♪ [Fire sizzling] Maiya May: In early January 2025, the world had a shocking realization-- wildfires are changing, and we're far more vulnerable than we knew.

♪ [Firefighter yelling] Maiya: But the LA Firestorm was just one of a string of fires causing destruction unprecedented in the modern era.

♪ Our film crew was on the ground from day one of the fires, and we had inside access to top fire officials and cutting-edge research.

Now, nearly a year after our original investigation, I wanted to see how the community is recovering.

So, I'm going back to meet with survivors, check in on the rebuild process, and find answers to their biggest questions.

The firefighter looked at him and said, "Sir, we have no water, and all of these units burnt."

Maiya: Now we have new models and new insight into what went wrong.

I'm Maiya May, the host of "Weathered," and I'm on a journey to understand where we are and where we're going in this moment of extreme change.

♪ And, above all else, I want to find out what we can do to stop this kind of disaster from ever happening again.

Police Department!

Man over radio: Fight the fire down!

Fight the fire down!

Yeah, let's get out of here.

We tried.

We tried, bro.

♪ Maiya: We're going to see what the burned areas look like and meet with community members determined to rebuild.

It's a huge risk for this to take longer than two years.

The Palisades and the Eaton Fire have been a turning point.

We're experiencing things that we never experienced before.

And as a public official, I have to tell the truth, even when the truth is difficult.

Maiya: That truth is more urgent than ever, with thousands of communities across the U.S.

vulnerable to the next fire and thousands of families' lives on hold as the rebuild of LA moves into its second year.

♪ [Fire sizzling] ♪ ♪ [Wind whistling] ♪ Here's what we know about the lead-up to the fires.

After two unusually wet years, Los Angeles, California entered an extreme eight-month dry spell with no rain, accompanied by record-breaking heat.

In these conditions, all you need is wind and an ignition to see extreme fire.

And looking at urban fire disasters over the last century, we see a clear uptick in the last decade.

With this surge in destructive fires, relying only on professional firefighters for protection is no longer enough.

Man: I grew up in Malibu.

I knew several people over the years that lost houses.

Fires happened at a pretty frequent pace every six, eight years, but it was never something that was really interesting at all.

And then the Woolsey Fire happened, and a lot of my friends, including my family, lost their house.

And I just couldn't let that go.

And so, I got oddly obsessed with what to do better for the next time.

I remember at a community meeting where we had all the fire chiefs, I remember just saying-- yelling at him, "Everybody just wants to hear you say sorry!"

Maiya: But Keegan, along with his friend Tyler, channeled that anger to help start the Community Brigade, a network of community members living in fire-prone areas who wanted to play an active role in preventing destruction during the next fire.

Keegan: The brigade ultimately was born out of the Woolsey experience.

We were just like, "Oh, we got this.

We're going to buy a truck, and we're going to buy a bunch of hoes, and we're going to handle the business next time."

Creating an ad hoc, kind of cowboy group of firefighters, um... That's what we thought then, at least.

Maiya: Over the following years, the brigade grew and began collaborating with fire departments to prepare for the inevitable.

In fall of 2024, 40 members received their fire certifications.

♪ But nothing could have prepared them for what was coming next.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, into a portion of Thursday, we are expecting some very strong, potentially damaging Santa Ana winds.

We'll be looking at 50, 60-mile-per-hour winds, 80-mile-per-hour winds.

Relative humidity values are going to drop to at least 10%.

Reporter: Any fire start could lead to rapid spread in these types of conditions.

Keegan: We just finished training in October.

We've done a bunch of tabletops, field drills, exercises, et cetera.

But we're T-ballers.

This was the World Series of Firefighting.

Marrone: In the past, I would have asked that they leave during the evacuation order.

Now, I'm asking that they stay, because they're going to be able to help us.

♪ [Wind whistling] Maiya: The forecast came true on January 7th, with wind speeds of up to 100 miles per hour.

A fire started by an arsonist on New Year's Day was thought to be extinguished by the LA Fire Department, until it emerged from the ground as fast-moving flames.

Man on radio: It is pushing directly towards Palisades.

This thing's got a wide path of travel already.

