Fog shrouded the ruins still standing at the center of the Pacific Palisades on a morning in December, a once-vibrant Los Angeles community decimated by flames. Melted newsstands that distributed the Palisadian-Post, an almost century-old paper that ceased operating in the fire’s wake, sit on crumbled concrete. Weeds spread over an expanse of emptied lots, painting the blackened foundations and chimneys with swaths of green.
It’s been a year of recovery and reckoning in Los Angeles since the unprecedented wildfires erupted in the parched southern California hillsides and cascaded into the surrounding suburbs with shocking ferocity, killing 31 people.
More than 16,000 structures – vibrant homes, businesses, churches and schools – were reduced to ash and toxic debris. While rebuilding efforts are under way, progress has been slow. Thousands of displaced Angelenos remain in limbo.
Meanwhile, city officials, researchers, non-profits and new community groups combed through the horrors to puzzle together what went wrong – and what can be changed. The firestorm overwhelmed municipal water systems and outpaced elite firefighting crews. Frantic evacuations slowed to a crawl along winding roads. Emergency alerts failed to reach thousands of people as flames bore down on them. In the chaos, the most vulnerable were left behind.
As the issues that defined the disaster and its recovery come into sharper focus, one urgent question looms: what can be done to stop another from striking in the future?
“This could not only happen again – it could be much worse,” said David Barrett, the executive director of MySafe:LA, a non-profit organization that’s partnered with the city’s first responders and policymakers to expand community preparedness.
The dangers are not confined to Los Angeles. There are more than 1,100 communities in 32 states across the US with characteristics similar to those that burned in the LA fires, data from the US Forest Service shows – and they are not only in the west. Researchers estimate roughly 115 million people – more than a third of the US population – live in areas that could host the next fire disaster.
The extreme conditions that aligned here were rare; but the dangers are only increasing. Los Angeles will have to prepare itself, even as the metropolis undergoes the arduous challenge of climbing out from under this catastrophe.
There’s still a long road to walk. The lack of coordination and leadership from federal agencies hollowed out by the Trump administration, a complicated and costly matrix of permits and approvals and the steep financial cost of rebuilding, especially for people who are under or uninsured, have all added burdens for survivors still processing loss and trauma.
“As we dig into it all we are also seeing the massive gaps,” said Dr Edith de Guzman, a cooperative extension climate researcher at UCLA. She is one of dozens of scientists who are examining what turned January’s ignitions into infernos. “There are so many dimensions and so many angles that we need to consider as we think about what wildfire resilience actually looks like,” said de Guzman.
“Now that we’re coming up on the one year we are only just starting to understand the magnitude.”
A mammoth rebuilding effort
The smoke had not yet cleared last January when LA leaders promised they would rebuild faster and stronger than ever before.
Two tight-knit communities on opposite sides of the sprawling city lay in ruins: the Palisades, an affluent coastal enclave overlooking the Pacific, was under the jurisdiction of LA city. To the east, the diverse, unincorporated town of Altadena tucked against the San Gabriel Mountains was overseen by LA county.
In the first six months, crews cleared more than 2.5m tons of toxic debris from the enormous fire footprints. The ash, metal, crumpled concrete and tainted soil was double the amount cleared from Ground Zero after 9/11 and rivaled the weight of 92 Statues of Liberty, according to the office of governor Gavin Newsom, who also claimed it was the fastest cleanup in US history. Then the work dramatically slowed.
As the year came to a close, wooden frames could be seen rising from the sea of cleared lots, but an overwhelming majority of rebuild projects have yet to break ground. Construction was under way for 511 homes in the Eaton fire footprint and about 370 in the Palisades in December.
About 2,600 permits to rebuild had been issued by 5 January, according to county and city records published by the state, approximately 41% of the applications received. For the majority of burned properties though, applications are not yet on file.
The patchwork progress has showcased sharp divides.
“It is predominantly the wealthy who are rebuilding,” said Dr Thomas Chandler, the managing director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, who has been watching the Los Angeles recovery closely.
Those with resources, especially developers who come equipped with knowledge and ready-made networks to quickly hire up contractors and labor, were able to get an early start.
The first finished home in the Palisades – a celebrated milestone – turned out to be a model used by a developer that was already permitted before it was destroyed in the fire.
Most victims are still tangled in a set of steep challenges. Many are uninsured or underinsured and payouts have widely fallen far short of rebuilding costs. Even after the governor suspended a slew of permitting and environmental regulations for fire victims to speed up recovery, there’s the paperwork, the phone calls, the dizzying matrix of decisions that fall to survivors as they try to pick trustworthy information in an onslaught of predatory offers.
Dr Manuel Pastor, the director of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California, has seen the deep conviction – “we will rebuild!” – voiced by victims and leaders in both areas immediately after the fire, already being tested. “There will be a lot of people who have the desire to rebuild who will not be able to,” he said.
