Flying south through smoky skies down the famous Malibu coast, at first the burnt-out mansions are the exception — solitary wrecks, smouldering away between rows of intact, gleaming beachfront villas.
But draw closer to Pacific Palisades, the ground zero of Los Angeles’s devastating fires, and those small scorched ruins become sporadic clusters, and then endless rows of charred, crumpled homes.
From the air, the extent of the devastation wrought by the Palisades fire on these two neighbourhoods is starting to come into focus: whole streets in ruins, the remains of once-fabulous houses now nothing but ash and memories.
Access to this area of utter devastation has been largely closed to the public and even to evacuated residents since the fire began on Wednesday.
Story continues after live blog
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The biggest among multiple blazes covering Los Angeles, the inferno has now ripped through over 8000ha of Pacific Palisades and Malibu.
A preliminary estimate of destroyed structures was “in the thousands”, city fire chief Kristin Crowley told Friday’s conference.
There have been at least two separate reports of human remains found in this fire alone, though officials have yet to confirm the fatal toll.
“It is safe to say that the Palisades fire is one of the most destructive natural disasters in the history of Los Angeles,” said Crowley.
For AFP reporters surveying the scenes from a helicopter on Friday, it was hard to argue with that view.
On some of these highly coveted Malibu oceanfront plots, beloved by celebrities, skeletal frames of buildings indicated the lavish scale of what has been destroyed.
Other multimillion-dollar mansions have vanished entirely, seemingly swept into the Pacific Ocean by the force of the Palisades fire.
And looming above Malibu, a thin sliver of luxurious waterfront property, is Pacific Palisades itself — an affluent plateau of expensive real estate, now deserted.
Not the entire hilltop is blackened. Several grand homes stand unscathed. Some streets have been spared entirely.
But towards the southern end of the Palisades, grids of roads that were until Wednesday lined with stunning homes now resemble makeshift cemeteries.
Where row upon row of family homes once stood, all that remain are occasional chimneys, blackened tree stumps and charred timber.
At a press conference on Friday, Los Angeles district attorney Nathan Hochman described walking through Pacific Palisades to the remains of his sister’s home as “apocalyptic”.
“Not since the 1990s when Los Angeles was hit with the fires, the flood, the earthquake and the riots, have I seen such disaster occur here in our city,” he said.
“This is crazy,” agreed Albert Azouz, a helicopter pilot who has flown these skies for almost a decade, observing the destruction from above on Friday.
“All these homes, gone.”
