More than 20,000 people who evacuated the Pacific Palisades on Tuesday have watched on TV for three days as their neighbourhood has burned without respite.
They have heard the statistics – about more than 50% of the buildings here being reduced to rubble. But it is not sufficient preparation for what they will see in real life.
“I’ve been telling everyone to brace themselves for this moment,” says Rachel Darvish, a lawyer who has lived in Pacific Palisades her whole life.
My team and I ride in a car with her as she returns for the first time since wildfire ripped through this community.
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The first place we stop is her modest childhood home where she lived until she was nine. It’s now a mound of dust and twisted metal, only a gate on to the pavement still standing.
“People think the Palisades are full of celebrities,” she says. “But this is where hardworking families come so that the kids can be by the beach and have a good life.”
She points across the road to another house which is now contorted by fire and covered in ash.
“That’s where I would spend July 4th at my neighbour’s,” she says. “We would go round to use their pool. I have the best memories here.”
As Rachel is talking she is interrupted by a deafening alarm from her phone. “It’s another emergency evacuation order,” she says. “This time for Malibu.”
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Even though the winds have subsided, the threat of new blazes remains and each new evacuation order or warning causes renewed panic among local people.
Next up on the misery tour is Rachel’s three-year-old daughter’s nursery school. There is nothing left of the main building.
“It’s an apocalypse,” she says. “This is just so devastating. And somehow we are supposed to come back and rebuild.”
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As we are driving away from the school, she spots a familiar face next to a black SUV with tinted windows. “Is that Gavin Newsom?” she asks. “It is, it’s the governor,” she says, slapping the back of the car seat before jumping out to speak to him.
“Mr governor,” she says, chasing him down the street as Newsom holds a phone to his ear.
“Please, tell me what you’re going to do,” she says. Newsom replies that he is on the phone to President Biden.
“Can I hear? Can I hear your call? Because I don’t believe it,” she responds.
Newsom points to his phone, claiming he has poor phone service and was unable to reach the president.
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Rachel then asks him why there was “no water in the hydrants?”
As firefighters battled a raging inferno on Tuesday, fire hydrants ran dry because of the huge demands.
Residents are demanding answers about whether there are wider vulnerabilities in city water supply systems and whether they are adequate to tackle wildfires on this scale.
“It has to be different next time round,” Rachel says.
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As estimated losses surge there is still zero containment of the Palisades fire. Officials say they don’t know the death toll and that dogs will be brought in to search the rubble for fatalities.
On the Pacific coast highway in Pacific Palisades, Geoffrey Axelrod and his partner Nicole hug each other tightly as they return to the ruins that are their home. Every one of the houses in this enclave has been destroyed.
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“This is just a little beach community,” says Geoffrey, who has lived here since 2015.
“I know everyone here and it’s all gone.
“My dearest friend Galene, who I’ve known for my whole life lived here,” he says, pointing to the wreckage next door.
“I taught my daughter to ride her bike on this street, how to swim in the pool. It’s so sad.”
Together Geoffrey and Nicole sift through the dust, trying to retrieve any belongings that have survived the fire.
In a plastic box they place everything they can find. There are a couple of turtle figurines, a garden gnome and a house name plaque.
It’s very little, but in a place where the loss is so huge, it means so much.
