Willemina Yospe set out on foot through a city on fire. She wore a white sweatsuit and carried an empty backpack. This was a rescue mission.
With the ocean behind her, flames up ahead and thick, yellowed smoke everywhere closing in, Ms Yospe wound her way through one of the most sublime corners of the country, her heaven turned hell.
She was one of countless others scattered across the county, navigating wreckage as Los Angeles burned from three sides, the fires uniting a varied place in desperation.
Ms Yospe didn’t know if her home of 14 years, up a winding street in the Pacific Palisades on the city’s west side, would still be standing. And she couldn’t be sure her cat, Tasi, would still be there — but she needed to see.
“I have a purpose,” she said, her eyes squinted against the ash and her voice muffled behind an N95 mask.
As the 59-year-old walked into the heart of the Palisades Fire on Wednesday afternoon, more parts of this sprawling metropolis burned - with the second of two critical blazes, the Eaton Fire, 30 miles east in the foothill community of Altadena. Some residents evacuated one danger zone only to be forced to pack up and flee again.
For at least 48 hours, it seemed like Angelenos saw flames nearly everywhere they looked.
Like so much of California, Los Angeles knows fire. But this has been different. The catastrophic scale. The ceaselessness of the winds propelling it. It is a disaster ripped from a Hollywood film, a real-life nightmare playing out in America’s dream factory.
The initial triangle of fires sparked on Tuesday and strengthened overnight. They sent up a noxious cloud that blunted the California sun and cast the city in an eerie shade of sepia. By Thursday, the third day of the firestorm, the infernos had chewed through a collective 29,000 acres, torched thousands of structures, claimed at least five lives and displaced 180,000 people. It was already one of the most destructive natural disasters in Los Angeles history, and it showed little sign of abating.
Another loss was more difficult to quantify: “I used to feel like I was protected by this little bubble,” Ms Yospe said, “and now that’s gone.”
To her left, a house was charred and smouldering; to her right, flames were quickly swallowing another. She had less than a mile to go. She turned in the direction of her home and walked up the street, alone and unprotected.
The warning on Monday was all-caps and unambiguous: “HEADS UP!!!” the National Weather Service’s Los Angeles office wrote. The incoming windstorm, it said, would be “LIFE-THREATENING” and “DESTRUCTIVE.”
The heavy Santa Ana gusts added another variable to a dangerous equation. After back-to-back wet years yielded bountiful vegetation growth, a mostly rainless nine months left much of it dry, brittle, kindling-like.
In a city where ruin is always a sudden temblor away, residents learn to make an uneasy peace with the spectre of disaster. Escape plans are made, go bags are packed. Still, though, some areas are more dangerous than others.
But the Pacific Palisades, an affluent neighbourhood in west Los Angeles, where celebrities mix with longtime residents in suburban clusters and hillside mansions, always felt relatively safe.
“We always felt so protected in the Palisades, from everything, the floods to the earthquakes,” said Chris Ragazzo, a 63-year-old photographer who has lived there for more than 30 years.
Until Tuesday morning.
The brush fire sparked about 10.30 a.m., and 80km/h gusts whipped it through the air. From a ridge above Mr Ragazzo’s century-old bungalow, he could feel the heat coming closer. When the wind shifted, he knew it was time to leave.
The flames followed him soon after — and by about 9 pm, they had exploded across the eastern half of the Santa Monica Mountains.
Tucked away in Tuna Canyon, Lewis Marvin, 47, stood alone at Moon Fire Temple, a mountaintop art space where Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and The Doors once performed.
After hours of filling trash cans with water and spraying the property with a garden hose, gusts of embers washed over him. He ran. Marvin jumped into a depleted reservoir, only his legs submerged, then fled once the smoke got too thick. He stumbled down a steep hillside as the temple went up in flames.
“I thought I could fight the fire,” said Mr Marvin, who manages the space. “There was nothing you could do.”
A couple hours later, Alden Cusick came to the same conclusion. He had been working to save a family home in the Huntington Palisades neighbourhood for three hours. He was one of the last residents left there as the blaze closed in. When neighbours’ houses started igniting, he jumped in his truck and sped down Sunset Boulevard.
The smoke made the night even darker, and he only saw the tree fall into the road at the last second. He skidded into it, reversed and found another way out.
“It’s unsafe to drive around,” he said. “Power lines are down, trees are falling over, it’s Armageddon.”
Mr Cusick, a real estate developer, has made a career building homes in the Palisades. Part of the reason he liked it was its seemingly low fire risk, especially in the suburban tracts near the town centre.
“After seeing this, where else in L.A. can I go?” he said. “It’s like anything can burn.”
By the end of the night Tuesday, it began to feel like everything might.
The Eaton Fire ignited soon after sundown. Then, right around the time Cusick escaped, the Hurst fire was growing to a menacing size about 25 miles north.
There are many Los Angeleses — red carpet galas and blue-collar neighbourhoods, beachside enclaves and mountain retreats, hipster cafés and biker bars — and by Wednesday morning, three of them were on fire.
In Sylmar, the northernmost neighbourhood in the city of Los Angeles, the Hurst fire was burning across hundreds of acres of San Fernando Valley horse country.
The Eaton Fire, which was even larger and had erupted at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, was roaring down through the unincorporated suburb of Altadena, incinerating block after block on its way toward Pasadena.
