We knew to expect winds. When they came on Tuesday morning, sounding like a tsunami crashing over my family’s home in western Malibu, the utility company shut off our power. We knew the chance of fire was high.

I had arrived home for the holidays in early December, and had already been greeted by the Franklin Fire, which had burned the hills black. Now, when my dad and I went in search of electricity, a great plume of smoke was rising above those burned hills. It cast out over the Pacific, just as it had during the Woolsey Fire that tore through Malibu in 2018. The way the wind was blowing—rattling our car, scattering palm fronds and tumbleweeds across the road—we knew this new fire would probably hit Topanga Canyon, the mountain community where I grew up. Dad decided we needed to get up there and help our former neighbors. People who have lived in this area for decades, as my family has, can get so used to evacuation warnings that they don’t always follow them.

Yesterday, the fires burning around Los Angeles were frightening; overnight they became a terror. A fire this strong, at this time of year, is unusual, an outlier. But it is also familiar, one in a series of fires that, as a seventh-generation Californian, I’ve lived through, or my family has. It has destroyed places that I’ve loved since childhood; it’s not the first fire that’s done so. To some of our friends and neighbors, this fire seemed manageable—until it didn’t. Today, it is, as one friend said, a hell fire.

On the way to Topanga Canyon, Dad and I stopped to watch the fire burn. The flames were coming into a neighborhood where two of my childhood friends grew up, just beyond the Pacific Palisades where the blaze started. The way the fire was burning, I couldn’t imagine that the Palisades was still standing. The main road was closed—these winds can dislodge rocks and rain them down on cars—so we took back streets. “You can tell people are emotional from the way they’re driving,” Dad said, after someone whipped around a blind turn. We made it to the house of a friend, another old-timer who, like Dad, lived through the 1993 fire, the one that got so close, it warped the double-pane glass in my childhood home. He told us he’d be fine, based on the way the wind was blowing, and offered to make us a pot of coffee while he still had power—he’d heard they’d be shutting it off in the next hour. Dad said it looked like the flames had reached the mouth of Topanga Canyon, and our friend promised he’d get ready to evacuate. “But nothing will ever be as bad as ’93,” he said.

When Dad and I got home, our power was still out. The city had issued evacuation warnings in a nearby neighborhood. Should we get ready? A month before, we’d packed up the family photos and the birth certificates for the Franklin Fire, and our house had been fine. Our Malibu neighbor, who stayed behind during the Woolsey Fire, tends not to worry. But the winds were so strong, she thought this one could be worse than all the others.

That night, Dad and I decided to get back in the car, to see how close the fire was. When we managed to open the front door against the wind, we were coated in a fine layer of dust. The houses around us were dark, all their power out. Driving on the highway this time, instead of smoke, we saw flames.

The friend we’d visited that afternoon called us. “I’m on the freeway now,” he said. “I got the hell out of there. We’re toast. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

From a radio broadcast, cutting in and out, we could hear the gist of the damage so far. “Malibu Feed Bin”—where my family would buy dog food and pet the rabbits—gone. “Topanga Ranch Motel”—the bungalows where I’d wait for the school bus—gone. “Reel Inn”—a seafood restaurant where employees would handwrite ocean puns beneath its neon sign—gone. “Cholada Thai”—a high-school standard where my friends and I still gather—gone. “Wiley’s Bait & Tackle,” a wooden shack opened in 1946, where my brother and I would gross each other out looking at lugworms—gone.

My ancestors came to California before it was even a state; we have lived through decades of Santa Ana winds coming in off the desert and shaking our houses so powerfully, we lose sleep. But my brother and I also used to stand outside our childhood home, our backs to the wind, and toss stones into a nearby canyon, laughing as the Santa Anas carried them farther than we could ever throw. The winds are part of life here, and one that I’ve always, probably foolishly, loved.