This was still all blue sky right here, and we were off the flank of the fire, and then the wind shifted just a little bit, and, boom, this first street was impacted by fire almost immediately.

Just in a few short minutes afterwards, it was almost nighttime here from how thick the smoke was.

[Over radio] Looks like the fire's gonna hit the back of these houses in about 5, 10 minutes.

Keegan: Next thing you know, there's sheriffs that are grabbing garden hoses and sheriffs grabbing fire hoses and helping put out spots.

It was just pure mayhem, honestly, and everybody's getting their teeth kicked in.

♪ Man: The plants in the front of the yard start catching on fire.

The bush on the side of the house starts catching on fire.

Well, hold up.

Man: All the smoke alarms in the neighborhood are going off.

[Smoke alarm beeping] Yeah, let's get out of here.

We tried.

We tried, bro.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, when this tree falls, it's over.

[Closing door] ♪ I'm sorry, bro.

We gotta get out of here.

♪ Oh, [beep]!

Man on radio: Incident from Operation.

Our mission right now is life safety.

EVAC is our concern.

Maiya: And then, just after 6 p.m., 30 miles away, the Eaton Fire starts in the hills above Altadena.

[Wind whistling] Man: Holy [beep]!

Response time from fire station 66 is probably two to three minutes.

Upon arrival, they had a large amount of fire pushing hard towards the nature center.

Maiya: At 6:36 p.m., helicopters arrive, but the winds are so violent that aerial firefighting is quickly grounded.

[Fire rumbling] Man over radio: We're going to have to shut down the water dropping operation.

From 6:18 that night until 6:00 the next morning, we had continuous 80-mile-an-hour gusts.

There's no stopping a fire that's getting pushed by an 80-mile-an-hour gust.

Maiya: Meanwhile, in Palisades, aerial efforts are grounded at 7:45.

Man over radio: Based on the wind conditions right now, we're ineffective, and we're not going to compromise safety.

Man: Copy to Traffic.

We lost the aircraft.

Maiya: Both fires swell in size, rapidly igniting thousands of homes.

♪ [Men yelling, wind blowing] It was chaos in the streets.

You had people trying to get out, burning power poles.

You had wires down.

Police department!

Evacuate immediately!

The smoke was so thick, and it was-- it was just raining embers.

[Fire rumbling] Man: Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Maiya: The fires continued to incinerate entire neighborhoods, until the winds subsided on January 8th.

All told, 16,000 homes and businesses burned down, and 31 people were killed in the fires.

♪ One year later, survivors are searching for ways to cope with the devastating loss and find hope.

♪ It's very different from when we were first here 10 months ago.

I mean, they've pretty much scraped most of the lots.

And I've even seen some houses almost rebuilt fully.

It's really encouraging to see.

Zaire.

Hey.

Maiya.

Pleasure meeting you.

Nice to meet you.

This is what it looks like when, uh... [Laughs] you lose everything.

Everything ends up in your trunk.

[Laughs] Some of my signs to put up... to... be clear on the neighborhood.

We are at my home.

And now I have to get to my childhood home, which I own this property also.

The house I grew up in my whole life, right here.

♪ This would have been the front yard.

This would have been the front porch stairs that you walk up.

Like, in my head, I can still see it.

I just want to walk up the steps right now.

I can see my mom's master bedroom.

Now I'm seeing just dirt and the remains of everything that's gone, everything that's lost, everything that... that we don't have anymore.

With my sister actually being buried, dying here, it is a graveyard.

I wouldn't wish it upon anybody to have to go through this type of pain.

♪ I didn't realize 80% of Black families own their homes here.

And I think not knowing how the community is gonna look moving forward is also playing into that feeling of despair.

It really is, because you take the fact that the homeowners are multigenerational.

So, you've got somebody whose parents might have bought their home in the '50s and the '60s, and then they've lived in the house, or they have sent... There's people at our church who might be seven family members all lost their homes.

So, it's not just losing your house, it's losing your community.

Maiya: Everyone we talked to made it clear that Altadena and Palisades were incredibly tight-knit communities, each in their own way.

I met Amy Bernstein, a rabbi from the Palisades who lost her home and has been overseeing the remediation of the smoke-damaged synagogue.

