As fires continue to burn throughout Los Angeles (LA) County for the third week in a row, over 200,000 residents have rushed to escape the flame — including many members of the University of California, LA (UCLA) community.
The Palisades fire — the largest of the over a dozen fires scorching LA — has burned over 23,700 acres since its outbreak on Jan. 7, 2025. Closest to UCLA campus, the Palisades fire is currently 49 percent contained, according to Cal Fire. All evacuation warnings to and around UCLA campus have been lifted, and classes — temporarily conducted virtually due to the fire — are set to resume in-person today on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025.

Although no public statement was released by university officials, reports from residents of UCLA and UC Riverside (UCR) show that, in the days following the outbreak of the fire, UCLA students were emergently evacuated to UCR.
An anonymous second-year UCLA student has confirmed that UCLA students were evacuated to UCR. Currently taking zoom classes from UCR campus, they explained that “a few days after the fires, we were emailed specifics about when and how we should evacuate campus … UCR has accommodated me, providing a place to stay, a gym, a quiet room for zoom and a place for food.” Although they described the transition back to online classes as “mildly annoying, [UCLA] professors have been extremely supportive in terms of attendance and accommodation.”
According to an anonymous residential advisor (RA) serving on UCR’s Residential Education (ResEd) team, RA’s started checking rooms in preparation for UCLA students evacuating from the fires beginning on Saturday, Jan. 11, 2025. RA’s on duty were given specific instructions to perform room checks on the “300 unoccupied living spaces on [UCR] campus … relocations will occur in any unoccupied beds or rooms in any of the residence halls or apartments on campus.”
RA’s were instructed to “knock on the door and if no one answered we had permission to let ourselves into the room. We had to check that the bed, desk and closet were all clear and unused or unoccupied, as well as inform students about UCLA’s evacuation plan. For spaces that weren’t clear, residents were instructed that they had 24 hours to remove their items and someone will come check again at a later time.”
First-year resident of Pentland Hills Residence Hall, Kaelyn McAdams, shared that the RA’s on duty were performing random room checks on triple and double occupancy rooms because the “school was talking on UCLA students currently displaced by the fires.” McAdams was unaware that campus housing was conducting room checks.

According to UCR campus housing policies, the university must provide a minimum of “24 hours posted or six days mailed notification” before entering a residence’s accommodations, except in the “event of an emergency, during periodic fire drills, when resident has abandoned or surrendered the premises, or when it is impracticable.”
McAdams explained that “the school apparently deemed this an emergency, however, the school has yet to give us an email about this being an emergency.”
ResEd professional staff were contacted to confirm these allegations, but no response was received as of Jan. 18, 2025.