Digging out in the Palisades Fire burn zone

Talking my way through the National Guard checkpoint at the intersection of Amalfi Drive and Sunset Boulevard felt like crossing the River Styx, into the underworld.

It was early March 2025. The last embers of the Palisades Fire had been out for a month. It was cold, gray and drizzling. A blue-green mist coiled around the chaparral foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains like tendrils of smoke. The air smelled of ozone and scorched chemicals. I had bronchitis and bad dreams.

I’d spent the prior day driving around Altadena in a daze. My wife and I had pilgrimaged to see our old house on Grand Oaks Avenue. By some stroke of luck it survived the Eaton Fire, which burned simultaneously with the Palisades Fire, wreathing LA in flames for 24 days. But starting just a couple blocks north of our house and stretching for miles westward, it looked like an atom bomb had detonated. Most of Altadena was gone.

That first day I made it past the checkpoint into the Pacific Palisades, I met Brayan. I was wandering on foot, absorbing the sight of mansion after mansion transformed by fire into teetering, abstract sculptures. I was chilled, wheezing through the N95 mask I’d plucked from our dusty pandemic stash. When I stopped in front of the first property on the block to be cleared, the door of an excavator swung open and a spectral figure dressed in a white hazmat suit descended into the wreckage. He approached and, pulling aside a respirator, asked, “Was this your house?”

Brayan, Villa View Drive, Pacific Palisades, March 2025. Brayan is a skilled digger operator, one of thousands of workers employed through contractors of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to clean up ash and debris left behind by the Palisades Fire, which erupted on January 7, 2025. Credit: Barron Bixler

“It feels like a responsibility. We’re helping the city heal.”
– Brayan

I explained that the house wasn’t mine, and that I’d come simply to try to make sense of the unimaginable scale of devastation — to see it with my own eyes. Brayan told me that he lives in Wilmington, a close-knit, industrial community near the Port of Los Angeles. He and his wife have young twin boys. When I asked if he worried about the toll his work in the burn zone could take on his health, he replied, “No, it’s more the little things, you know?”

By the little things, he meant the psychic weight of seeing — and toiling amidst — the ruins of everything the residents of the Palisades had lost. And by extension, what we all are losing. Debris can be cleared. Houses can be rebuilt. Scars can heal over. But the lingering grief and anticipatory dread of climate disaster never really go away.

As I traversed the burn zone over the coming months, I met dozens of guys like Brayan — the workers charged with shoring up our broken world. As I heard their stories and tried to balance them against the impossible ambition of their labor, I was plagued by nagging questions: Amid ICE raids in their neighborhoods and brazen persecution of immigrant communities across the U.S., are we asking too much of these men in service of one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods? What scars will they carry with them out of this damned place, back into the bright shining blue world above?

“I saw the fire on TV and thought: ‘This is crazy.’ But I never expected that the whole town was gonna be gone. When I saw it for myself, I felt sick. Then I had to get to work.” – Luis

Luis, Villa View Drive, Pacific Palisades, March 2025. Luis was one of the first demolition workers to arrive in the Palisades Fire burn zone in late February 2025, as part of the Army Corps of Engineers’ Phase-2 debris removal operation. The Corps contracted a complex patchwork of private companies to undertake demolition, cleanup and debris removal for 8,000 structures destroyed or damaged in the fire. The companies employed workers like Luis with expertise in the demolition and construction trades. Credit: Barron Bixler

Berea Place, Pacific Palisades, May 2025. One of the largest and most complex residential demolition sites in the Palisades Fire burn zone, this property on Berea Place — tucked into a steep lot in the first rise of the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains — was once a $10 million, multi-level luxury home offering “exclusive tranquility and breathtaking ocean views.” The cleared lot is currently valued on Zillow at about $700,000. Credit: Barron Bixler

Goucher Street, Pacific Palisades, March 2025. The Palisades Fire transformed homes into what often looked like teetering, abstract sculptures. The destruction was so absolute for many properties, salvaging possessions — or even raw building materials — was nearly impossible. Credit: Barron Bixler

“These guys have been dealing with this for years, bro. They’re not criminals. They don’t have any probation or parole going on. These guys work, just dedicate to their family, working and providing.”
– Reynaldo

