<p>By Wednesday morning, it looked as if a bomb had detonated on Sunset Boulevard.</p><p>As the catastrophic Palisades fire receded from one of the city’s iconic thoroughfares, smoke and ash rendered the once-picturesque landscape into something oddly lunar.</p><p>There were charred buildings, some slightly damaged, others fully destroyed. A burned-out Shell station, the pumps intact but the convenience store gone; a Bank of America in a historic building hollowed out by fire, the metal skeletons of the ATMs out front left twisted by the intense heat.</p>