Everyone is aware that California is a region prone to catastrophes, yet there is a recognizable reasoning behind this stunning, meticulously maintained state’s unfortunate topography.

Wildfires are perceived to arise in nature, among the hills, rather than along the coastline, and certainly not within one of the largest and most well-prepared cities globally.

However, the fires that ravaged the coastal city of Pacific Palisades this week were ignited by the type of fierce wind speeds usually found in high mountain passes and at the summits of the Sierra Nevada. These astonishing wind gusts of 70 to 80 miles per hour shattered all those preconceived notions.

Dennis Weaver, who resides on a cliff overlooking numerous scorched homes along the Pacific Coast Highway, remarked: “We’re so distanced from the mountains that we never anticipated we would need to evacuate.” She grappled to articulate the tragedy and irony of her friends losing everything in a blaze near the globe’s most significant water source.

“We’re just 100 feet from the Pacific Ocean,” Weaver stated. “It’s absolutely absurd.”

The raging inferno eliminated any supposed advantages of having well-equipped urban firefighting resources.

Nearby small tanker aircraft and helicopters remained grounded. As fire engines encountered congestion, a vigorous stream of water was whisked away by the wind and transformed into vapor. Furthermore, the immediate strain on the city’s water infrastructure rapidly drained the fire hydrants.

At that moment, all the affluence, urban life, and privilege in the world did not seem particularly beneficial. The desperate citizens may have found themselves entirely isolated on a flaming hillside in the midst of nowhere.

“Fires under such circumstances are essentially unmanageable,” commented UCLA climate specialist Daniel Swain. “The most prudent action is to remove people from harm’s way.”

To comprehend why Tuesday’s events were so astonishing and confidence-eroding, envision the wind as water flowing. Typically, in a Santa Ana storm, much of it streams out of the desert, akin to water meandering down a riverbed, through mountain passes, and into valleys along predictable routes.

To the north, the most powerful winds surge through Santa Clarita’s Newhall Pass into the San Fernando Valley.

In the center, they travel along the Santa Ana River, the namesake of these storms, passing through Riverside and Anaheim as they advance toward the coast.

To the south, winds traverse through the Cajon Pass nestled between the San Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountains.

However, on Tuesday, winds were so ferocious above that everything spilled over the mountain summits and crashed into the valleys as if colossal waves inundating the shore.

Swain characterized it as “geophysically chaotic” conditions. “You don’t simply have to be in a mountain crevice for the most intense winds to blow.”

Then, similar to a tsunami, it radiated infinitely. In this case, it genuinely surged over the Santa Monica Mountains — Swain referred to it as a “hydraulic jump” — and slammed into the western coastline of Los Angeles County, crashing directly into the Pacific Palisades.

Swain indicated that such storms have occurred previously, including one in 2011 that resulted in considerable wind damage in the San Fernando Valley. Fortunately, however, they did not trigger a disastrous fire.

On Tuesday, the city was not as fortunate.

By Thursday, neighborhoods were still

Smoldering for miles along the Pacific Coast Highway, with over 5,000 residences and businesses incinerated. Inhabitants sought to discover the fate of their homes and engaged in a dispute with law enforcement who had been instructed to prevent access to the evacuation zone.

The scene echoed the aftermath of numerous other devastating blazes, such as the Camp Fire in Butte County in 2018 and the Lahaina Fire on Maui in 2023, yet this time the situation felt bizarrely familiar, even to those who have never witnessed anything similar before. Palisades.

For anyone raised in the Midwest or on the East Coast, absorbing visuals of California through series like Baywatch and films like Point Break, this was the Los Angeles of aspirations.

A slow, sorrowful drive along the shoreline on Thursday unveiled much of that recognizable region reduced to charred debris.

The remnants of a seaside residence smolder along the Pacific Ocean.

(Wally Scully/Los Angeles Times)

Do you recall Moonshadows, the coastal eatery where Mel Gibson got inebriated and was pulled over by police just down the street in 2006, initiating a near-career-ending anti-Semitic rant?

Lost.

Also gone is Gibson’s $14 million residence in Malibu, which was consumed by flames while he was recording a podcast with Joe Rogan in Austin, Texas. “Well, at least I no longer have those troublesome plumbing issues,” he joked to The Hollywood Reporter.

Paris Hilton, Billy Crystal, and possibly Jeff Bridges, who starred in the classic film The Big Lebowski, where Los Angeles’ West Side was the true protagonist, all lost their residences.

And that one circulating on social media, cloaked in a cataclysmic orange mist, urging individuals to leave their keys in their vehicles so they can be relocated for fire trucks to pass through. The chubby-cheeked figure was actor Steve Guttenberg from the 1980s film “Police Academy”.

What about Los Angeles?

The sensation of “Is this reality or a cinematic scene?” is palpable as an aerial tanker retrieves water from the sea and ascends into the sky above, inhaling the acrid air and wiping ash from reddened eyes. It persists even as the water is released. It feels like the set of a disaster film.

It swiftly turns into reality when a regular man in a Dodgers cap, N95 mask, and dusty surgical scrubs limps down Temescal Canyon Road.

Paul Austin, 61, an orthodontist, departed at 6 a.m. on Tuesday to visit an office in Simi Valley for some dental work. While he was away, the house he had inhabited for 20 years and nearly everything in it was “entirely, entirely obliterated,” he recounted. He hadn’t changed his attire for three days.

He commenced the interview with humor. The sole remnant on his property is the enormous Santa figure in his front yard. There were a few Christmas decorations remaining, but I was sure they would be swept away.

“I don’t believe any of us genuinely comprehend the sorrow of what we have lost,” he remarked, then paused, overwhelmed by a sudden wave of emotion behind his mask and goggles.

“All.”