California rain now brings another threat to wildfire victims: Mudslides. The relentless fires have left 82 dead, hundreds more missing, destroying most everything in their wake. But it was the fast-moving Woolsey Fire just 10 days ago that left three dead and thousands of acres charred.
THV11's Dawn Scott tells us that it forced an Arkansan studying at a California college to evacuate. Anna Clare Burnett graduated from Mount Saint Mary Academy in 2016. She's a Pepperdine University junior, but she found herself scrambling to flee the Malibu campus when flames moved in.
Home in Arkansas right now, she shared how thankful she is to be alive.
Images of California's devastating wildfires, pictures of harrowing evacuations, a deadly inferno threatening homes and lives. It seems so far away from Arkansas.
"It was bad, it was really bad," Burnett said. The flames were entirely too close to Burnett, who awoke to roommates banging on her Pepperdine University off-campus apartment door.
"They said, 'We've gotta go there's a fire it's coming right now. Malibu is evacuating we have to leave now,'" she said. "I grabbed some t-shirts, shoved them in my purse, left in my pajamas with no shoes."
Burnett rushed away from danger but hit a line of traffic. In the driver's seat, she turned around and saw how close the fire truly was.
"And I looked behind and it was so close that I could see the flames. It was this giant wall of smoke so thick you could not see through it at all," she said. "Four and a half hours later, I had traveled like five miles and my car runs out of gas."
She ended up jumping in a friend's car and they began receiving images and texts of what they narrowly escaped. They made it to an LA hotel, thinking it would be a short stay. Then they turned on the news.
"I was just sitting on the hotel bed watching my apartment burn on TV," Burnett said. "I called my mom crying and I said, 'I just wanna come home, I don't wanna be here, I don't want the fire to come here.'"
Burnett took the next flight to Little Rock at 1 a.m. She's now home for Thanksgiving.
"It feels so good to be with people I love so much," she said.
Except one loved one, her father, who was a Pepperdine alum and died during 9/11.
"He was on flight 93, yes 9/11," Burnett said. She was 3-years-old when he died. "We moved to Arkansas about a year after he died."
But she remembers him instilling a love of Pepperdine.
"Whenever we were kids, he used to train us to say 'I wanna go to Pepperdine.' He would ask us in the middle of the day, 'Anna Clare, where do you want to go? I wanna go to Pepperdine.'"
The fire raged through the heroes garden at Pepperdine honoring the alum who died during 9/11, like her father. Fires raged but left the inscribed rocks alone.
"Only things left are really just the stones and the rocks with the quotations and bible verses engraved on them," she said.
One, in particular, is something her dad often told her mom: "In the midst of tragedy we can find God."
Something Anna Clare is finding out right now, having survived raging wildfires. This Thanksgiving, she says she has many reasons to give thanks.
"The only thing irreplaceable is a life. And everyone that I love is okay," she said. "Every single tragedy has a light you can find, if you look for it."
And you can't help but think if her father was here today, you know he would've said the same thing.
"Gratitude is not in things that are destructible. It's not in clothes or an apartment, it's not in money," she said. "It's in the people that matter, it's in your family."
Burnett has no idea when she'll be able to return to campus or class and she doesn't know what she will return to. Regardless, she said she is overwhelmed by the generosity of people around the country who've offered support.
"There's more to be thankful for than angry at," she said.
PHOTOS: Arkansan narrowly escapes California wildfires while attending university
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