On social media, Los Angeles residents have been posting apocalyptic-like photos of partially burnt pages of books, passages from the Quran, magazine ads, family photos, and even pornography that have landed in their backyards and on the properties where they live, amid the raging wildfires.
In some cases, people are finding the same partially burned pages from the same books in different parts of the city, sometimes more than a dozen miles away from the nearest wildfire.
Some people see this as a tragic example of how intense the unprecedented fires and winds have been over the past week. As of Tuesday morning, Los Angeles area fires have burned nearly 60 square miles of land, nearly the size of three Manhattans.
Ohers, meanwhile, see it as a glimmer of hope amongst the ashes and despair.
“This just landed in my sister’s Silverlake backyard. Zoom in. Read carefully,” writer and producer Liz Feldman wrote on Instagram, referring to a burnt piece of paper that contained the word “baraq,” the Hebrew word for “to restore, to repair.”