Early this week, the National Weather Service started sending out alerts in Los Angeles about a “life-threatening and destructive” windstorm set to begin on Tuesday afternoon. The threat of fires had been implicit—the conditions for them were good, as is often the case in the area. The Palisades Fire began as a brush fire on Tuesday morning; by the end of the day, it was rapidly approaching three thousand acres in size. Even if you were far from the flames, you couldn’t help but feel uneasy. The wind had been gusting violently all day. I kept plans to meet my dad for dinner. Driving over, I saw palm fronds sliding across the road, and lawn furniture tumbled about. We met at 6:30 at a German beer bar in Highland Park, and, before we had ordered drinks, he received an alert on his phone about the Eaton Fire, which broke out shortly after 6 P.M. in the San Gabriel Mountains above the city of Altadena, where my brother lives. My parents were staying with him. They decided to evacuate, and my dad booked a hotel room on his phone. Not long after, the electricity in the restaurant cut out. Back home in Mount Washington, I could see flames eating their way down the flanks of the San Gabriel Mountains. A strong wind blew, and then a tree in the yard fell down. Around ten thirty that night, another fire, the Hurst, picked up near Sylmar.
By the next morning, breathing was like trying to inhale a campfire. In downtown Los Angeles, which was veiled in smoke, local government officials convened for an update at the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration. The good news was that there had been no confirmed fire-related deaths in the Palisades. But there had been two related to the Eaton Fire. That number would later rise to five. And, as of eight o’clock on Wednesday morning, there were four fires, spanning more than seven thousand acres. A thousand structures had been destroyed in the Palisades on the previous night. The damage in Altadena was at a hundred structures and counting. (By the next morning, the official estimate rose to more than a thousand there, too.) More than seventy thousand residents of Los Angeles County were under orders to evacuate their homes, and tens of thousands more were warned to be ready to follow them. More than four hundred thousand people were without electricity.
The ability of the firefighters to respond was limited by the number, size, and location of the fires, and by the unusual intensity of the Santa Ana winds, which the previous night had reached seventy miles an hour in some places. “There are not enough firefighters in L.A. County to address four separate fires of this magnitude,” Anthony Marrone, the chief of the L.A. County Fire Department, said. “The L.A. County Fire Department was prepared for one or two major brush fires, but not four, especially given the sustained winds and low humidities.” The fire department, which also handles emergency services in the county, was at “draw down”—everyone who could be called into work had been. The wind had grounded firefighting aircraft for much of the night. In the Palisades, water pressure had been lost by three in the morning, as the extra strain on the system temporarily ran three crucial storage tanks dry. Firefighters from other California counties and other states were meeting to offer aid. The mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, was still en route back to California from a diplomatic trip to Ghana. Many schools were closed. Employees with respiratory issues were encouraged to stay home, and officials suggested that the West Side should be avoided altogether. Also closed: Griffith Park (and access to the Hollywood sign), Runyon Canyon, and the L.A. Zoo.
Meanwhile, the online hyperbole, conspiracy theories, and quick takes on Los Angeles were generating their own weather system. From the ground, the social-media response looked self-interested and craven, a reminder of the dissonance between the two realities. At Zuma Beach, in Malibu, emergency workers had set up a command post to coördinate the response to the Palisades Fire. To get there, I took a back route, which takes you up the 101 Freeway through the San Fernando Valley and then crosses over the Santa Monica Mountains to the beach. On the normally breathtaking drive over the mountains, the car shuddered in gusts of wind, and when the first glimpse of the Pacific came into view it was heaving with whitecaps. At Zuma, the command center was set up outside a lifeguard station; it had previously been in Will Rogers State Beach, but the area had gotten smoked out. A map of the county had been put up on the wall of a large garage, and uniformed members of state and local agencies gathered next to racks of surfboards and kayaks to discuss the next phase of evacuation plans. Thomas Shoots, a spokesperson with CAL FIRE, the state firefighting agency, told me that the aircraft were flying again, but where the fire might go next was still unpredictable.
“These winds, they’re erratic,” he said. “It’s not like they’re just blowing in one direction. We know the Santa Ana winds, we have that northeasterly flow, but really there is no part of this fire that is buttoned up.”
