Returning Pacific Palisades residents were grieving not just homes turned to ash, but memories buried amid the rubble

Wildfires had crept close to the Pacific Palisades before.

Just in 2018, the catastrophic Woolsey fire wreaked havoc in nearby Malibu. There’d been other close calls: evacuations because of a brush fire in 2019. A blaze chewing through steep remote terrain nearby the following year.