This is the sanctuary, and even before we started doing anything structurally to the sanctuary, all of this was in place, all of this scaffolding, just for remediation.

The building didn't burn, but the smoke has in it toxins, so from floors all the way up, everything has to be cleaned and treated or torn out.

What's really hard for me is that all of our elders are gone from the Palisades.

And for people whose homes are being remediated, some of them might come back.

Most of them are not gonna wait.

So, that entire part of our community is gone.

And it's really hard to know that I'm not gonna be there with them at the end, that I'm not gonna-- I'm not gonna hold their hand.

♪ Maiya: Of the 8,000 fires that burn in California each year, just a small handful move into urban communities.

But those fast-moving, super-destructive fires account for half of the homes burned in the state.

Because so much of the infrastructure is destroyed, rebuilding is often agonizingly slow.

And it's not just California.

Lahaina, they haven't built back just about anything yet.

So, literally, they're staying in portable housing, because they haven't been able to recover.

Paradise, seven years later, they're talking about 20%, 30% recovery, if that.

What happens when that recovery doesn't happen fast enough?

I have an almost two-year-old daughter, and I have an 85-year-old mother.

So, for them to actually experience Altadena, it can't be 10 years.

If you put 10 years on my mother, she has to be blessed to live to be 95.

If you're talking about my daughter, then she's 11 or 12.

So, she would have missed a whole childhood.

Maiya: And if recovery is too slow, people will leave and won't come back.

The community will disband.

It's a huge risk for this to take longer than two years.

And one major obstacle to recovery is insurance.

Almost everybody you talk to were drastically underinsured.

Many of us fell way short, way short.

And for some people, it ruined them.

They can't afford to rebuild, and their property is not worth anything close to what it was.

My house that was remodeled, that would have been worth probably 2.1 million with all the remodeling and everything, dream home, pool and all that, they sent me a check for $297,000.

[Laughs] ♪ Maiya: But one year after the fire, there is some good news.

Compared to similar fires, many parts of the rebuild are happening at record speed.

Lots have been cleared, and some homes are nearly rebuilt.

This fire recovery could be different than any other before it.

And it could create a model for how communities can adapt to a hotter, more fire-prone future.

Altadena is the backdrop.

We are JPL.

We're NASA.

We know how to get stuff done.

This house will be done within the next two or three months.

So, when we say, "Can it be done?"

This is proof.

We want to be the example of a real recovery, because it has not happened.

So many innovations that have come out of disaster, you know?

And why can't the rebuilding of Altadena be one of those things?

I mean, why not?

Maiya: But in order to build back stronger, it's important to understand what went wrong in the first place.

Wildfires used to be something that we could stop.

So, what's changed?

I'm a fire chief, and I'm not a scientist.

But when I look back over my career, I cannot deny that fire season is now longer.

I cannot deny that fires are harder to extinguish.

I'm not gonna argue what's causing the climate to change.

I'm here to tell you that I have a front-row seat to the results of this changing climate.

♪ Maiya: To understand the changes we're seeing today, we need to understand the past.

The early 1900s were hot and dry, and that didn't just cause the Dust Bowl.

There was also a lot of fire.

In fact, many researchers believe that there was more fire then than there is now.

♪ By the 1940s, firefighting had become professional and efficient, but wildfire was still a huge problem in the West.

Then, ocean currents shifted, bringing cooler, wetter conditions to much of the western U.S.

It also made fires far easier to fight.

♪ We had these incremental wet periods during the summer.

Incremental rains every week or two is just enough to tamp down fire behavior and support the fire managers to get out there and suppress those fires.

Maiya: And under these conditions, firefighting worked.

Acres burned per year plummeted.

♪ Chris Dunn: And that's the period of that great expansion.

We see communities expanding, we see the land utilization expanding, we've expanded our recreation resources, we've expanded our water infrastructure, we've expanded our power infrastructure, and we've expanded our timber bases under the expectation that that's sustainable into the future.

Maiya: And, most importantly, we expanded where we lived.

♪ But then, things changed again, and by the 1980s, the western US had left that cool, wet period.

The number of acres burned per year began to rise.

♪ But now, there are whole towns, cities, farms, and infrastructure filling our fire-prone areas.

♪ And now, we layer on top of that expansion the warmest year in human history.

