Al Jazeera Podcasts.

Today, Los Angeles is burning.

It looked like this apocalyptic scene playing out all around us.

I went out to the balcony and our neighbor said,

look over there, there's a fire just there and I turn and we could see the flames coming up

over the hill. They're being called the most destructive fires in L.A.'s history. So how are

local officials and residents responding?

I'm Malika Bilal in L.A., and this is the take.

Mona Holmes grew up in Altadena, just northeast of downtown Los Angeles.

It's where the Eaton fire has killed at least five people and destroyed more than 1,000 homes.

I watched everything unfold and wondered which parts of Altadena were going to be impacted. This is an entire community that is on the side of a mountain, a massive mountain range.

And as someone who had experienced fires in that area growing up, we'd never seen anything

like this before.

It's been devastating.

She's a reporter who lives in East Los Angeles now, but her childhood was rooted in out to Dina.

I decided to drive four blocks north to my childhood home.

There were down power lines that I had to drive through, fires that were still ongoing.

And when I turned onto the street I grew up on

called Punahoo, I almost didn't recognize it. Everything was leveled. It looked as if a

bomb had gone off in the neighborhood. This is my childhood home. It's gone. This is also one of the

last areas in Southern California where there were a lot of black

families whose parents and grandparents still had homes in Altadena, still owned them,

...