Meanwhile, thousands of displaced people have been forced to compete for temporary homes in one of the most expensive housing markets in the US, some still paying mortgages on structures no longer standing. Even for those able to secure short-term mortgage relief, benefits will expire at the one-year mark.
Given the fatigue, frustration and financial hardship, many wonder if it’s worth undergoing an arduous rebuild without knowing if the neighborhoods themselves will bounce back. The blazes severed social networks. Burned schools and small businesses are still shut down. And then there’s the question – could they lose it all again?
As the year came to a close, the slogans “Pali strong” and “Altadena is not for sale” could still be seen on yard signs or attached to chainlink fences throughout the neighborhoods. But among them, there are also scores of “for sale” signs.
People who made these communities special are already starting to slip away. As the period of instability lingers, more are expected to follow. Depending on who purchases the properties, the neighborhoods may change.
“Price pressure in Altadena will unfortunately make a neighborhood that was effortlessly multi-ethnic become much more homogenous in income and race,” Pastor said.
In the first nine months after the Eaton fire, outside investors bought roughly two-thirds of the 241 lots put up for sale in Altadena, according to research from UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics institute, published in October.
In December, one of the first rebuilds hit the market for close to $2m after the lot sold for $635,000 last April. The developer, NP Altadena I LLC, is owned by a San Diego firm that specializes in scooping up lots and rebuilding post-disaster, and has 15 properties in the town.
Roughly 350 lots were sold in the Palisades in that same time frame, according to the website Pali Builds. After the fire, Kambiz Kamdar, a Palisades resident and fourth-generation contractor, put his expertise to work when he co-created the platform, intending to help his neighbors navigate the complexity and hold the city to account.
“Right now you have thousands of people thrown into the mix of rebuilding and they don’t know where to start,” he said. “We are still going through it – and we are not getting the support we need to move things along faster here.”
As recovery crawls, there are still hopes that the city will have more time to learn lessons.
Dr Megan Mullin, the faculty director for the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, who was also appointed to lead a commission tasked with advising on how to incorporate resilience into the rebuild, said a lasting recovery will require understanding what the region is up against – and how to navigate the dangers that haven’t subsided. “The challenge we face long term is how much are we willing to do and how much are we willing to pay to protect ourselves from fire?”Lessons from the disaster
It’s been called the perfect storm.
The years before the fire had been exceedingly wet, seeding the hills with highly flammable brush. This was followed by a devastatingly dry winter – the second driest and its third warmest on record.
Then came the winds. Gusts hit the top 2% of wind speeds ever recorded for the area, reaching up to 90mph.
When flames ignited on all sides of the city, waves of destruction and terror overwhelmed the region’s capacity to respond.
“There was nothing they could do in that confluence of wind and smoke and fire,” Barrett said. That’s why, he added, “there needs to be a better effort made to maintain readiness”.
The way these extreme elements aligned was unprecedented, but the event is part of a terrifying pattern. Periods of strong rains followed by deep droughts are being supercharged by the climate crisis as temperatures rise. The confluence has created a new kind of catastrophic fire more capable of exploding into residential and urban areas.
“We are living in changed conditions and the systems we built previously haven’t caught up,” de Guzman said. “We are hoping to get smarter in the wake of this.”
A slew of investigations, inquiries, roundtables, and community events have already yielded important observations about what went wrong.
A comprehensive timeline of the fires, commissioned by Newsom, captured the chaos that ensued as multiple fires laid siege to different parts of the city. Scores of homes on the west side of LA had already been devoured when a new set of flames were spotted raging down the canyons toward Altadena. First responders were spread too thin, and attention was swiftly divided between attempts at protecting homes and executing frenzied evacuations.
Residents on both sides of the city say they didn’t receive warnings to leave until the fire was raining down upon them. An independent after-action review completed by a contractor for LA county found that public safety power shutoffs in the area, power lines downed in the wind and smoke thick enough to cloud signal strength took out cellphones and landline communications where people would typically receive orders to leave.
Conditions may have hampered these systems, but there were clear failures too.
West Altadena was not sent electronic evacuation orders until hours after the flames had already roared into their neighborhoods, the LA Times reported. All but one of the 19 people who perished in the Eaton fire lived in this area, which was notified to escape around 3.30am – several hours after their neighbors were told to flee.
In another gutting finding, a report from the California Commission on Aging released in November said all but four of the 31 people killed overall in the fires were older than the age of 65 or had a disability. The median age of the victims was 76. The report found that many of them knew the dangers were approaching and simply had no means of escape. Some tried to call 911. Help never arrived.
In the Palisades, images of cars abandoned by the side of the road highlighted the longstanding problems with evacuating LA’s most fire-prone neighborhoods. Kamdar’s wife and children were among those trapped in the terrifying gridlock, forced to grab whatever they could carry and run out of the burning canyons on foot.
