Some aluminum alloys in the engine blocks of modern cars can begin to melt at 960 degrees Fahrenheit.
This was not a fact I held in my brain a few weeks ago. But after walking through the destruction of Altadena and seeing puddles of solid metal below charred vehicles, the liquefaction point of engine-block materials is at least one thing I’ve been able to fully comprehend lately.
On Jan. 8, I was a reporter on the Business desk of The New York Times and was gearing up to cover the influence of a tech oligopoly on an incoming president set to assume office a whole coast away. But when a fire broke out a mile from my home in Hollywood on a day when two other infernos had already incinerated neighborhoods, my job changed in an instant. I was a fire reporter. Little else mattered.
I had to learn fast. Where are the winds blowing? What does containment mean? How do I talk to someone on what may be the worst day of that person’s life?
Being a reporter is about taking in a lot of new information, processing it and explaining it to the world. And while I’ve taken in a lot of facts and data and reporting, the processing of what I’ve seen has yet to come. How do you make sense of a mother of two crying in front of you as she visits the destroyed dream home she had spent two decades building? Or that an Altadena neighborhood lost so many of the institutions — a summer camp, a diner, a hardware store — that made it what it was? Or that some locals still had the humanity to share tacos and Hennessy at a random gas station they had transformed into a charity site?
I spent this past Sunday digging through the wreckage of my partner’s father’s home in Pacific Palisades. The two-story building had collapsed on itself and a steady rain had turned the ash and crumbling stucco into a slurry that made it nearly impossible to dig. This was a quest to find something — anything — yet all that survived was a sunscreen bottle, a few mugs and a 1988 Mercedes 560SL. The car stood out like a red beacon in front of a torched alien landscape.
But the search provided a bit of clarity, with each jab of the shovel into the muck. It will take a long time to clean this all up. And it will take even longer to understand.
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