This is the third and final part in a short series of photo essays about the California wildfires. It focuses on the aftermath.
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If there are, as Wallace Stevens wrote, 13 ways of looking at a blackbird, how many are there of looking at a home, a block, a neighborhood, a city reduced to rubble?
We can look from far off, through a TV screen or handheld device, comfortable.
We can look from a helicopter, swooping over.
We can walk a street till reality hits us — the sight, the sound, the smell, the feel of it.
We can ask about the house left unharmed in a neighborhood of ashes.
We can mourn those who did not escape with their lives, and cheer that so many were successfully evacuated.
We can imagine, for a moment, what it is to lose forever not the walls and windows of one’s house but the lifetime of treasures and tokens that made that house a home.
We can ponder the economics of the future, insurance availability and rates, the housing market, rents, gouging, giving.
We can broaden that thought to the political, the partisan point-scoring, the agendas, the lies, the coming battles.
We can take stock of our situation, ask whether we want to rebuild, if possible, and again challenge the forces of nature on the same inauspicious field of battle.
We can wonder what the scene we behold tells us about our place on the planet, whether there’s any connection at all between the ruins before us and the SUV we’ve driven back to them.
We can stare stone-faced, we can cry.
We can open our hearts, or close them.
We can thank god for what we have, whether we believe in god or not — and know that, being human, we will probably soon go back to taking it much for granted.
There is nothing like the monochrome of ash and rubble to remind us of the transience of all that we are and all that we build. And the mockery of celestial blue and the incongruous four walls of white or color left intact and unharmed to remind us that fairness is a human construct..
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” T. S. Eliot wrote, fittingly, in The Waste Land. We are always building, always organizing, always fortifying — resisting the entropic forces of the cosmos, though at times perhaps unwittingly assisting them with our own destructive impulses. We generally recover, sometimes with amazing rapidity, though it takes longer to build than to destroy. We take “progress” as a guarantee, though history is marked by oscillation. What we build is often, though not always, beautiful. We aspire, we try.
America has escaped, for many generations, the scourge of all-out war on our soil. There are no American Dresdens, Londons, Hiroshimas, Nagasakis, Beiruts, or Gazas. In living memory and beyond, all our major disasters have been “natural”: hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, quakes, eruptions, fires.
Some might say it’s because we have been strong, others that we’ve been lucky. I believe that it is because we have stayed true to our principles, imperfect as they are, and taken care of our democracy — a structure made not of wood or glass or stone but of values and laws and protocols, mutual respect and, yes, empathy.
It is, as of this week, in the path of a firestorm.
Many have already evacuated. It is up to the rest of us, who remain, to set and defend a line.
Part 3: The Aftermath
Suburban communities were caught in a firestorm.
People in structures standing alone after a fire suffer, too.
This church building survived the California fire 😳🫢 pic.twitter.com/fC3aJKBbI6
— Agana Gee (@AganaGee) January 13, 2025
Aerial view of a burned out neighborhood in Pacific Palisades, CA, January 14, 2025.
Survivor’s remorse is common when one home is spared in a neighborhood.
"Every house is burnt down on my block except for my house."
A California man was astonished to find that his home was the only one left standing on his block in the wake of the destructive Eaton Fire in Altadena. pic.twitter.com/GEOlrtIw9I
— AccuWeather (@accuweather) January 19, 2025
The Guardian provides aerial before and after views of the destruction.
A firestorm can melt and vaporize objects in its path.
My Co-founder Josh Weinsch took this photo of his little daughter’s bike, which was in their driveway when they evacuated. Their neighborhood was vaporized.
— Seamus Blackley (@seamus.bsky.social) 2025-01-12T18:33:48.658Z
Three lawsuits were filed against Southern California Edison.
#BREAKINGNEWS: Three lawsuits were filed Monday morning against Southern California Edison in connection with the Eaton Fire.
Surveillance video and witness accounts have been raising questions about whether the Eaton Fire may have been started by a downed power line.… pic.twitter.com/5xZhP0hcts
— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) January 13, 2025
Rubble, double toil and trouble.
The president knows more about fires and water than anybody.
Trump on wildfires: "Los Angeles has massive amounts of water available to it. All they have to do is turn the value, and that's the valve coming back from and down from the Pacific Northwest."
Authorities work to prevent looters from “casing the joint” via drones.
A National Guard helicopter takes video of the devastation from above.
Thousands of government employees and volunteers will work until they put out the last burning embers and remove all of the debris.
As the winds die down and the fires are starting to become contained, let us not forget to keep thanking our brave firefighters who are still hard at work. Many of them have been working nonstop since the fires started last week, working to keep us safe. We don’t just have our… pic.twitter.com/7VHeTIoGNm
— Maria Shriver (@mariashriver) January 16, 2025