I continued south down the Pacific Coast Highway, past the green lawns of Pepperdine University and the deserted parking lots of the Malibu Country Mart, the Palisades Fire visible in the distance as a billowing cloud. It was near Carbon Beach that I saw the first beach house in flames. In Los Angeles, it’s a known phenomenon that houses in the hills sometimes burn; the risk comes with the territory. But this was different—not only was the house facing the ocean, it was several miles away from the heart of the Palisades Fire and had presumably been set alight by embers carried with the wind. Beyond it, more houses were smoldering or engulfed in flames, and the Pacific Coast Highway receded south into a vague haze of smoke and flashing lights. I parked on the side of the street that wasn’t on fire. Except for first responders, the area had mostly been evacuated, but a couple of people, longtime Malibu residents, were standing around in civilian clothing.
“We’ve been through a few, but this is the worst ever,” Janice Burns (“no pun intended”), who works in real estate and has lived in Malibu since 1978, said. “Ever, ever, ever in fifty years.”
“It’s up there,” Thomas Hirsch, a dentist who has been in Malibu since 1965 and lost his house in the 2018 Woolsey Fire, agreed.
They waved at a man walking down the sidewalk. This turned out to be Jefferson Wagner, the two-time former mayor of Malibu and owner of Zuma Jay Surfboards, which has been in business for fifty years. Wagner also lost his house in the Woolsey Fire, and has been living in a condo while its replacement is under construction. I asked how this fire compared with the others he has seen.
“This is worse than the Woolsey Fire,” he said. “And 1993, that was three hundred and sixty-five homes. This is a lot more than that.”
Fire trucks drove past us. Wagner identified one that had travelled all the way from the Bay Area city of Piedmont. We looked across the street at the scorched estate, which like many houses on the Pacific Coast Highway had been set back from the road and hidden behind gates. The tall white wooden fences were now half gone and still licked by low flames; a tangle of metal was all that was left of the building behind them. “That’s David Geffen’s old house,” Burns remarked. (The music mogul had sold it for a reported eighty-five million dollars in 2017.) The conversation turned to calculations of risk.
“You’re in a fire zone, you know it’s a risk,” Hirsch said.
“Or you live in Kansas, and you’re going to have a tornado,” Burns said.
“Or you live in Florida, and you have a hurricane,” Wagner added.
“It’s the price you pay for this view,” Burns, looking out at the ocean, said.
In Santa Monica, I drove by an evacuation center, where a steady stream of residents arrived carrying bottled water or diapers. At the Brentwood Country Mart, on the edge of the mandatory evacuation zone at San Vicente Boulevard, I stopped for a coffee, then watched the winged doors of a black Tesla open and Harrison Ford step out—it was still L.A. Around one in the afternoon, my family called to tell me that my brother’s house in Altadena, which he started renting in 2020, had burned down. I left the West Side and made the familiar drive up there to meet him back in the neighborhood. The Pacific Palisades is a wealthy enclave with modernist architecture and houses with views of the sea. Although Altadena, which you can see laid out in a grid as you drive toward the San Gabriel Mountains, has gentrified in recent years, it has traditionally been a middle-class suburb to nearby Pasadena. Former residents include the science-fiction novelist Octavia Butler and the physicist Richard Feynman.
As I turned east from Lincoln Avenue, I could see that the destruction was immediate and ongoing. The noxious air smelled of burnt plastic. A few residents stood outside their destroyed homes, trying to put out the last flames with garden hoses. (Earlier that day, at the press conference, a Department of Public Works official had wearily said that customers needed “to understand that it’s really quite futile to fight fires with the hose at your house.”) Other houses were still in flames. I got out and spoke with a couple, Dietra Moses and Ben Lieberson, who were standing in front of the ruins of their home. Around four in the morning, they were woken up by an evacuation order to a house filled with smoke. They had lived in Altadena since 1999. “It was, like, coming from London, what a perfect place,” Lieberson, who is British, said. “Quiet, got a big yard, trees; chill, nice people, such a mixed community of people—just chill, you know?”
Now, groups of television cameramen dressed in yellow fire gear wandered the streets. I met up with my brother, and we drove farther up the hill, toward the foot of the mountains. Block after block of the city was incinerated; the place we knew was simply gone. In the wreckage of the houses, only the occasional recognizable object remained: some trash bins melted on one side, like the marshmallows in a s’more; a Santa sled that had not yet been put away for the season; the frame of my niece’s bike in what used to be my brother’s garage. The wind had by then died down—it was, at least in Altadena, almost completely still. ♦