On our current trajectory, the warming we've seen could double by the end of the century.

And this really matters when it comes to fire, because, as temperatures increase, the ability for the atmosphere to hold water vapor also increases, and it's exponential.

You can basically think of the atmosphere as a giant sponge that can absorb and then release water.

The warmer the atmosphere, the bigger the sponge.

And this has two effects-- First, when that moisture is released, it leads to more extreme precipitation.

But when conditions are dry, a thirstier atmosphere does the opposite.

It pulls moisture from the land, sucking water from plants and soil, creating the perfect conditions for fire to spread faster and burn hotter.

This dramatic shift between extremes is what some scientists call "weather whiplash."

In early 2025, during our original investigation, I met with climatologist Park Williams to learn how that whiplash played a big role in the LA Firestorm.

You can think of wildfire as being a light that is either on or off, but with fire, you can only turn on the light if you have four switches on at the same time.

Maiya: These switches include fuels, aridity, fire weather, like strong, dry winds, and ignition.

2023 and 2024 was extraordinarily wet.

Lots of new plants grew.

This is just a record of the greenness in coastal Southern California for the last 40 years.

And this past spring was near record high... Wow.

...meaning that, probably, we haven't seen fuel loads like this more than once or twice in the last four decades.

Wow!

And that was due to all of those atmospheric rivers that we saw rolling through California.

That's right.

And that leads us to the next ingredient, which is aridity.

This year has been an extraordinarily unlucky year so far.

Usually we get our first rain by sometime in October or November, and here we are in mid to late January, and we still haven't had our first rain.

The vegetation and structures are probably drier than we've seen anytime in the last 150 years, at least.

Another contributor to that is temperature.

Heat works to dry out fuels, because heat causes the atmosphere to be thirstier.

Another factor is wind, right?

That's right.

Now, this, though, is the middle of Santa Ana wind season.

Santa Anas are strongest and most common in December and January.

Usually, they can't drive fire, because, usually, everything's all wet by then.

What made this year extraordinary was the huge amount of fuel, the very, very dry conditions because of lack of precipitation, high temperatures, and then to cap it off, a really strong Santa Ana wind event.

And there is one more factor, which is ignition.

Yeah, that's right.

So, in coastal Southern California, when we have these fires going in Santa Ana wind events, essentially, all the fires were caused by people.

Lightning does not occur during these events.

Unfortunately, when conditions are this extreme and perfect for fire, it's almost inevitable that there is going to be an accidental spark somewhere, and those accidental sparks have a really easy time lighting very destructive fires under these crazy weather conditions.

It just seems like a perfect storm.

It has been a perfect storm, but this type of event is the type of event we expect to see more of in the future.

♪ Maiya: There are so many communities in California and beyond with the same level of risk.

Future fires are inevitable, but does the disaster have to be?

The Eden and Palisades fires had tragic origins that feel so preventable-- a power line ignition, an arson, and a failure to fully extinguish lingering embers.

We can and should address these root causes.

But where there are humans, there will be ignitions.

Campfires, fireworks, sparks from cars, trailers, and construction equipment, smoking, debris burning-- the list goes on.

All of these helped ignite major wildfires in recent years.

But, for nearly a century, we've been able to put out fires before they destroy communities.

Now, wildfires destroy a community almost every year.

So, what's changed?

Well, let's look at how wildland fire is different from a structure fire.

♪ When one home is burning, firefighters can usually deliver enough water to lower the temperature and stop the blaze.

But wildfires often spread across an area too large to deliver water fast enough, so their only chance is to get in front of the fire.

The primary tactic is to corral fires by creating an unburnable line around them.

You encircle the whole fire perimeter with a trail built to mineral soil-- nothing burnable there-- and then you start burning inside that line to kind of rob the wildfire of any fuel to burn.

Maiya: The overwhelming majority of wildfires are stopped quickly with a combination of hand tools, bulldozers, and air attack.

♪ The LA County Fire Department is one of the most elite fire suppression organizations in the world.

If anyone can put out a blaze before it reaches communities, it's them.

