To truly take in the enormity, it helps to get up close. The Palisades and Eaton fires are roughly 30 miles from each other. I drove to the center of both last week, trying to make sense of how Los Angeles was suddenly transformed. I’ve lived and reported here for more than a decade, and have covered countless wildfires and other disasters. The scale of this one, I knew, was different. The two burned landscapes looked eerily similar: Basketball hoops and chimneys rose over the decimated landscape like charred towers. But as I went from block to block, what surprised me most was not the sight so much as the smell. It wasn’t just one universal stench of burned metal. The scents shifted, ever so subtly. One destroyed home smelled more acrid than the other; another more like sulfur, that one more woodsy. Again and again, I was struck by the unique way havoc played on the nose. It all felt surreal. In the Palisades, I spent several minutes staring at the charred ruin of an A.T.M. It was blackened and hollowed out, the keypads a melted mess. George Barber, a lifelong Los Angeles resident and a veteran of the Iraq war, stood in front of me, a handgun strapped to his waist. The security company he works for had sent him to make sure the fire-safe cashboxes were still secure. They were, Mr. Barber said, pointing to an area behind the wall. This, too, was surreal. Here was an armed guard, in a place burned to the ground, monitoring the precious cash. He did the same thing hours earlier in Altadena. Even in a disaster zone, it seems, paper money must be protected. “I’ve seen a lot,” said Mr. Barber, who was taking pictures of the devastation. “But never anything like this.”
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