It has long been a local article of faith: Southern California disasters are rarely as sweeping as they seem.
Delaware and Rhode Island could fit, with room to spare, in Los Angeles County. A drive from Pacific Palisades to Pasadena takes nearly an hour, even without traffic. When the Los Angeles riots erupted in 1992, Americans recoiled at the fires silhouetting the downtown skyline. Not shown were the jacaranda-lined streets and placid suburbs where the rest of Southern California watched the mayhem on TV.
This time, it was different.
In a furious assault that began Tuesday morning and continued into Wednesday night, a wind-and-wildfire monster attacked a metropolis of 4,753 miles and nearly 10 million people, whipping up flames that tore through communities of every socioeconomic status and stripe.
Mansions were reduced to ash in Pacific Palisades, a West Los Angeles celebrity enclave. Subdivisions burned to the ground 35 miles to the east in the tidy suburb of Altadena. Ranch hands in rural Sylmar, 25 miles to the north, fled into the fiery night, leading horses. New homeowners in freshly built developments hours away in inland communities like Pomona braced for evacuations as 59-mile-per-hour winds rattled the windowpanes and palm trees.