David Pierce shouted to his wife, Jane Pierce, to pack, as embers rained down on their block in Altadena.

Ms. Pierce set to work on finding the 15 items on the list pinned to their bulletin board — a list they had created after surviving a fire decades earlier and included computers, eyeglasses, spare car keys and of course, their yellow Labrador retriever, Tegan.

While she packed, he ran from neighbor to neighbor, pounding on their doors. He frantically called the couple who live behind them, and who were out of the country, to get the code to their gate, so that he could grab Candy, their 80-pound Belgian Malinois.

The Pierces — he a retired lawyer, 63, and she a retired neonatal nurse, 62 — shoved Tegan and Candy into their respective SUVs.

But as they sped away from the fire, Mr. Pierce was consumed about the animals he couldn’t grab: five koi that they had bought a quarter century ago.