Dick Van Dyke is sharing his harrowing experience escaping the Malibu fire earlier this week.
Speaking with a local news outlet in an interview that aired on the Today show Thursday, Van Dyke, who turns 99 on Friday, said the fire “was coming from the hill, you could see it. And oh my God, and we got out of here.”
Van Dyke said he was struggling outside trying to unsnarl his fire hose when neighbors came to his rescue. “I was trying to crawl to the car, I had exhausted myself, I couldn’t get up,” he said. “Three neighbors came and carried me out and came back and put out a little fire in the guest house and saved me.”
You can see Van Dyke’s interview below.
Van Dyke and his wife Arlene Silver fled their home on Tuesday, along with their pets, all except one of their cats, Bobo, who escaped as they were evacuating. “Bobo escaped as we were leaving,” he wrote in a post on Facebook. “We’re praying he’ll be okay and that our community in Serra Retreat will survive these terrible fires.”
But there is a happy ending to the story. “We found Bobo as soon as we arrived back home this morning,” Van Dyke wrote in a post on Facebook alongside a love heart emoji. ‘There was so much interest in his disappearance that Animal Control was called in to assist. But, thankfully he was easy to find and not harmed.”
Van Dyke is one of thousands of Malibu residents forced to flee the fire that has burned more than 4,000 acres and is still 7% percent contained.