And it’s not just the Palisades. Barrett said the dangers are much the same in neighborhoods such as the Hollywood Hills, Laurel Canyon, and the San Fernando Valley, where roads tightly twist and turn.
“It looks like someone poured a bowl of spaghetti,” he said of evacuation maps in the Hollywood Hills. “They’re terrifying, actually,” he said. “It could take five hours, seven hours, nine hours just to get everyone who lives there out.”
Along with better evacuation planning, attention has turned to whether new home building and design standards can stop or slow future fires. Experts are beginning to understand how wildfires become urban conflagrations.
The structures themselves served as fuel for the LA fires, according to an analysis by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), a non-profit research and communications organization funded by the insurance industry.
In dense residential neighborhoods, the wind-carried embers landed on wooden fencing, wafted into uncovered air vents, or settled on eaves. Once flames were able to get into a structure it would rapidly be consumed, spreading from house to house.
“This wasn’t a wildfire. This wasn’t a forest fire,” de Guzman said. “These are fires that moved through the air.”
Fire-resistant building materials, things such as concrete, brick or stucco sidings, all play a crucial role in protecting structures. So-called “home hardening” strategies need to be more comprehensive, though.
Destruction analysts found many residents had worked hard to retrofit their homes in high fire-risk areas, but older windows were weak points that failed due to the high radiant heat when adjacent buildings caught fire. There were also fire-resistant homes spared amid the burned wreckage in both fire footprints, but left with significant smoke damage.
Even with good intel, there are still layers of challenges when it comes to implementation. In areas where homes are constructed closely together, resilience has to be built blocks at a time.
“It’s expensive,” Mullin, the UCLA director, said, noting the clear benefits of home hardening. “And it is really expensive at the scale that’s needed.”
Signs of rebirth
It’s blisteringly hot across town in Altadena. That doesn’t slow down throngs of volunteer workers clad in hardhats and brightly colored shirts. Amid the clamor of saws and hammers, they are busy adding layers to the wood-framed bones of a brand new home, slated for completion in early 2026.
This rebuild is an act of community ingenuity and support, the culmination of a partnership between Habitat for Humanity and a new foundation called the Foothill Catalog.
Altadena-based architects Cynthia Sigler and her husband Alex Athenson were inspired by the catalog home program popularized in the early 1900s by companies like Sears. They watched their neighborhood burn, and created the Foothill Catalog as a way for people to streamline their rebuilding by shopping for a new home that comes with permits prepackaged.
“Resiliency is most effective at the community scale,” Sigler said. “That’s ultimately what we’re trying to do with this catalog model.”
The catalog contains roughly 20 plans pre-approved with LA county. They are working on LA city-specific plans too, that can be used by residents in the Palisades. Each of the homes will be built to the highest standards for safety, but also style. The team, who received $1m from the LA Rises initiative in partnership with the California Fire Foundation, is not only hoping to rebuild , but also restore Altadena’s unique and historic character lost to the flames.
“What that requires is accessibility, making good design accessible, and providing an equitable path to rebuilding,” Sigler said.
It’s one of many community efforts that have sprung to life across LA as the city recovers and also grapples with the risks that remain.
Barrett and his organization MySafe:LA have helped shepherd a budding preparation movement. Dozens of councils and neighborhood organizing events have launched across LA in the past year.
But resilience is not just about safeguarding structures or practicing evacuations. Community efforts were at the center of saving lives during the firestorm and supporting victims through its long aftermath. To secure their future, locals are working to reignite and protect what made these places special.
Just down the road from the Foothill Catalog house, another type of recovery is unfolding.
Small trees in neat rows – lemons, limes, oranges – have begun to fruit for the first time this year. Near them, the uneven tops of cactus heads stuck into the ground are starting to take root. Lizards scurry across sun-filled plots that are nearly ready to receive new seeds as scores of bees hover and drop on to a lavender bush that casts floral scents into the air.
Altadena’s Community Garden – a neighborhood crown jewel since it first opened in 1970 – was decimated by the Eaton fire. Many of its members lost their homes and are still scattered to the wind, waiting to return.
When they do, Joe Nagy, the garden’s president said, the grounds will be ready to be the refuge it always was.
“I know people need this place,” he said, describing how much work he and other volunteers have dedicated to ensuring the soil is safe and its 82 plots, the orchard, and the compost are ready to reopen in time for the anniversary of the fires.
“One of the positive things about a disaster is people stop and they think about what to do and how to help,” he said. He hopes that won’t stop. Even when the houses come back, when charred trees are covered in new green shoots, when the signs of what happened here begin to fade, the risks will not.
“What I would like to see after we get over the hump of how we clean up this mess – and a lot of the conversations I don’t think we are having right now – is how to prevent it,” he said. “Once we figure out how to heal, we have to keep going.”