So, the threat in Los Angeles County, you know, I say that it's probably one of the most dangerous places around, because we get the kind of weather that very few places on the Earth get, coupled with the vegetation and the topography, the number of people that we have living here... Mike Sagely: Our air operation here is extremely demanding.

We have a complex aircraft.

We fly it single-pilot.

We fly it day, night, under night-vision goggle.

A very diverse and demanding environment that we operate on doing a very complex mission.

So when you see a fire that is moving towards homes, it definitely puts an added sense of urgency with what you're doing.

♪ There's, you know, over 100 cameras in the LA/Orange County areas.

They'll be able to pick up a little bit of smoke in a location and then get a response out really quick.

The conditions we can fly in and how much water we can drop is unparalleled to any other era of firefighting.

Maiya: Since 1983, an average of nearly 70,000 fires burn each year in the U.S.

Nearly 98% of them are controlled by firefighters before becoming large and destructive to human communities.

But dry, windy conditions change everything.

♪ Alkonis: If you haven't been in a wind-driven fire, day turns into night.

There's so much particle in the air, that you have no idea that it's daytime.

And you've got so many embers being tossed at 50 miles an hour, spotting about a mile in front of you.

And to think that you're gonna stop it by putting a hand line or putting a dozer quickly around it, it's not gonna happen.

Maiya: Strong winds blow embers over even the largest fire line, and even air operations become far less effective.

If it's so windy that the water literally isn't even really hitting the ground, then what are you doing, other than accepting a large level of risk?

Maiya: During the Eaton and Palisades fires, pilots supported the initial attack but were grounded because of strong, chaotic wind.

♪ Man over radio: All air resources are going to be clearing the incident.

Man 2: Branch 7 copies, aircraft is shut down.

[Beep] Extreme fire weather is expected to become more common in the future, and there are thousands of communities like the ones that burned down.

So, I want to know how we stop this type of disaster from ever happening again.

In my conversations with survivors, three questions keep coming up-- Could clearing vegetation beforehand have kept these fires out of communities?

How about more firefighters on duty?

Or would more water pressure in hydrants have made the difference?

I went to experts in each of those areas to find out.

So, we are actually on the way to meet with Bobby Garcia.

He is the Fire Chief of the Angeles National Forest.

You can see it straight ahead and around.

It's basically the mountainous area around LA.

And I really just want to ask him point blank, "Would more vegetation management have stopped the Palisades and Eaton fires?"

Maiya: In Southern California, vegetation management usually means removing shrubs and trees in hopes of slowing a fire down or making it less intense.

That often means cutting long lines or fuel breaks through wildland vegetation.

♪ Is vegetation management the most critical element in this particular scenario?

I don't think so.

In this scenario, the fire behavior was affected by fuels and topography, of course, but it was driven by the wind.

Maiya: Bobby told us that in wind-driven fires, embers can simply blow over fuel breaks.

And in this ecosystem, efforts to remove vegetation more broadly can lead to a new problem-- takeover by highly-flammable, often invasive grass.

Garcia: When we have seasonal drying occur in the natural vegetation, it's adapted to the fire environment.

It takes longer to cure to dry out.

When that all gets replaced with grasses and invasive species, as soon as the first week or two of summer weather hits, that vegetation is cured out, and it's ready to burn.

What you're saying is that it can actually lead to faster fires, more destructive fires, because of what grows in the place of the chaparral.

♪ So, I'm walking through the burned area right now, and you can see all around me what has grown back since the fire.

And I can definitely see how a fire would move very quickly through this type of environment.

These grasses are very dry, they're tightly packed... Man.

There's a clear role for active forest management, right?

And whether it's the objective of the ecosystem health or protecting communities, but there's limits to what that's going to provide, and almost to the point of a false sense of security.

Maiya: Anything that speeds fires up makes them more deadly and destructive to communities.

The extreme speed of these fires also helps answer the second question-- "Could we simply scale up the number of firefighters and firefighting resources?"

Sprengel: It was a wildland fire for probably about four to five minutes.

This fire burned straight downhill into structures and then started burning structure-to-structure.

♪ Once the homes start to burn, that scale, you've already lost.

♪ Fighting a structural fire, a first alarm, which is how firefighting resources are apportioned, is at least 15 firefighters for one house.

Four engines, a truck, and a BC is a general response.

