My name is Brianna Sacks, and I cover disasters and extreme weather for the Washington Post climate team.

I'm currently in my brother's office in Santa Monica, which is a city partially under evacuation warning and order right next to the Pacific Palisades.

Brianna has been reporting in Los Angeles since wildfires ripped through the county early

Tuesday. The extent of the destruction is massive. Large swathes of L.A. are burning. Tens of thousands of people

are evacuating from their homes in dense urban neighborhoods. And for Brianna, reporting on it

all hits close to home. My dad, he's 80, and he lives right to where the fire roared up in the Pacific Palisades

right on sunset.

And I grew up doing this.

I grew up in Malibu, which is next to the Palisades, and that town just had a fire last

month.

And a lot of vivid memories coming

back of evacuating and, you know, watching my childhood burn and it's, it's happening again.

When I connected with Brianna this morning, she told me her dad got out.

Her cousins, who also live in the area, were able to leave.

But for so many people, evacuating has been a singularly harrowing experience.

I was hearing online before I got there of people getting stuck in their cars and having to abandon their cars. And when I got to the scene, which was like half of a mile from where my dad lived, there were 50 cars just abandoned there

and crunched their windows smashed,

doors smashed because a dozer had moved them out of the way.

And police there told me that they were ordering people

to abandon their vehicles because the fire was right on top of them

and telling them to leave the cars and

just run, which is just astounding.

...