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The trash cans blew over on West Mariposa Street. It was Tuesday morning, January 7, and the Santa Ana winds had picked up. A 69-year-old woman named Jerri Flowers was outside her house on a corner lot in Altadena. She had bought it for $100,000 decades earlier, but it was now worth ten times that, with a roof topped with solar panels and an unruly Chinese elm tree in the yard.

Flowers is one of the many residents of Los Angeles I spoke to over the past few weeks, people with markedly different lives in a sprawling city. But in the days following the fires that started on January 7, they shared an understanding of what it was to fear losing everything. Flowers and the others walked me through what they had lost — and what they hoped to rebuild.

For Flowers, her home was where she raised her family. She worked for the county health-services department and was one of many Black Angelenos who had found an affordable place to live in West Altadena. The decades had taken from her — she had buried one son and then her husband. But she had maintained the place, and the house’s increasing value allowed her to take out loans for payments on her car. One son still lived with her, while a daughter had moved to Kansas City. In a room she called “the library,” she kept bookshelves full of Bibles.

As Flowers retrieved the trash cans, she saw a neighbor doing the same thing. The woman walked into the street, extended her arms, and exclaimed, “Remember when you were a little girl, the wind was blowing, and you would act like you were flying?”

An Altadena photographer and director named Joseph Kindred, who is 35, always looked forward to the arrival of the Santa Ana winds. As a boy, he would stand in the street with his arms out, feeling free. “My favorite time of year,” he said. Though he’d spent his childhood on the west side of town, near Flowers, his growing success allowed him to move with his family to the more affluent and heavily wooded eastern part of the neighborhood. His new home was nearly hidden behind brush and a tall pine that sometimes dripped sap on his fiancée’s Tesla. He liked hearing owls in the night and seeing palm trees in the fog.

Another Altadena resident, Greg Sliwinski, a 50-year-old firefighter who was born in Poland, told me he loved the winds because they signaled that it was time to go curl up on his custom couch, which his wife, a Taiwanese immigrant named Hsinyi “Annie” Su, had bought for him. They had moved into their house in 2018, a few years before Sliwinski became a rookie with the Kern County Fire Department, 80 miles north. It was simple: 1,200 square feet with whitewashed walls, a neat lawn, and a sun room, which they gave over to their two cats. “We had an American Dream,” Sliwinski said. Though their yard didn’t contain much vegetation, one of their immediate neighbors had lush trees hanging over their fence and would object when Sliwinski and Su trimmed the foliage back.

The Santa Ana winds come from the eastern deserts, picking up speed as they descend from Nevada toward the San Gabriel Mountains before turning toward the sea, where they reach Santa Monica, the Pacific Palisades, and Malibu. Indigenous inhabitants of this region lit fires to lessen its natural fuel load. Experts often say that, in landscapes like this, a fire put out is a fire put off. But prescribed burning around Malibu had since been impeded by colonization and the establishment of permanent and lavish homes where, as the author Mike Davis put it, “hyperbole meets the surf.”

On January 7, about when the wind knocked over the trash cans outside Flowers’s house, a small fire started in the hills just northeast of the Pacific Palisades. The Palisades once symbolized a halcyon era of Los Angeles: Middle-class residents who were savvy about real estate had been able to buy here, building a close-knit neighborhood perched between the mountains and the sea. “It is such an incredible place to live,” said Jill Lipsky, a schoolteacher and third-generation Palisades resident whose grandparents helped develop the community. She had grown up on a narrow road ending in a cul-de-sac abutting the hills. Her parents had lived on one corner, her grandmother across the street. With her husband, the photographer Jeff Lipsky, she’d moved into her grandmother’s place and later inherited her parents’ home, which she rented out. The income from that property helped the couple and their three children to live in a neighborhood that was increasingly sought after by L.A.’s elite.

The actor Martin Short moved here in 1984, renting a home right before he started working on Saturday Night Live. He bought a house in the neighborhood three years later. “Right away I knew this is where I wanted to live,” he told me. “You’re five minutes from the ocean or five minutes from the greatest hiking in the mountains imaginable.” Beyond that, he said, the Palisades offered a sense of safety: “There was only one way in and one way out.”

Over the years, the Palisades drew other residents seeking privacy — among them Tom Hanks, Jamie Lee Curtis, Larry Ellison, and JJ Redick, the Lakers’ current coach, who moved in prior to this NBA season. Although it became harder for the middle class to live here, the community remained close: Jill Lipsky remembered congratulating Curtis at a grocery store following her 2023 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Short, who grew up outside Toronto, was broadly aware of the fire danger. In 1993, a large wildfire had destroyed more than 270 homes in the Malibu area; from Short’s balcony, he’d seen it approaching the Palisades and prepared to evacuate his young children, until firefighters had contained it. But in the years since, the community had continued to grow into the fire-prone hills. While the Lipskys trimmed their yards — Jill didn’t like the look of overgrown brush — such efforts were not universally adopted. “That whole place is so tightly compact, with winding streets, and a community that loves the brush,” said Steven Gutierrez, a former wildland firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service.

This winter, the land abutting the Palisades was overgrown with dry chaparral. On January 7, Short was on a balcony outside his bedroom when he first saw the flames. The years since the 1993 fire had taken from him, too — his wife had died in 2010 — but he was now a grandfather, and his two sons lived in the neighborhood. One of them called to say it was time to evacuate, and Short began retrieving family photo albums. This time, the firefighters couldn’t contain the blaze. Short drove down toward the Pacific Coast Highway, only to find the exits from his neighborhood were clogged. He remained in his car, where it took him more than an hour to cover a distance that would normally take five minutes. Others abandoned their vehicles and began to walk. The skies darkened, turning day into night.

In December, a German magazine published an essay called “Hollywood in Flammen,” by Stephen Pyne, an expert in the history of wildfire and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. “Southern California has the mightiest firefighting force in the world,” wrote Pyne, “yet under the worst conditions — and global warming ensures even these will get worse and multiply — it is helpless against the flames.” It was not widely circulated.

Together, the city and county fire departments employ about 8,000 people. Their efforts are supplemented by wildland firefighters with the U.S. Forest Service and Cal Fire, the state firefighting agency, which has 6,000 full-time firefighters from San Diego to the Oregon border.

Since the fires started, many residents have looked back on what happened, wondering what might have been saved and seeking to assign responsibility. It is as though, if a single culprit could be identified, the city might return to normal. Some events, however, are beyond human control.

On the morning of January 7, Mike Park, a 55-year-old captain with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, had just finished a 24-hour shift. Because of the wind warnings, he was sent back to work, manning a patrol vehicle out of Diamond Bar, 50 miles east of the Pacific Palisades. Once the fire ignited, around 10:30 a.m., he was dispatched to a staging area in the San Fernando Valley, where he was assigned to a strike team consisting of five patrol vehicles.

Patrol vehicles, or Type 6 engines, are the size of a large pickup. Park told me his carried just 150 gallons of water. Given their limitations, Park assumed he’d be assigned to look for hot spots — places where burned materials continue to smolder. But on the way to the Palisades, he was told he’d be protecting houses on the Pacific Coast Highway. “There were just no fire engines left,” he told me. His instructions, he said, were simple: “Try to do what we can.”

Large wildfires rely on fuel and wind. In the woods, wildland firefighters contain and redirect them by cutting firebreaks down to mineral soil. Once a fire reaches an urban street, it warrants a different approach, with engines, fire hoses, and lots of water. In both settings, aerial drops of fire........

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