♪ If one home is burning, any fire department anywhere can suppress that.

At 10 homes, we now need 150 firefighters.

If we're going to effectively go in and-- no kidding-- put that fire out, we need 150 firefighters, and we need them right now.

Because fire-- the growth curve is exponential.

Using this math, to protect the first wave of homes from burning in Palisades, you would need every firefighter in the LA region to respond within minutes.

By the time the Eaton fire moved into Altadena, you would likely need every firefighter in California.

If I could have had every engine in LA County, I couldn't have stopped this.

Once you have urban conflagration, structure-to-structure fire transmission, then all of the things we are talking about from a wildland setting are no longer effective, because we're in a fundamentally different fire.

The building itself, the structure can sustain a longer ignition compared to a tree.

A tree can burn for, I don't know, a minute or two.

A structure can burn for an hour.

When we have dense neighborhoods, we have more cars, we have more fences, we have more sheds.

Maiya: In this scenario, fires become unstoppable.

Emergency response shifts from firefighting to an all-out race to save lives.

And that's exactly what happened in LA.

♪ The priority was rescue.

So, we're going to take care of life first, and then save property as we can.

The conditions were so bad, that I couldn't see the end of my hood.

I had two hands come across my hood.

Put on my brakes.

It was a middle-aged lady, and she says, "My dad is trapped in the house.

He can't get out."

So we immediately ran up to the house, grabbed him, got him out to my vehicle.

And our fire personnel and our law enforcement personnel went on calls for service like that all through the night.

[Keys jangling] Police Department!

Maiya: While assisting with evacuations in Pacific Palisades was the first priority for Keegan and the Community Fire Brigade, they also spent time doing last-minute preparations on homes, clearing flammable items away from structures and extinguishing spot fires before they could ignite homes.

But this was a decision that Keegan still grapples with.

Somebody died on PCH.

Somebody died up Lost Forest.

Somebody died in Big Rock.

Did we help a couple of structures survive?

Maybe.

How do you-- How do you measure the importance of structures versus lives?

I just keep going that over my mind is, how much time am I willing to wager prepping and doing triage with time that I could be trying to convince another person to leave?

In that moment, where you're trying to get people out, you're seeing people's homes get destroyed.

I mean, what's going through your mind?

I live in the community.

My kids go to school in the community.

Um... and I'm assistant chief here for the community.

It's heartbreaking.

It's heartbreaking.

Why didn't we get to that one person's house where that person died?

And that's, like-- that's the really heavy part.

♪ With fires this fast, resources were strained, and saving lives was the priority.

But I've heard over and over that firefighters ran out of water.

So, would more water pressure have changed the outcome?

Man over radio: Our folks are starting to report that they're running out of water.

We have also lost water.

We have no water supply.

Why was there no water in the hydrants?

They can't fight a fire without water.

There's a reservoir that had 10 million gallons of water, supposedly, and firefighters and a hydrant right here, and fire engines with people with hoses.

The firefighter looked at him and said, "Sir, we have no water."

And all of these units burned.

Maiya: But there was one community that didn't lose water pressure during the fires.

I wanted to know if their water manager could help us understand what made the difference.

This is the top of our system.

Okay.

So, this is the highest water tank in the district.

And the fire ignition point was over the hill over there.

How many gallons is this thing?

This is half a million gallons.

This was built after '93 with fire and other hazards in mind.

Right.

It's steel.

It's got a steel roof, defensible space, just like around your house.

Having half a million gallons at the top of your system in a gravity-fed system is critical to have it available for the fire.

The water system is a community asset.

And so, they made the decision after '93 to invest in it, and that paid off now, but it costs money.

Maiya: The community of Kinneloa also added backup pumps and mobile generators to harden the system, and it operated normally.

There were some system failures, like a wood roof tank burning in Altadena, but once homes started to burn, the problems in Palisades and Altadena were much bigger than hardening could fix.

If a bunch of homes have already burned, each one has at least a three-quarter-inch domestic supply that is now open and is flowing up to 23 gallons per minute per house that have been destroyed.

Maiya: That means in order to keep water pressure strong, the system would need an unprecedented level of water storage high above the community.

♪ I could multiply my supply by 100.

