LOS ANGELES — Home after home is gone. Old apartment buildings, mansions, cottages, generational homes. Gone. Community centers. Parks. Gas stations. Coffee shops. Banks. Grocery stores. They’re all gone.
And Pacific Palisades, a coastal community of about 23,000 people, was still burning from the wildfires that have swept through the city this week.
The town looked as if several large bombs had gone off. Flames were leaping through an apartment complex next to a retirement community, its top floors caved in. The Gelson’s supermarket across the street was torched. A gas station where a Washington Post reporter stood Tuesday, talking to police about how bad this fire was getting, was also gone, the cars left in its parking lot now just shells of brown steel.
In the square, a popular community spot, the Starbucks inside the iconic light pink Bank of America building was gone. Behind it, the smoking devastation stretched for blocks.
Heavy winds rocked metal street signs like swings and caused smoldering fires to reignite in some blown-out storefronts.
Firefighting and emergency response officials have been stretched to the limit as three major fires blew up around Los Angeles, flanking much of the region and spurring mass evacuations. On Tuesday, many Palisades residents barely made it out as flames quickly ripped through the dry, brushy hills, with winds sending embers spewing down toward the densely populated neighborhoods.
Along Sunset Boulevard, the winding two-way road that cuts through much of Los Angeles, street after street has been reduced to rubble or is still burning, glowing flames really the only thing visible through the thick blanket of black smoke that still covers much of the area. The smoke gets worse the farther north you go. Green grass and a looming concrete bell tower are all that remain of the Palisades Presbyterian Church, small flames visible beneath its cross.
“Is there anyone who didn’t lose their house? Those are the questions,” said Kelsey Van Hook, who grew up in the Palisades and is confident all that is left of her childhood home is a chimney. In her neighborhood WhatsApp chat, it feels as if everyone is confirming that their house is gone too.
The community — home to beloved trails through nature parks, a July Fourth parade, a critical high school for the area, a Yogurt Shoppe every kid grows up going to, a 5K race and a theater center — feels like “a total loss,” Van Hook said.
Van Hook’s home was gone, along with nearly every other home on her street near the town center. All that remained was a tangerine tree, its bright small fruit scattered all over the blackened front yard.
As homes still burned, the neighborhood was mostly deserted. There were few firefighters to be seen, except for one crew trying to douse some flames that were dancing from a building at Palisades High School. Another crew was seen responding to a fire in the remnants of a hair salon, its windows shattered. A sign that read “Joy to All” still hung from its red door.
Around noon, more crews arrived, spreading out as homes and a bank again surged into flames.
Residents who stayed, especially those in the Bluffs neighborhood, said there were no fire crews around them. There was no running water. They were using buckets from swimming pools to douse what they could. Residents and firefighters faced similar issues during the 2018 Woolsey Fire in Malibu, when some hydrants also ran dry.
Fire officials were blunt on Wednesday about the lack of adequate resources and how thin their ranks had been stretched by multiple massive wildfires.
Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said his department was prepared for one or two major brush fires, but not for “this type of widespread disaster.”
“There are not enough firefighters in L.A. County to address four separate fires of this magnitude,” he said.
Marrone told reporters Wednesday morning that the Palisades fire had grown to more than 5,000 acres, had destroyed more than 1,000 structures and continues to grow. “We have no percentage of containment,” he said of the fire, adding that its cause remains under investigation.
While no fatalities have been reported in that fire, Marrone said two civilian deaths had been reported in the Eaton fire, which has now burned more than 10,000 acres, officials said. That fire also remained entirely uncontained, Marrone said, and has claimed at least 100 structures.
Marrone said that though more than 1,500 people were working to combat the out-of-control fires, it wasn’t nearly enough.
Police officers told The Washington Post that they forced dozens of people to abandon their cars because the “fire was right on top of them.” By Tuesday afternoon it seemed that firefighters had gotten a small handle on the area near where the blaze sparked. They had protected the Self Realization Center, the famous temple said in a statement, and were putting out spot fires near a sushi restaurant and a bakery.
But then the winds shifted, and flames quickly roared east across Sunset toward Palisades High School. On Wednesday morning, most of that stretch was incinerated, and the tree-lined streets were apocalyptic.
A few people inside the fire perimeter drove and walked around in a daze, stopping in front of burning homes, taking in the wreckage of the town center. Others got past police barricades by walking or scootering along the smoke-covered beach, the gray fumes so thick that the ocean had disappeared.
Sarah Kamdar fled Pacific Palisades on Tuesday as flames approached her son’s school, first by car until she hit gridlock, then on foot. She found an Airbnb in northern Santa Monica, but it quickly became an evacuation zone as well. So she and relatives went farther south, bunking up in hotels. By Wednesday morning, they again found themselves in an evacuation zone.
“I’m walking back from Target with the dog, and the kids called me and said, ‘We smell smoke in the hotel,’” said Kamdar, 42, a psychologist and mother of three. “I think we might need to go somewhere farther out. The hope was to stay nearby if we could get back in.”
Kamdar’s husband had managed to walk back into Pacific Palisades on Wednesday morning with a neighbor. They found the neighbor’s house first.
“They just sent me a picture,” Kamdar said. “It’s not there anymore.”
The men then began searching for Kamdar’s mother’s house in Marquez Knolls. The house next door was on fire when she left. After that, they would look for her sister’s above Palisades High, which her 15-year-old daughter attended. “We have video of that catching on fire, so I’m not very hopeful,” she said. Kamdar’s family home in the Highlands area was too far away, she said, but so far everything they had seen in the village was “absolute devastation.”
“It’s obliterated. I really don’t even know where our rebuild begins,” Kamdar said.
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Molly Hennessy-Fiske contributed to this report.