A nightmare came true for Hope Edelman.
“This is the big one we all feared, but somehow convinced ourselves would never happen,” said Edelman, an author and 27-year resident of Topanga Canyon, referring to the Palisades fire that began Tuesday and was, as she spoke Wednesday, eating up the canyons near her home.
“Now it is.”
Tens of thousands of locals could say the same. Some of the most beautiful, expensive and fire-prone neighborhoods of Los Angeles County are in flames.
Officials said late Wednesday afternoon that the Palisades fire, which includes nearly 16,000 acres of Malibu and Pacific Palisades and nearby coastal communities, and the Eaton fire, which has eaten nearly 11,000 acres in the foothills north of Pasadena and Altadena, have combined to kill at least five people and destroy no less than 1,000 homes. Neither blaze is contained and fire officials said destruction could grow in coming hours and days.
They also said two smaller blazes – the Hurst fire, near Sylmar, and the Lidia fire, near Palmdale – remained uncontained as of late afternoon. And a brush fire started late Wednesday afternoon near Runyon Canyon in the Hollywood Hills.
The two biggest of the fires don’t seem to care about star power or name recognition. They’ve damaged or wiped out landmarks as diverse as the Will Rogers estate in Pacific Palisades and the Bunny Museum in Altadena. Celebrities and those far out of the spotlight alike lost their homes.
But, in addition to the human and physical and even cultural destruction, the fires also are upending lives.
More than 100,000 people, from neighborhoods as far south as Santa Monica and as far north as Glendale, packed up and fled their homes late Tuesday and Wednesday. Hotels, motels, vacation rentals and public shelters were mostly full throughout the region, a result of people fleeing fires. And roads in some of the communities were filled to the point of choking with abandoned cars, as television news crews trained their cameras on empty Land Rovers and Bentleys.
For Jason and Zhaleh Yamada-Hanff, the decision to pack up their three young sons and a dog and evacuate their Eagle Rock home was more about common sense – and the bitter whiff of burning chaparral – than any official evacuation order.
“We were worried about it (Tuesday) night, and watching the maps pretty carefully. But when we got up this morning and saw where the (fire perimeter) had moved, and heard that there were ‘go’ orders for the neighborhood right across the freeway, we decided to get out,” Jason Yamada-Hanff said via phone from his grandmother’s home in Irvine.
“We could smell it, too,” he added.
“It was time.”
The fires and mass destruction led to political finger-pointing and blame, including from President-elect Donald Trump toward Gov. Gavin Newsom.
On his Truth Social, Trump accused Newsom of prioritizing “an essentially worthless fish” over making sure water flowed to Southern California. In the Pacific Palisades, where the devastation appeared apocalyptic in some neighborhoods, there were reports that no water flowed from some fire hydrants.
“He is the blame for this,” Trump said.
Newsom on Wednesday spent time with President Joe Biden at a stop in Santa Monica and later showed his frustration with Trump in an interview on CNN.
“This guy wanted to politicize it,” Newsom said. “I have a lot of thoughts and I know what I want to say, but I won’t.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass also was the subject of significant criticism for her handling of the crisis, though she said she was in constant contact with officials as she returned Wednesday from a trip to Africa.
Those dust-ups, however, paled in comparison to the devastation suffered by people who lost everything in some cases or, in others, waited for any word about how their homes or businesses fared.
For people who stuck it out – or couldn’t leave – conditions were tough.
Power was out or intermittent in some parts of the region. Cell service was gone or iffy. And food providers from outside Los Angeles said they were prepping to send meals to places where food soon might become scarce, and to feed people who don’t typically need such assistance.
“Once you’re cut off from services, it doesn’t matter what your portfolio looks like,” said Mike Learakos, chief executive of Abound Food Care, a Santa Ana nonprofit that on Wednesday was prepping to send about 1,300 meals to a food pantry in Hollywood that is expecting a surge of fire-fleeing clients.
“If you need food, we’re going to help you,” Learakos added.
“And the need definitely is there or coming soon.”
None of this was a surprise. In the chaparral ecosystem that dominates much of coastal Southern California, wildfire is a natural event.
But as climate has changed, and prompted extreme rains and extreme droughts to become more common, fires of the size and scope of Palisades and Eaton – some natural, and some man-made – have become grimly routine.
Consider just a few of the dozens of named fires to hit Los Angeles in the past 16 years:
• In 2020, the Bobcat fire burned 116,000 acres in the Angeles National Forest north of Monrovia, killing none but wiping out 170 structures.
• In 2018, the Woolsey fire burned nearly 97,000 acres in north Los Angeles and Ventura counties, killing three people, injuring five and knocking down 1,643 structures.
• In 2009, the Station fire burned 115,000 acres near Flintridge, killing two people, both firefighters, and destroying 209 structures.
Other huge fires have hit Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counites. During a six-day span in October 2003, fires hit Ventura, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego counties, wiping out more than 6,500 homes and businesses and killing at least 20 people.
The specific conditions leading to the current round of blazes are particularly ripe for huge fires.
Two years of record or near-record rainfall hit Southern California from 2022 through the middle of last year. That created huge growth of brush and grasses and other plants that can become fuel for fires. Since the end of the heavy rains, the spigot has switched off and the region has had no rain. That, in turn, has dried out much of the vegetation that’s bloomed over the past two years.
Combine that with a Santa Ana wind event that has included gusts of more than 80 mph in some canyons, and the current round of fire is almost unsurprising.
Still, Malibu resident Veronique de Turenne suggested the current fire is running against patterns she’s seen over the years. The Santa Anas, she said, are blowing stronger – and in a different direction – than usual.
“There’s a traditional trajectory, or used to be a traditional trajectory… (The winds) usually go down one canyon at a time. Then that pattern got broken with the Woolsey fire when the fires came down all the canyons at once,” she said.
This fire, she said, is even worse.
“This was different. This was so different. Everything about it felt different. It felt apocalyptic.”