The US National Guard tanks blocking the roads around Pacific Palisades and Malibu, historic neighborhoods on the Los Angeles coast devastated by fire, hide a scene of ash, rubble and silence.
"This is hard even for us," a damage inspector who is working in Pacific Palisades and did not want to be identified told Lusa. "I saw toys in the rubble. I hugged my children tighter when I got home."
Teams of inspectors are making an initial assessment and placing pink tape on the property to mark it in the count. This is how the map of the damage caused by the massive Palisades and Altadena fires, the most devastating and deadly of all those that have ravaged the county in the last week, is being constructed.
Pacific Palisades is now a ghost town, where few houses remain standing. There are completely melted cars in what used to be garages and little or nothing distinguishable from what ten days ago were living rooms, bedrooms or kitchens.
In the hilly areas, from where you can see the sea, the silence is almost oppressive. The wind lifts the ash and carries the intense smell of burning, which is unbearable without an N-95 mask, but it brings no sound. You can't hear the animals, machines or people that gave life to these neighborhoods until just over a week ago. All the streets are empty and the houses are bare, most of them completely on the ground.
But they all have one thing in common: the chimneys are still standing, as are the brick walls and a few fountains and clay pots. Everything else is black and white, destroyed by the wildfire that broke out on January 7.
In Palisades and Malibu, as in most of Los Angeles, the houses are mostly made of wood and plywood, even the ones that cost millions of dollars. This is not only the standard in the country, but also an option that makes it less dangerous to experience an earthquake, something that residents in the region are quite accustomed to.
However, the use of these materials makes fires devastating, as is evident in the areas where Lusa observed the aftermath of the disaster.
In addition to the inspectors, there are streets where work is being done to check for risks -- for example, by the gas company -- and to mitigate hazards, such as burnt trees at risk of falling and holes in the ground.
The police and the National Guard patrol the area, ensuring that the (few) houses that survived are not looted and that residents do not return until the danger is over. Anyone who can prove that they lived there can enter for an hour, but then they must leave and cannot do so every day. These are measures to ensure safety in an inhospitable environment.
On Sunset Boulevard, where many residents abandoned their cars and fled on foot, tow trucks are beginning to remove the incinerated vehicles. They put an orange "X" on the ones that are identified and take them to the scrapyard. Those that didn't burn are damaged, because the firefighters had to clear a path to rescue the residential areas. Everything around is burned.
The scene is the same when you go down Sunset Boulevard and reach the Pacific Coast Highway towards Malibu. On the right side, the canyons are black, consumed by fire. And on the left side, facing the sea, there are structures of iron, cement and twisted metal, as if in a war scene.
The fire jumped the road and reached the other side, taking everything in its path. Historic sites have disappeared, such as the Topanga Ranch Motel, and here and there are burned vehicles. Next door, the famous Rosenthal Winery is left with only the giant colorful chairs that stood outside.
The cleanup and reconstruction work is starting slowly, with the fire at 27% containment, and there are many doubts about what help will be available. Many homeowners either couldn’t get disaster insurance or had their policies terminated recently, as insurers have become increasingly reluctant to accept contracts in areas that are at risk of climate change.
The California Department of Insurance issued a ban on cancellations and non-renewals that was retroactive to the three months before a fire and extended for a year, so that homeowners can get paid for their losses.
But this is a growing problem in California, which has seen a string of destructive wildfires over the past decade. The deadliest was the Camp Fire in 2018, which burned the town of Paradise to the ground and killed 85 people.