Reynaldo, Toyopa Drive, Pacific Palisades, July 2025. By mid-July 2025, around the six-month anniversary of the eruption of the fire, all properties whose owners had opted in to the free Army Corps Phase-2 debris removal program had been cleared. Only a few hundred “opt-outs” — properties whose owners decided to undertake remediation privately — remained. Reynaldo was the jobsite foreman for one such “opt-out” property in the flats south of Sunset Boulevard. Reynaldo halted work for the day when one of his crew had family members swept up in a now-infamous ICE raid at an agricultural operation in Camarillo, during which farmworker Jaime Alanis Garcia died and 200 other workers were detained. Credit: Barron Bixler

“It’s hard to see these people lose everything.” – Luis

Ernesto, Goucher Street, Pacific Palisades, March 2025. Early on in the Phase-2 debris removal operation, particularly at properties that proved difficult to access with heavy machinery, workers like Ernesto carried out ash and debris by hand using 5-gallon buckets and wheel barrows, often navigating treacherous terrain on foot. Credit: Barron Bixler

Chautauqua Boulevard, Pacific Palisades, May 2025. The Palisades Fire burned 37 square miles, destroyed or damaged 8,000 structures and killed 12 people. Immediate and long-term impacts on ecosystems in this sensitive wildland-urban interface interface remain unquantified. In the months following the fire, cleanup crews removed a million tons of toxic ash and debris, and other environmental remediation efforts are ongoing. Credit: Barron Bixler

Lachman Lane, Pacific Palisades, July 2025. The basement of this midcentury hillside house on Lachman Lane survived the fire, although it was heavily damaged and was slated for demolition, according to the crew working the jobsite. Durable cement bears the blackened scars of the flammable objects that burned in the fire, since cleared by demolition and cleanup crews. Credit: Barron Bixler

Chapala Drive, Pacific Palisades, May 2025. The Palisades Fire ignited in the Santa Monica Mountains above the Pacific Palisades when an arson fire, never fully extinguished by firefighters, rekindled. Fueled by strong seasonal Santa Ana winds, the fire burned so ferociously that it tore through 4 or 5 miles of residential neighborhoods and commercial buildings right down to Malibu Beach. Credit: Barron Bixler

“I’m from Michoacan. The owner hired me when I was at Home Depot looking for work, and I’m just out here saving whatever I can for them. Right now I’m breaking these bricks apart and stacking them over there. Maybe they can reuse them.” – Miguel

Miguel, Alma Real Drive, Pacific Palisades, May 2025. The vast majority of property owners in the Pacific Palisades opted in to the Army Corps’ free Phase-2 debris removal program. A few hundred opted out of the program and hired private contractors. Only a handful hired their own workers directly, often from informal hiring sites like Home Depot, to perform demolition work. Men like Miguel, who recently arrived in LA from Michoacan, worked the dangerous jobsites without mandated protection from the physical and environmental hazards of the burn zone.

Paskenta Drive, Pacific Palisades, March 2025. In the surreal post-fire landscape, only a few kinds of objects remained intact: chimneys, swimming pools, car frames, tree trunks, scraps of stone wall, barbecue grills, and, most reliably, garden statues. Amid the ash and rubble, these objects appeared to stand sentinel. Credit: Barron Bixler

Angel, Berea Place, Pacific Palisades, May 2025. Angel worked one of the most challenging and hazardous demolition sites in the Pacific Palisades. While these positions were well paid by construction and demolition standards, the work was physically grueling and carried both immediate and long-term risks to workers’ health. To accrue overtime pay, many opted to work for weeks at a time without taking a single day off. Credit: Barron Bixler

Isidro, Lachman Lane, Pacific Palisades, July 2025. Demolition and cleanup crews often bounced from jobsite to jobsite, crisscrossing the Palisades Fire burn zone in a pattern that felt random, and even inequitable, to some residents. Between February and mid-May 2025, the Army Corps responded to 350 complaints from homeowners about the quality or thoroughness of cleanup work on their properties. Credit: Barron Bixler

Glenhaven Drive, Pacific Palisades, July 2025. By July 2025, the tangled mass of wreckage that defined the landscape of the Pacific Palisades in March had mostly been cleared and hauled to landfills and salvage yards around the LA Basin. At a few properties, tidy piles of ash and debris remained, awaiting haul trucks to come and clear the way for sale or rebuilding. Credit: Barron Bixler

Note: This story was updated to shorten some quotes for design purposes and to clarify a caption.

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