‘Gossip Girl’s Samantha Rose Baldwin Ran Through Palisades Fire To Save Her Cat

deadline.com:

As wildfires ravage Southern California, many evacuees have been separated from their pets while fleeing impacted areas. Samantha Rose Baldwin, an actress who appeared in the Gossip Girl reboot, detailed the “terrifying” experience of running through the Palisades Fire to save her 10-year old tortoiseshell cat Kitty. “It was an immediate spring into action and an amalgamation of questions racing through my head – can I get my cat out?

Is my dad safe and getting ready to leave?” she explained to DailyMail.com. While her father was helping evacuate students at a nearby elementary school, where he worked as a security guard before it ultimately burned down in the fires, Baldwin attempted to get home.

With bumper-to-bumper traffic that would have taken her two hours to get to her apartment, Baldwin “decided to park my car and run,” adding: “I ran for about 15 minutes on Sunset Boulevard until I made it home.” The actress said it “took 20 minutes for me to find her” once she got inside her apartment, as Kitty “had gone into her best hiding spot which was inside the couch.

I grabbed her and wrapped her up in a blanket and put her inside my cat carrier backpack.” “Once we got outside, the fire had gotten closer to us and the path going back to my car was now no longer an option,” she continued. “I thought to myself, ‘Where I am suppose to go?’ The fire was all around us.