On Wednesday morning, it looked like a bomb had exploded on Sunset Boulevard.

As the catastrophic Palisades Fire left one of the city’s iconic main streets, smoke and ash transformed the once picturesque landscape into something strangely lunar.

There were charred buildings, some slightly damaged, others completely destroyed. A burned-out Shell gas station, the pumps intact but the supermarket gone; a Bank of America in a historic building gutted by fire, while the metal skeletons of the ATMs outside were warped by the intense heat.

During a police blockade, Palisades residents pleaded with LAPD officers to let them through to check on their homes and pick up vital medications.

The Palisades inferno erupted Tuesday morning near Piedra Morada Drive and was hit by strong wind gusts. By Wednesday afternoon it had burned more than 11,802 acres, snaking west to Malibu and east to Brentwood, leaving widespread devastation.

Tens of thousands of residents were forced from their homes. Authorities reported an unspecified number of “significant” injuries as devastating fires raged in other parts of the city at the same time. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department tallied two looting arrests as thieves attempted to loot wealthy neighborhoods that had been evacuated.

“Despite the extraordinary nature of what happened and is unfolding, I fear that we are witnessing a new, terrible and tragic normal,” said William Deverell, historian and director of the Huntington-USC Institute for California and the West.

Much of the Pacific Coast Highway and its homes and landmarks between Will Rogers State Beach north of Santa Monica and Carbon Beach in eastern Malibu lay in ruins Wednesday. Large sections of coastal homes along the highway were reduced to smoldering rubble that fell onto the beach and into the sea.

Cozy homes and multimillion-dollar beach palaces that once dotted the coastline are all gone. Beloved longstanding businesses and landmarks of the local canon – also wiped out.

In Santa Monica, doctors in the emergency room at Providence Saint John’s Health Center treated patients suffering from smoke inhalation, eye irritation and minor burns.

Dr. Ali Jamehdor urged people with heart or breathing problems to stay indoors and exercise caution amid strong winds that tossed debris into the air. Operations at the Santa Monica hospital were postponed Tuesday evening and were expected to resume Thursday.

Much of what remained Wednesday of the Palisades’ Alphabet Streets neighborhood, a mostly flat residential neighborhood in a U-shaped pocket north of Sunset Boulevard, was blackened rubble and dust.

Although much of the Palisades was cordoned off, James Fynes, 40, found a back staircase into the area. He had come to see the house of his friend’s parents, who had moved in last year after three years of construction.

“This is crazy,” he repeated as he walked through street after street full of charred cars and destroyed houses. “I can’t believe there’s no water.”

In each burned block, reminders of the property owners’ wealth remained: a home gym burned almost beyond recognition, then a blackened hot tub, next to the shells of several cars parked in a garage.

On most blocks only fireplaces remained. Power lines collapsed onto destroyed streets. Some houses were still burning.

For 56-year-old John Lightfoot, every store that burned down had memories associated with it: the bank he used for decades, the small cafe he frequented, both gone.

A few blocks away, Michael Payton, branch manager of nearby Erewhon, came to survey the damage. The company had survived, but so much else was gone.

“The entire Palisades is finished. “The whole city is finished,” he said. “This is utter devastation.”

Fear spread across Los Angeles as the Palisades and other fires raged and the wind howled, and seemingly no corner of the city was completely out of danger.

Some residents reported evacuating more than once as the fire followed them to friends or family members’ homes in “safe” zones. Others learned from afar that their homes had burned down through fire or security alarms that alerted their phones.

“When we talk about disasters in Southern California, L.A. County, and fire disasters in particular, in my experience in the past there seems to be a divide between those of us who live in the apartments, far away from the foothill areas,” the historian said DJ Waldie.

From the plains, the flames at higher elevations can seem distant and like “someone else’s Los Angeles, where things are constantly burning down,” Waldie said.

But that paradigm was turned on its head Tuesday evening when a wide swath of lower-lying Santa Monica was under an evacuation warning.

By midday Wednesday, desperate Santa Monica residents gasped in smoke, battled 40 mph wind gusts and dragged pets and suitcases to their cars to flee the mandatory evacuation zone north of San Vicente. And yet two blocks away, on Marguerita Avenue near Ocean Avenue, a construction crew was quietly working on a residential building.

“We have to survive; That’s why we’re still here,” said Josue Curiel, who lives in Inglewood and is originally from Jalisco, Mexico. All members of his crew of about half a dozen men were also born south of the border.

“If you’re a worker, you’re hungry, so that’s how it is.”

As they attached their ladder to the building to protect it from the howling wind, they worked to repair a water-damaged balcony – which had nothing to do with the natural disaster raging around them.

“I was planning on having the day off,” Curiel said last night, shrugging as he watched the news, but when he woke up he found the job was still pending. “A lot of people are still working.”

Mike Flannigan, a professor at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, Canada, who studies wildfires, said there is a simple recipe that applies to fires in California: vegetation, ignition and favorable weather, which typically comes from hot and dry winds consists.

“If you have all three, you have wildfire,” he said.

These elements helped the Palisades Fire move quickly, sweeping through ravine and hillside neighborhoods.

On the east-west corridors through Central LA, the brown fronds of palm trees — queen, fan and other palm species — were scattered like carrion on the streets and sidewalks. Nobody stood a chance against the strong wind.

Heading west from the Miracle Mile area, the eerie plume of smoke under the mid-morning sun painted the landscape in amber and ocher. The cloud darkened the sky so much that street and residential lights were illuminated with photocells that turned on at dusk – human technology tricked by the inferno.

Former Police Commission President Steve Soboroff, a West L.A. resident, said each of his five children, all of whom live in the Los Angeles area, have evacuated their homes.

“This isn’t just a fire,” Soboroff said. “You contain a fire, you build a ring around the fire. It’s like a thousand fires. It’s simply impossible. I think back to the Great Chicago Fire. Because of the density, I don’t know of anything that has ever been like that here. It’s just a worst-case scenario.”