Meryl Streep is the kind of person you want to have around during a crisis.

“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,” Abe Streep wrote in a New York Magazine article published Tuesday about the three-time Oscar winner’s encounter with the Southern California wildfires.

“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,” the New Mexico-based writer reported about his aunt’s encounter with the blazes that broke out in early January.

The article described the devastation in the area and examined how Los Angeles will rebuild.

Abe Streep also spoke with Martin Short, Meryl’s Only Murders in the Building costar and rumored boyfriend, and related the actor’s experience with the fire in the Pacific Palisades. Though Short saw the flames from his balcony, he evacuated only after one of his sons, who lives nearby, called and told him to. Traffic heading out of the neighborhood was backed up, though, and it took him “more than an hour to cover a distance that would normally take five minutes,” Streep wrote. The actor made sure to take his family photo albums with him.

When evacuation orders for residents of the area were lifted Jan. 27, Short was allowed to return and found his house remained standing.

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Actor Haley Joel Osment, who has made his home in the Altadena community, which was ravaged by the Eaton Fire, also described his experience. The Sixth Sense actor lost 500 records and a piano his parents had given him when he turned 18, half his lifetime ago.

Many celebrity homes, including those of Billy Crystal, Jamie Lee Curtis, Anna Faris, Paris Hilton, Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag, Mark Hamill, and Mandy Moore, were burned down in the fires.