Isabelle Mullen: Communities obliterated, lives lost and mountains of rubble line the streets amid LA fires

It’s hard to describe the scale of destruction across Los Angeles right now. Entire communities have been obliterated by fire.

In place of homes, churches, schools, and shopping centres are mountains of rubble, and kilometres of melted plastic.

Lifetimes of memories are all gone.

And then there’s the loss of life.

I’ll never forget Ruth, an Altadena woman who was allowed to return to her neighbourhood to search for her missing aunt.

Ruth was carrying a shovel and told us her aunt’s house was gone — the only thing that remained was a padlock on the front gate.

She’d come to look for her because she lived alone with her cat, but she was never found.

There are so many stories like Ruth’s. Missing family members and friends who couldn’t get out in time or had nowhere to go, trapped inside their houses as fire claimed entire towns.

People with disabilities, the elderly, and the lonely. Men and women who had run out of options, who remained in their homes, hoping the fire would pass.

Their families have been left with the impossible task of searching for their remains.

Australian man Rory Sykes was one of those people.

In Malibu with his Mum Shelley, 32-year-old Rory lived with cerebral palsy and was blind. He was too heavy for Shelley to lift, so she left to get help but once out of the fire zone she wasn’t allowed back in.

Less than half an hour later, everything was gone. Rory’s cottage had been reduced to rubble, and Shelley was asked to identify her son’s body.

I now know what someone means when they describe something as “apocalyptic”.

But that word doesn’t capture the heartbreak or the helplessness.

In Altadena, the firefighters we saw were exasperated. Homes were literally burning down around them and there was nothing they could do.

There was no water to fight them, so they tried to get as many people out as they could, knowing they couldn’t save everyone.

In California, the blame game is now in full swing, with accusations of staffing shortages and department cuts.

It’s hard to know when things will calm down. The Santa Ana winds otherwise known as the “devil winds” are expected to come back this week. At one point we were told they were reaching “tornado speeds.”

Hopefully firefighters have done enough to keep these fires in the canyons and away from homes.

One thing is for sure, the city of celebrity has changed. It already feels different.

These fires shouldn’t have happened in winter, but without serious rain for six months, the conditions were primed.

This is California’s driest winter since the 1960s.

Hopefully some good can come out of this devastation, and fire departments can get the resources they need so this never happens again.

But in the meantime, anger is growing.

No one can escape the heartache, even outside the fire zones.

The destruction literally hangs in the air.

The smell of burnt rubbish and melted plastic sits like a dark cloud over Los Angeles.

It sticks to your clothes and gets under your skin.

Just walking around Hollywood, your throat burns. It’s so toxic, that even with a mask you know it’s doing you harm.

Tiny particles of rubbish sit on everything so that when you wash your hands the water runs black.

The City of Angels has descended into a hell that not even Hollywood’s finest producers could have scripted.

Not that they’d want to, this devastation is playing out far too close to home.