Scenes from the worst 24 hours in the history of Los Angeles…
Four fires transform into massive flamethrowers, fueled by 99 mph Santa Ana winds. They engulf three football fields every minute, swallowing trees, cars and lives in their paths.
A man shoots video on his phone from inside his mostly glass house, flames raging on three of four sides. He tilts the camera down to his dog, whose eyes are huge.
A local-TV-station cameraman in Pacific Palisades shoots live with one hand and holds a garden hose on a burning house with the other. You do what you can.
My buddy in the Palisades texts: “There’s whole blocks on fire up here and no firefighters in sight.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Firefighters, grimy with ash, hook up to hydrants only to find the water has run out.
Panicked people run for their lives — literally. They hold dogs, photos, whatever they can carry.
A young man in Altadena comes out his front door with a groaning backpack over his shoulders, eschewing his car and climbing instead onto his bicycle, knowing he’ll have to navigate roads clogged with abandoned cars, felled trees and fire trucks.
An entire fleet of air tankers and fire choppers sit on the LAX tarmac, their bellies full of fire-retardant chemicals, rendered useless by a sky choked thick black.
Stunning beach-tickling Malibu homes — the properties of movie stars and TV directors — try on an entirely new interior decor: unquenchable fire, an element that doesn’t seem to care how many Oscars they’ve won.
Seventy-seven-year-old actor James Woods breaks down in tears on live TV, grieving his Palisades home and his neighborhood. “One day you’re swimming in the pool,” he says, “and the next day it’s all gone.”
A film score composer checks his phone and finds his neighbor has sent a video. It tells the composer his three-month-old Palisades home, his two Steinways and all his sheet music are in ashes. Nothing left. Not every tragedy is on the screen.
Propane tanks explode, glass doors on ovens shatter, metal street signs bang a dirge against parking lot rails, dogs bark and ever, always, the relentless gales howl.
A man leads two horses down a street, leaning against the hurricane-force winds. He wears goggles against the embers that are flying like sideways rain, hungry to start the next devastation. The horses can only squint and toss their heads to and fro, itching to run.
A writer thinks back on his 45 years spent in Los Angeles, off and on. He remembers the L.A. riots, the Northridge earthquake, the massive Mendocino fire, all of them paling compared with this. He’s never seen annihilation like this. These fires burn from the beach to the mountains, from Pasadena to the Palisades, from the Malibu trailers to Pasadena mansions. Some fully immolate in the time it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer.
The dawn blinks awake in the black smoke, slowly revealing a hellscape too cruel for any Hollywood director to imagine.