'It was biblical': Ash and flame upend Life in Southern California

It has long been a local article of faith: Southern California disasters are rarely as big as they seem.

Delaware and Rhode Island could fit, with room to spare, in Los Angeles County. A drive from Pacific Palisades to Pasadena takes nearly an hour, even without traffic. When the Los Angeles riots erupted in 1992, Americans recoiled at the fires silhouetting the downtown skyline. Not shown were the jacaranda-lined streets and placid suburbs where the rest of Southern California watched the mayhem on TV.

This time, it was different.

In a furious assault that began Tuesday morning and continued into Wednesday night, a wind-and-wildfire monster attacked a metropolis of 4,753 miles and nearly 10 million people, whipping up flames that tore through communities of every socioeconomic status and stripe.

Mansions were reduced to ash in Pacific Palisades, a West Los Angeles celebrity enclave. Subdivisions burned to the ground 35 miles to the east in the tidy suburb of Altadena. Ranch hands in rural Sylmar, 25 miles to the north, fled into the fiery night, leading horses. New homeowners in freshly built developments hours away in inland communities such as Pomona braced for evacuations as 59-mph winds rattled the windowpanes and palm trees.

As of late Wednesday, the fires had claimed at least five lives and destroyed more than 1,000 buildings, with more damage expected as the wind intensified with nightfall. A new fire in the evening had engulfed part of Hollywood Hills. More than 80,000 people were under evacuation orders.

It wasn't just that the place was in flames. It was that it seemed to be in flames everywhere at once, as a barrage of separate wildfire events erupted in population centers across the region, each spawning its own constellation of spot fires from wind-driven embers. Psychically if not physically, they merged into a kind of mega-catastrophe for Southern Californians. Ash, smoke, wind and flames carried the heart-stinging realization, which spread like a contagion, that a new and less manageable landscape was on the horizon.

"The only thing I can think of that would compare with this would be a massive earthquake," said Zev Yaroslavsky, 76, who served for decades in Los Angeles as a City Council member and county supervisor. "Except that earthquakes have an epicenter."

He paused to cough, hoarse from the smoke that has blanketed the region. "This thing is all over the place," he said. "It's impacting everybody who breathes the air. When I went to get the paper this morning, a big black cloud hung over the city from the Eaton fire. It was biblical."

When Antonio Villaraigosa was mayor of Los Angeles from 2005 to 2013, not a year passed that didn't include a helicopter ride in which he surveyed the vast Los Angeles Basin after some disaster. Every year, he said, he would be struck by the sheer breadth and vulnerability of Southern California.

The high-rises down Wilshire Boulevard. The celebrity compounds in the Santa Monica Mountains. The endless tracts of little homes, each a repository of a family's dreams and life savings. The hills, with their narrow and twisty streets and bone-dry chaparral -- a constant peril in fire season, though it was also clear that the sheer size of the place could trump even an inferno.

Wednesday, Villaraigosa and others said, no place seemed immune.

"I've lived here my whole life and never seen anything like this," said Villaraigosa, 71, who spoke by phone from his own Los Angeles home, where he was anticipating evacuation orders. "The devastation in the Palisades. The first responders. The fire chief in Pasadena just estimated that the number of homes lost there would be in the triple digits. The Ralphs on Sunset is destroyed. I used to go to that market all the time."

To outsiders, Los Angeles can come off as a faceless sprawl filled with artifice and isolation. But those who live there discover that every neighborhood and every backyard is its own universe. Each hub of the region has its own character, cuisine, vernacular, soul and landmarks.

The fire in Pacific Palisades took with it not only the homes of famous people -- "One day you're swimming in the pool and the next day it's all gone," actor James Woods told CNN, weeping -- but also the infrastructure of a small town with a population roughly the size of Pottstown, Pennsylvania.

The Palisades has a median household income of $155,433, nearly double that of Los Angeles County, according to city and census data that includes nearby Brentwood. The house where the first flames were reported has an estimated value -- midrange for the community -- of about $4.5 million. Far pricier properties, famously, rise into the hillsides, owned by family-friendly moguls including Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. Sugar Ray Leonard's estate is on the market for just under $40 million.

But many of the homes that burned were in a part of town known as the Highlands, where town houses built in the 1970s and '80s have long offered a more affordable option for retirees and single parents. There are longtime denizens who have lived in the Palisades for decades, having bought low years ago in a gem of a place that was more coastal than Beverly Hills and less rustic than nearby Malibu or Topanga Canyon. As firefighters struggled to save the central business district and the local school buildings, generations of "Pali High" graduates frantically begged them to save the site of their teenage memories.

The communities around Eaton Canyon, an hour's drive to the east, make up another Southern California entirely. Anchored by Pasadena, which has a population of more than 133,000, the area is a majority-minority magnet for the middle and upper-middle class of the region. Altadena, the unincorporated community closest to the fire, is known for its rambling ranch houses and neat bungalows that hug the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.

People hike in the canyon on weekends and debate the relative merits of drought-tolerant landscaping and rose gardens. Christmas decorations are a competitive sport. The splendor of the Angeles National Forest is a local respite. And the threat of wildfire is a constant.

"This is my fourth fire and the only time we've ever left," said Muffie Alejandro, 74, the owner of a manufacturing company who has lived near Eaton Canyon since 1989. Tuesday, she evacuated to a hotel with her husband, Jan, and her dogs, Mingus and Clinton. "This is the worst I've ever seen," she said.

Sylmar is yet another Los Angeles, remote and rugged, far to the north in the San Fernando Valley, an arid swath of ranches and working-class suburbs once known for its groves of olive trees. Its population is about 80,000, and three-quarters Latino. The terminus of the Los Angeles Aqueduct system is there, as is the Olive View-UCLA Medical Center.

It burns regularly, too. One wildfire, in 2008, destroyed nearly 500 houses. El Cariso Community Regional Park, a local landmark, is dedicated to fire crews who died in a 1966 blaze.

This week, those distinct versions of paradise became one, united in terror.

"There's a kind of mantra that when the wind blows, Los Angeles burns," said DJ Waldie, 76, a historian who has written extensively about Southern California and is a lifelong resident of the Los Angeles suburb of Lakewood. "That's true again, but there's an ominous sense this time."

This disaster, he said, has come suddenly, and all over, and seems only to promise more disaster: "I think that Angelenos are thinking, 'This is going to go on and on and on. And what will become of us?'"