Last night, my parents and I kept our phones on in case any emergency notifications came through. This morning, our power was still out. We have loaded the family photos and the birth certificates in the car and are ready to leave if the evacuation notice comes. Even as the fires are still burning, my parents are already talking about how they will handle this all better “next time.” We will get a larger coffee press so that, next time, we can each have two servings when the power goes out. We will get a camp stove so that, next time, when the gas shuts off, we won’t have to boil water on the barbecue.

Mom just told me that her friend sent her some new photographs: My childhood home, which she and my Dad built together in Topanga Canyon, may be gone. For now, the fire is still on the other side of Malibu. The wind is still blowing.

Destructive wildfires erupted in several places in Los Angeles yesterday, driven by extreme winds and dry conditions. The Palisades Fire grew quickly, tearing across hillsides and through the Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, burning many structures and sending thick plumes of smoke into the air. Tens of thousands of residents were forced to evacuate in often-chaotic circumstances. Firefighters and volunteers battled many blazes overnight, as residents braced for increasing winds forecast for the next few days.

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When wildfires began ravaging Los Angeles yesterday, the story was familiar in many respects: In dry and windy weather, a small blaze can spread so fast and so far that no one can do anything to stop it, especially in terrain dense with brush and hard for firefighters to reach.

Pacific Palisades, where the first fire began, is such a neighborhood; its roughly 24 square miles are beside rugged wilderness. The roads are winding. Homes are built on parts of a mountain range and in six major canyons. A fire-hazard map proposed by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection in 2022 described the area as “very high” risk—the highest possible categorization. And it has burned before, most significantly in November 1961, during a historic blaze.

Yet for all their predictability, these blazes are also outliers. Among people I spoke with who have observed Southern California wildfires for decades, several felt that these fires are unusually dramatic and dreadful, and have more potential than most to alter regional politics.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The Southern California wildfire paradox]

First, consider the warnings that preceded the fires. On Monday, the National Weather Service alerted Southern Californians to an imminent “LIFE-THREATENING, DESTRUCTIVE, Widespread Windstorm,” language far stronger than warnings typically given just before the Santa Ana winds begin to blow, rushing down through mountain passes and canyons to sea level, heating up and drying out along the way.

Yesterday, hours before any fire began, Los Angeles Times subscribers woke up to this front-page headline “Unusually Strong Winds Carry High Risk of Winter Fires.” It warned of gusts up to 100 miles per hour and quoted a fire official describing the danger to the region as “extreme.” The prediction could hardly have been more emphatic.

Sure enough, by lunchtime, a fire hadn’t just ignited in Pacific Palisades, threatening the Getty Villa––it had spread out of control in a visually spectacular manner. Twenty miles away, people could walk onto the beach, look north along an unobstructed coastline, and see a plume of smoke behind the Santa Monica pier. It billowed out over the bay for miles. By evening and especially after nightfall, people could see flames seeming to engulf the hillsides north of Santa Monica. A blockbuster using CGI to convey “L.A. in flames” would not have been more dramatic.

Footage shot within Pacific Palisades itself was just as shocking. News crews and residents recorded terrifying scenes amid architecturally striking custom-built homes.

Many owners of Palisades real estate are unusually wealthy and influential. And that brings us to the politics of the blaze. The real-estate developer Rick Caruso, who owns a shopping center in the neighborhood, alleged on a local news channel that fire hydrants didn’t have enough water to supply firefighters with what they needed. He said that someone should ask Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, whom he ran against in the most recent mayoral election, what went wrong.

The entrepreneur Wes Nichols, who has lived in the neighborhood for 26 years, evacuated sometime after dark. He posted on social media that he personally saw more than 100 homes engulfed in flames, adding, “I’m mad at what I saw. Our politicians have failed us. Unprepared, unimaginative, understaffed, now overwhelmed. Heads must roll for this disaster.”

[Read: The wildfire risk in America’s front yards]

Bass wasn’t able to represent herself to the public or answer her critics because when the fire began, she was in Ghana, attending the inauguration of its president.