It would cost a billion dollars.

But beyond that, now I'm gonna be fighting water quality issues every day, because I'm going to have stagnant water.

Maiya: Tom likened this water supply to a coffee shop that normally serves 300 cups per day.

It would quickly be overwhelmed if someone ordered 40,000 cups.

They could scale up their shop, employees, and supplies by 100 times, but they would have to charge over $100 per cup to pay for that standby capacity.

If this would solve the problem, you could make a case that the cost is worth it, but timelines just don't match up.

If we're in the point of a fire where homes have already begun to burn, we're already in an urban fire, we essentially need an engine or engines assigned to each house with their own hydrant.

And once those initial blocks of homes begin to burn, that fire is going to burn until the wind stops.

There is one chance to prevent that fire from becoming an urban conflagration.

Maiya: And the first reports of water pressure loss in Palisades were eight hours into the fire.

So, by the time water was an issue, hundreds, maybe even thousands of homes were burning.

You could spend billions and billions of dollars doing vegetation management, increasing the number of firefighters, increasing water supplies, and you would still have the same outcome that we saw in Altadena and the Palisades.

What firefighters need more of in order to prevent wildland fire from transitioning to urban fire is time.

Maiya: But how do we give them more time during that crucial window?

So, you've been through quite the transformation since the Woolsey Fire.

Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

During the Woolsey Fire and directly after, I was that uninformed resident that was frustrated, angry, and I was the one that was out there yelling at the fire chief, saying that they should have done something different or better.

And then I stumbled on Jack Cohen.

That was the, like, "Aha!"

shift for me.

Keegan: There goes Jack.

Man: Get some good video?

Keegan: Got Jack running into the smoke.

[Helicopter whirring] Jack Cohen: I became a research scientist, a fire scientist, in 1976.

I've been doing fire since as long as I can remember.

♪ From my standpoint, one of the major contributions to the research that I've done is to redefine this problem.

The main point here is that it's a home ignition problem, not a wildfire control problem.

[Fire rumbling] The big problem with us defining wildland urban fire disasters as a wildfire problem is that we focus on and put all of our energy into attempting to eliminate the wildfire to begin with instead of taking the opportunity to be more practically effective with regard to changing the ignitability of the thing that gets destroyed, which are the structures.

♪ Maiya: What Jack discovered is that the way a wildfire enters a community isn't through a wall of flames, but something much... smaller.

Jack: Well, as it turns out, we're talking about a burning ember landing on the structure and the debris that maybe is in the-- in the rain gutters and igniting that debris that then puts flame on the eaves that then spreads into the attic of the house and totally consumes the house.

Maiya: And with that, Jack created the modern understanding of how fire enters communities.

He found the mechanism that burns houses and how wind creates so many ignitions.

We have large ember production.

Researcher: Thousands of embers.

Park: Embers the size of golf balls.

So many embers spotting, you know, in advance of the fire.

Jack: So we had to do experiments where we could generate a blizzard of burning embers on a full-scale house and then begin to experiment with where the ignitions occur and see if a specific design was vulnerable to ignition from burning embers.

♪ Maiya: And a few years ago, I visited the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety to see one of these ember experiments in person.

So, we're in the main chamber, right?

Yeah.

What makes this place so cool?

This is the only place on this planet that we can test full-scale buildings and then add fire to them.

And this is how you generate the wind?

Correct.

We have 105 fans here.

Wow.

And we have the capability to generate a real hurricane.

Just how fast can these winds blow?

So, we can go up to 120, 125-miles-an-hour wind.

Yeah, you don't want to be in the chamber when the fans are on.

What we have here is a mock test building.

Half of it is wildfire resistant, and the other half of it is more traditional building structure.

And here in the wind chamber, we're going to shoot embers at it.

And when they come and impact the building, we're going to see the difference in wildfire-resistant building and non-wildfire-resistant building and how they perform to that ember exposure.

[Over loudspeaker] Fans are on.

We're about to start generator starter procedures.

Man: Control room ready.

[Beep] Copy.

Test starts 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Generators on.

[Beep] All right, all crews are going.

[Beep] ♪ ♪ [Blowing] ♪ Maiya: These experiments identified the most important steps to hardening homes and stop wildfires from becoming urban conflagrations.

