"Talking my way through the National Guard checkpoint at the intersection of Amalfi Drive and Sunset Boulevard felt like crossing the River Styx, into the underworld. It was early March 2025. The last embers of the Palisades Fire had been out for a month. It was cold, gray and drizzling. A blue-green mist coiled around the chaparral foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains like tendrils of smoke. The air smelled of ozone and scorched chemicals. I had bronchitis and bad dreams."
"I'd spent the prior day driving around Altadena in a daze. My wife and I had pilgrimaged to see our old house on Grand Oaks Avenue. By some stroke of luck it survived the Eaton Fire, which burned simultaneously with the Palisades Fire, wreathing LA in flames for 24 days. But starting just a couple blocks north of our house and stretching for miles westward, it looked like an atom bomb had detonated. Most of Altadena was gone."
"I was wandering on foot, absorbing the sight of mansion after mansion transformed by fire into teetering, abstract sculptures. I was chilled, wheezing through the N95 mask I'd plucked from our dusty pandemic stash. When I stopped in front of the first property on the block to be cleared, the door of an excavator swung open and a spectral figure dressed in a white hazmat suit descended into the wreckage. He approached and, pulling aside a respirator, asked, "Was this your house?""
National Guard checkpoints restricted access to burned neighborhoods at Amalfi Drive and Sunset Boulevard after the Palisades Fire. Early March 2025 conditions were cold, gray and drizzling, with a blue-green mist coiling around chaparral foothills and a smell of ozone and scorched chemicals. The Palisades Fire and the simultaneously burning Eaton Fire wreathhed Los Angeles in flames for 24 days. Large sections of Altadena were destroyed while some houses survived. In the Pacific Palisades mansions were reduced to charred, teetering forms. Hazardous cleanup involved workers in hazmat suits, including a Wilmington resident named Brayan who performs recovery work while raising young twin boys.
Read at High Country News
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