LA Wildfire Live Updates: Winds Fanning Flames Ease as Fire Crews Make Progress

Entire blocks have been reduced to ash debris while one house stands isolated – and it’s unclear whether it was protected by private firefighters that only money can buy, grace or the merciless whims of Santa’s winds Ana. The civic fabric seems both torn and strained.

Are fires the great equalizer, the great divider or the great unifier of Los Angeles? Or, like so much else about this disaster, is it all of those things at once?

Sitting in a wheelchair outside the doors of an evacuation shelter in the Westwood neighborhood of West Los Angeles, Jay Solton, 85, embodied this jumble of personal and community trauma and resilience.

She was beaming, but grieving, and her life was on hold at a local leisure center. His career had touched on Los Angeles’ two obsessions: real estate and Hollywood. She recounted afternoons spent with Frank Sinatra and Doris Day in the 1960s, and how she grew closer to her new neighbors while distancing herself from her sons.

When the fire threatened her small apartment building in the Brentwood neighborhood, Ms. Solton decided to leave with her neighbor and head to the shelter. It was the first time she had been forced to evacuate in more than six decades in Los Angeles. With the power out and the winds still howling, Ms. Solton felt safer staying away. It seems strange, she said, but there was almost something exhilarating about this sudden collective tension.

“When you’re treated as well as we are, it leaves very little room for any kind of anxiety,” she said of her temporary home at the evacuation center, where the Southern California sun offered a jarring counterpoint to the devastation in the Pacific. Palisades, just six miles west. When a man stopped to compliment her, she joked with him that she had already met another suitor inside.

“Knowing that there is friendship and decency between all the groups of people who have come together,” she said, “I think it’s going to make Los Angeles stronger.”

Perhaps a kind of numbness had always hung over Los Angeles. The kind of situation that allows millions of residents to ignore the thousands of people sleeping under highways in every neighborhood and seemingly on every street corner. The kind of person who keeps you connected despite the constant threat of earthquakes, high winds, mudslides and fires.

More than a week after the wildfires broke out, this numbness feels much more like mourning.

“I see this incredible loss, this incredible pain that you can see in people’s eyes,” said Arielle Chiara Khonsary, 30, a fifth-generation Angeleno whose home in Palisades was destroyed. “For example, you meet looks in the elevator and you know it’s someone who has lost everything.”

Bobby McDonald, 78, has lived in and around Altadena for nearly three decades. He was stunned when he saw on local television the house he had sold two years earlier burning down. Swaths of his neighborhood remind him of something he never thought his neighborhood would remind him of: his time fighting in Vietnam.

“It looks like what I saw there,” he said.

Mr. McDonald, who helps oversee the luxury suites at the Crypto.com Arena, said his Altadena was a small town within a big city. He saw the same people all the time: at the gas station, at the grocery store, at the McDonald’s he loved on the corner of East Washington Boulevard and North Altadena Drive.

“I don’t know if future generations will be able to share what we did,” he added, wiping away tears as he stood outside a grocery store just south of the evacuation zone, his first trip outside for days. “It will take a long time to get that feeling back.”

To live in Los Angeles is to marvel and take for granted its immensity. What most people casually call a city is actually a county made up of 88 municipal jurisdictions. The local cliché is that it’s the only place where you can ski and surf in the same day. So the only way to gauge the scale of wildfire devastation is to get up high, in the air, or on a hilltop perch.

If you climb a ridge at the base of Altadena on a clear day, you can see from downtown Los Angeles all the way to California’s iconic Sparkling Coast. A moonscape of burned-out cars, charred tree trunks and piles and piles of debris and ash replaced the usual suburban bustle. The distance makes it impossible to see the scene of destruction in the coastal community of Palisades. Yet the perspective highlights both the immensity of the fires and the immensity of Los Angeles, from the mountains to the ocean, as well as the damage done in between.

The fires burned 38,000 acres in Los Angeles County, taking with them more than 12,000 structures and 25 lives. The Palisades and Eaton fires, on opposite sides of the county, created a far-reaching footprint, unifying a region that has long contained disparate identities.

Historians look for analogies: Hurricane Katrina, and even September 11 or Pearl Harbor. Victims are scrambling to find long-term housing. Ordinary residents, even those in urban centers, long considered safe from the barren hills, have packed their first bags.

For years, Christopher Bailey has been asking his TikTok followers for donations so he can cook and distribute hot dogs from his food truck on Skid Row near downtown Los Angeles. As the fires burned, he told supporters he wanted to offer something similar to victims forced from their homes.

Within days, the operation expanded to a huge flea market at the Santa Anita racetrack, a few miles east of Altadena. Rows and rows of used clothes, shoes, diapers, books, masks, cosmetics and toiletries were all available for free one evening this week.

No one checked to see if those who showed up had damaged or destroyed houses. Many families said they were there simply because they could qualify for free food and supplies. Food trucks handed out carne asada and agua frescas while music blared in the background. It was a celebratory and frenzied exchange for the working class, many of whom still had housing, but were still in need.

The city remains deeply divided along race, class and money. Many struggle even though they earn six-figure salaries, a harsh reality in a place where the median rent is around $3,000 a month.

As a child, Iiesha Dent watched her mother build a solid middle-class life after opening a hair salon in Pasadena in the 1970s. Last week, she launched her own small-scale relief operation on the salon’s lawn . On social media, she asked her customers and friends to come and bring supplies. Within hours, his yard along Lake Avenue, which leads to some of Altadena’s most blighted neighborhoods, was attracting people looking for diapers or bottled water.

Yet like others in the region, she has deep suspicions about the causes of inequality in the city and how the recovery will unfold. She worried about whether longtime middle-class black and Latino residents would be replaced by wealthier transplants when neighborhoods were rebuilt. And she wondered to what extent the tragedy could have been avoided.

“It’s almost like: Did they allow this to happen on purpose? » she said. “You have a lot of black and brown residents – do you just want them to leave?

City and county officials have pledged to investigate the cause of the fires, review the city’s preparedness and dedicate resources to rebuilding.

When Ms. Khonsary, a fifth-generation Angeleno, returned home to inspect the wreckage, she was looking for the smallest of things: a pink conch that had been passed down through four generations of women in her family.

The shell was one of the only items that survived a fire that destroyed her great-grandmother’s home in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles in the early 1900s. She never knew her great -grandmother and she died when Mrs. Khonsary was 3 years old.

She and her wife searched the ruins and rubble, looking for the shell and other possessions. The fire left very little standing: the fireplace, a burned-out washing machine, pieces of wrought iron. Ms. Khonsary said she had come to view her losses as a kind of capitulation, to “turn them over to the fire.”

And there it was – the shell, in the ashes. He was broken into pieces, but he had survived. A bit like his city.

Mimi Dwyer, Vik Jolly And Eli Tan reports contributed.