I WAS AT MY cabin in Joshua Tree right before the wind started up. The air was totally still, the sky was clear, the stars were sparkling. My gut was telling me this was the calm before the storm. In this case, it was a firestorm.

Over the years, I have photographed what the Santa Ana winds can do. The gales that regularly blast through Los Angeles are legendary, and—with barely a drop of rain in Southern California in eight months—the land was tinderbox dry and primed for an inferno. That's exactly what happened the next day. Many times over.

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The first of the two major conflagrations, the Palisades fire, had erupted before I began driving my pickup back to LA on January 7. By the time I got home to Newport Beach, dropped my dog off, got through traffic, and reached Santa Monica, it was 6:30 p.m. It was dark and you could just see a glow on the northern horizon. Instead of rising high into the sky, the smoke column was leaned over sideways, pushed horizontal by the heavy winds.

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I had an anemometer—a portable wind gauge— and there were 45-mph gusts at the beach where I was standing. My guess is that on the ridge tops it was blowing at 60 to 70 mph. I thought, Okay, aircraft aren't even going to be able to fly until at least tomorrow. On one side was the Pacific, but cresting those hills was another ocean—this one made of flames. The winds blew sparks over the peaks. It was literally a wave of fire crashing down the hill.

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I shot the fire with the Santa Monica Pier in the foreground. Palm fronds and street signs were flying out into the water. My face was red from standing on the edge of the surf because all the sand coming off the beach was sandblasting me.

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Then the Eaton fire started just east of LA, near Pasadena in middle-class Altadena. By the time I got there, the chaos looked like a war zone. The visibility was maybe 25 feet. There were spot fires and embers in a park, which people were trying to put out themselves. Large branches had come down everywhere. I had to push open my truck door with both arms, because there was so much wind pressure keeping it shut. There were fire engines everywhere, people walking down the street with bags, loads of cars backed up. I knew that a lot of people, including people I knew and cared about, might be losing their homes that night.

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I drove by a senior care home that had just been evacuated. They got nearly 200 people onto city buses and were gone by the time I got there, but I saw empty hospital gurneys and beds just rolling down the road in the wind. The mattresses were blowing off and getting wrapped around palm trees, which were igniting on top, throwing embers off, and starting more spot fires downwind. I saw the crew of one Los Angeles County fire engine trying to put water on a home that was ablaze. It was already a total loss, but they were trying to stop it from igniting neighboring homes. Even a fire engine with its high-pressure deck gun shooting a torrent of water was like pissing in the wind at that point.

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My goal with this fire photography is for people to be better prepared—for them to take the evacuations seriously, and maybe beforehand clear brush to fortify their homes. I hope it can help make firefighters' jobs easier in educating the public. Safety and respect are important to me. I stay out of the way of first responders, and when I returned to photograph residents returning to where their homes used to be, I didn't photograph any homeowners unless I had their permission.

This has been a terrible tragedy. We have to be realistic about the risk of where we've built. Because these fires will happen again. —Stuart Palley as told to Anthony Breznican