By midday, plumes of black smoke had blotted out the snowcapped peaks that loom high overhead. A cloud hung over the Rose Bowl, where just days earlier 90,000 fans had packed in to watch a college football playoff game between Ohio State and Oregon.
Altadena, a quiet district where tree-lined streets bleed into the wilds of the Angeles National Forest, was home to a treasured nature centre, where children could meet reptiles and learn about the plants and animals native to an area with abundant ecological diversity. The centre, like so many other local landmarks, was levelled.
“We are prone to wildfires, but nothing like what I have witnessed today,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents the area, said on Wednesday.
Anne Louise Bannon has lived in Altadena with her husband for 26 years, and they could feel the fire closing in on their familiar surroundings. The smell of smoke wafted through their house, where their power had long been shut off, and their phones blared with an emergency alert.
“We could see the glow on the hills north of us,” she said.
Andy Daley, a sculpture artist, was new to the town. He was sifting through the shell of the home on Santa Rosa Avenue he had owned for just one year.
“Hell of a housewarming party” he said.
Only a month ago, hundreds of revellers crowded along his street for the annual lighting of Christmas Tree Lane, a beloved local tradition.
Now the community was observing another kind of ceremony - this a collective one, binding it through shock and pain to the other far-flung neighbourhoods. Even in this city, where stars often seem to exist in a separate, rarefied world, disasters collapse divides.
In the Huntington Palisades, Billy Bush, host of the TV show Extra, ticked off the names of actors with homes in the area: “Julia Louis-Dreyfus lives in here, Cobie Smulders lives in here, Chris O’Donnell, Ted McGinley.”
Bush doesn’t live in the neighborhood, but he drove there to check on the houses of 10 friends. As of that Wednesday afternoon, eight were still intact — including McGinley’s.
But McGinley, who starred in the ’90s sitcom Married … With Children, wasn’t taking chances. He dashed into his house to grab a few cherished paintings and then left again. The scene, he said, “felt like the end of the world.”
The Palisades Fire only grew as the day wore on. By mid-afternoon Wednesday, it covered more than 15,000 acres.
On Sunset Boulevard, near the southern tip of Will Rogers State Historic Park, Stephen Shigematsu stood in front of his childhood home, wearing a gas mask as he tried to tamp down hot spots and smouldering foliage with a metal rake.
His friend, Gage Danley, drove in with him to help — their Subaru left running in the driveway, ready to escape at a moment’s notice.
Mr Danley, whose family lost their home in the 2018 Woolsey Fire, watched the nearby greenery warily.
“That palm tree could become a candlewick.”
Across the street, firefighters worked on undamaged homes, opening doors and moving patio furniture to ensure better access in case they ignited. They were trading off time on the hoses to preserve water pressure, said one firefighter from Santa Clara who gave his name only as Aaron.
“Oh shoot, it’s on the roof,” Aaron yelled to his colleagues as flames sprung up among the Spanish tiles on the house in front of him. “Hey guys! It’s on the roof! It’s on the roof!”
Even though it had been burning for more than 24 hours, the fire remained unpredictable. As the wind raged, it would continue jumping from structure to structure.
Nearby, Bob Dubbins and his son, Andrew, walked down the middle of Amalfi Drive under a shroud of smoke. Above them, palms shook in the wind. Their family home was across the canyon, but they didn’t know if it was still standing. They risked the walk up — through still-burning buildings — to get a clear view.
The pair stepped onto someone’s deck, ducked under a strand of patio lights and looked across the canyon to where their house had stood.
“It’s gone,” Mr Dubbins said. “It’s gone. It was right above that white house. See that big pine tree? It’s gone.
“And the neighbours are gone.”
Down Sunset, Nancy Waterman’s place was still standing. The 71-year-old had been hosing it down all morning. Her walls were scorched, her fence smoldering, but they were there. Her pony and chickens survived.
“I saved my house,” she said.
Ms Waterman lives alone on the four-acre property. Members of the Beach Boys once resided there, she said, and Tom Petty had been a tenant. Next door, her neighbour’s house had been reduced to piles of ash, twisted metal and a brick fireplace standing alone. She thought the fire had died — until an explosion issued from the remains.
Flames bloomed. Two more booms. Then retorts came like gunshots or fireworks.
“That’s really not cool,” she said. “That’s like a big fire again.”
Her house was not safe yet. She’d lived there for more than two decades, but it suddenly felt like too much.
“I feel like selling,” she said. “And just taking my family somewhere. It’s too hard. I’m too old.”
By the time Ms Yospe had come within a mile of her home, she had reached the same conclusion.
“I’m done with California,” she said. “I’m done.”
As she walked, she struggled to process what she saw. Part of Palisades Charter High School, where her kids had gone, was burning. A charred textbook page blew in the wind. The Presbyterian church across the street was already lost, its crucifix-topped tower the only thing still upright.
When she plunged into a thick haze of smoke, determined to make it to her street, she wasn’t sure what she would find. On the way up to her cul-de-sac, nearly all the homes were destroyed. She weaved through fallen power lines, turned onto her road and found her house. The garage was destroyed and a front window blown out.
She rushed inside, went upstairs and found Tasi, her cat, alive and hiding under her bed covers.
They made it back to their hotel before nightfall. Exhilarated, exhausted, grateful.
A few hours later, in the Hollywood Hills, a new fire had just started to burn.