On January 7th a lethal combination of powerful winds and recent drought sent the greater Los Angeles area up in flames. A week later, the city is still burning. At least 24 people have been killed and more than 12,000 buildings have been destroyed by the fires. By the time the flames are finally extinguished – and no one is quite sure when that will be – those figures will undoubtedly be higher.
Entire neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble. Walking through the newly charred parts of Los Angeles feels a little bit like trespassing in a graveyard. When I look at the piles of ash and glass and twisted metal in Altadena or Pacific Palisades, it’s hard to envision these neighbourhoods whole. But the few things that the fires, miraculously, left untouched help paint a picture of what these communities used to be.
In Altadena I met a few people on the street. One woman came back to see if her house had survived the fires. It did and she collected the essentials: her pillow and her tax documents. “We bought the house in 1998,” she told me. “It was the most beautiful year of our lives.” Firefighters drove by in their trucks and raised a weary hand in greeting as they passed. A city power worker ran lines through the street to try to turn the electricity back on for the few homes that remained standing. But the neighbourhood was mostly quiet, and I felt the need to whisper.
Chimneys were all that were left on some lots. They stood tall, like headstones above the debris. Concrete stairs to nowhere showed where front doors used to be. A dining room table was surrounded by four chairs but no walls. A little toy truck and a ripped trampoline evoked scenes of after-school play. A lemon tree was untouched, its yellow fruit audaciously vibrant against the ash and smoke. In front of what used to be a megamansion was a Harris-Walz sign; November seemed so very long ago. Aryn Braun
Thousands of gallons of flame retardant have been dropped from the sky to slow the fires’ spread, blanketing surfaces with an eerie pink sheen
Loren Elliott / REDUX / EYEVINE
Flame-retardant foam transforms a garden into a swamp. It will lose its pink colour with prolonged exposure to the sun
LOREN ELLIOTT / REDUX / EYEVINE
