I’ve been to Los Angeles many times over the years — for work, for pleasure, and occasionally for that curious hybrid of both that journalists tell their accountants is “business travel”. I’ve always loved the place: the optimism in the air, the palm-lined streets, the sun-washed hills rolling down to the Pacific.
But this time was different. The hills were scorched. The air was acrid. Driving into Altadena, I was met not by the familiar suburban hum but by the sight — and smell — of destruction. Houses gutted. Trees reduced to brittle, blackened bones. A haze that clung to the lungs.
The Altadena fires had not just burned through land. They’d burned through lives. People who had built homes, memories, and futures there now stood in the ash, holding nothing but what they’d managed to carry out in the scramble to safety.
And it wasn’t just the physical damage. It was the mood. Conversations were quieter, eyes heavier. You could feel the shared trauma — the knowledge that the place they loved could, at any moment, be taken again.
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