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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Gabrielle Canon in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, California

The Los Angeles wildfires were ‘the perfect storm’. Is the city ready for the next one?

A composite image showing a burned car on the left and a person working on a home in Altadena.
One year after the fires, the effort to rebuild what was lost is under way. Composite: Gabrielle Canon/The Guardian

Fog shrouded the ruins still standing at the center of the Pacific Palisades on a morning in December, a once-vibrant Los Angeles community decimated by flames. Melted newsstands that distributed the Palisadian-Post, an almost century-old paper that ceased operating in the fire’s wake, sit on crumbled concrete. Weeds spread over an expanse of emptied lots, painting the blackened foundations and chimneys with swaths of green.

It’s been a year of recovery and reckoning in Los Angeles since the unprecedented wildfires erupted in the parched southern California hillsides and cascaded into the surrounding suburbs with shocking ferocity, killing 31 people.

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