Things may only get worse from here. The Palisades Fire, having already spread at least to Malibu, destroying homes and businesses, now threatens Santa Monica and beyond––that is to say, it could still spread from the edges of greater Los Angeles to a swath of its dense core. Weather is the biggest factor in the city’s fate.

Strong, gusty winds are forecast to continue in much of the region throughout the day today. Wind is howling outside my window an hour south, in Orange County. And for many miles in every direction, a new catastrophic fire could start at any moment. I’ve lived through 45 years of Southern California wildfires. I can’t recall having as much uncertainty about how not just one community but the region as a whole will fare in the next 24 hours.

As Santa Ana winds whipped sheets of embers over the Pacific Coast Highway in Southern California last night, the palm trees along the beach in the Pacific Palisades ignited like torches scaled for gods. The high school was burning. Soon, the grounds around the Getty Villa were too. The climate scientist Daniel Swain went live on his YouTube channel, warning that this fire would get worse before it got better. The winds, already screaming, would speed up. Tens of thousands of people were fleeing as he spoke. Sunset Boulevard was backed up; ash rained down on drivers as they exited their cars to escape on foot. A bulldozer parted the sea of abandoned cars to let emergency vehicles pass.

The hills were ready to burn. It’s January, well past the time of year when fire season in Southern California is supposed to end. But in this part of the semi-arid chaparral called Los Angeles, fire season can now be any time.

Drought had begun to bear down by the time the fires started. A wetter season is supposed to begin around October, but no meaningful amount of rain has fallen since May. Then came a record-breaking hot summer. The land was now drier than in almost any year since recordkeeping began. Grasses and sagebrush that had previously greened in spring rains dried to a crisp and stayed that way, a perfect buffet of fuel for a blaze to feast on. As The Atlantic wrote last summer, California’s fire luck of the past two years had run out. “You’d have to go to the late 1800s to see this dry of a start to the rainy season,” Glen MacDonald, a geography professor at UCLA, told me.

Then the colder months brought the Santa Ana winds: stuff of legend, the strong downslope gusts that suck humidity out of the air, if there was any to begin with. This time, the winds were stronger than average, too. A parched landscape; crisp-dried vegetation; strong, hot winds: “The gun was loaded,” MacDonald said. And it was pointed at Pacific Palisades.

MacDonald studies climate change and wildfires, and he has published a paper with colleagues projecting that the wildfire season in Southern California would, on average, start earlier and last longer in the future, thanks to human-driven climate warming. The lengthier the season, the greater the probability that a fire-weather day would overlap with a Santa Ana–wind day, or a day when someone happened to ignite a fire—more than 90 percent of fires in Southern California are sparked by human activity, he said.

Last night, he watched an example of his work unfold in real time. He could see smoke rising off the Palisades Fire from his house in Thousand Oaks. He had important documents in bags, just in case he and his family had to evacuate. In a dry year, he told me, the concept of fire season no longer applied in Southern California: “You can have a fire any month of the year.”

This morning, a second and third major fire are pressing toward more suburban zones where people are now evacuating. The Los Angeles mayor has told the city to brace for more. Altogether, more than 5,000 acres have burned already, and an unknown number of structures along with them. Schools are closing this morning, and Los Angeles health officials warned of unhealthy air, directing people to wear masks outdoors and keep windows closed as smoke and soot blanketed some parts of the city.

As he watched the smoke, MacDonald said he had colleagues at the university who lived in the active fire zone. He hoped they were all right; he texted them, knowing that they may not respond for a while. He’d evacuated from the Woolsey Fire in 2018, which burned nearly 100,000 acres and destroyed some 1,600 buildings, including some of his neighbors’ homes. I asked what it was like to study the future of fire in California while living it. “It makes the work more immediate,” he said. “It gives you a sense of unease. As the summer ends and you know you’re dried out, you look around you at things you own, and you think, This could just be ashes.”