than 10,000 homes, racking up billions in costs and leaving thousands of people homeless.

The World Weather Attribution network of researchers from the US, UK and a number of other European countries warned the hot, dry and windy conditions that drove the fires were about 35% more likely due to global warming – driven primarily by burning fossil fuels.

It added that the fire-risk conditions could become another 35% more likely if global temperatures rise 2.6C above pre-industrial levels, for which the world is currently on track by 2100.

The LA fires were fanned by strong 'Santa Ana' winds and fed by drought conditions since May 2024 which left grasses and brush dry and highly flammable, while wet winters in the previous two years had created more vegetation growth that added more fuel to the fire.

The researchers examined the 'fire weather index' which uses the temperature, humidity, rainfall and wind speed in the preceding weeks and days to characterise the conditions that make fires more likely.

They said while coastal southern California is an environment 'highly prone to catastrophic wildfires', the extreme fire weather index condition that drove the LA fires is getting more likely due to climate change.

The hot dry conditions behind the wildfires are expected to occur every 17 years in today's climate, which has warmed 1.3C since pre-industrial times, making them 35% more likely to occur than in a world without global warming, and they are about 6% more intense, the researchers said.

The low rainfall between October and December, a period when rain usually brings an end to the region's wildfire season, is now about 2.4 times more likely than in pre-industrial times, an analysis of historical weather data found.

Hot, dry conditions are being seen for an extra 23 days each year on average, increasingly overlapping with the Santa Ana winds that spread the wildfires, they said.