The stats show that the majority of the loss, maybe up to 90% in wildfire-prone areas, are because of embers.

Basically, when embers accumulate around the buildings, it ignites the recipient fuel, and, well, the recipient fuels becomes flames.

The flame near the structure is the recipe for disaster.

And the wind is, like, blowing these embers around.

Exactly.

We're not talking about 100 or 200 embers.

We are literally talking about thousands of embers hitting the wall, falling at the base of the wall, and then if there is any combustible in that area, that's fair game.

Maiya: In order to protect your home from embers, there's a lot that you can and should do.

But there's a few very simple, very effective steps that you can start with.

You have to have a class-A, non-combustible roof.

That's non-negotiable.

That said, there are very few non-class-A roofs left.

Number two is you have to have ember-resistant vents.

If the vents are not ember-resistant, either 1/8th or finer mesh, embers will find the void spaces, and it won't matter how many other mitigations are placed.

And the third thing is you have to have Zone 0, five foot of non-combustible, inclusive of wooden fences.

If you have those three, I think that's the baseline.

Maiya: But once homes in an urban area are burning, is this enough?

♪ So, when the first building ignites and when we add wind to this, the flame stretches and tilts down.

When the distance between the structures is shorter than the flame length, basically, we are holding a blowtorch on our homes.

And the heat, the flux put off by a burning home far exceeds anything you see in a wildland setting, both in the peak temperatures and the time.

A home burns for a long time.

Maiya: Since the LA fires, Dave has been working on a groundbreaking new approach to protect homes from fire at the community level.

One or two homes being hardened is irrelevant.

It needs to be a critical mass at the critical location in order to be effective.

Maiya: He and his team can now identify the most likely places for a wildland fire to transition to an urban conflagration.

That being the area where there is alignment between topography, fuel, and weather that support the fastest-moving fire spread, and that those areas should be prioritized for mitigation actions because they will have the greatest potential return on investment.

It would be better if everyone did everything everywhere, but that's not the environment we live in.

Maiya: And even in extreme fire conditions, these strategic home-hardening steps can work.

It does not matter if the winds are high and your firefighting aircraft are grounded.

It does not matter if there are multiple fires causing firefighting resources to be diverted.

Because they significantly increase the time it takes for a vegetative fire to transition into the built environment, they give your firefighters a greater probability of success.

Faraz: We can't stop wildfires.

That's correct, we cannot do that.

But we can stop conflagration.

We can bend down the risk curves by using these mitigation strategies that we don't see Altadena completely wiped out.

That's something that I am sure we can do.

Maiya: We have the science to prevent homes from burning down.

The challenge is getting homes in the most strategic locations prepared before the next fire starts.

And until that happens, insurance is likely to be a frustrating and expensive process.

In 2018, most of the town of Paradise, California burnt to the ground.

Many residents rebuilt their homes to high standards, only to discover their new homes were impossible to insure.

In 2022, we started seeing astronomical rates.

My policy went from 2,500 to 12,000.

Had a friend go to 21,000, another 30,000 annually, for a home that's built to these high standards, has no plants around it.

So, it was making us all a little crazy.

Maiya: So, Jen reached out to the Institute for Business and Home Safety to learn how residents could qualify for the Wildfire Prepared Home certificate to help get insurance.

Jen: They said most people fail at Zone 0.

So, we decided perhaps we become the resource, right?

So, in early 2024, we came up with this new Gravel Grant Program.

[Truck beeping] Maiya: We visited Paradise on a Community Action Day to see volunteers spreading gravel to create an unburnable 5-foot buffer around people's homes.

Jen: Here's our homeowner, brand-new home, built to code, right?

She has no homeowner's insurance.

So, the goal is actually to get her the Wildfire Prepared Home certificate, because next month, another insurance company is coming and says, "If you have that, here's standard insurance."

Maiya: Even with these extra steps to comply, many homeowners are still left uninsured.

So, will LA be able to avoid these insurance struggles?

Right now, I'm worried, and my neighbors are worried that even if we rebuild, is it even insurable?

And is that insurance going to be affordable?

Or are we going to be priced out?

Maiya: I wanted to check back in with survivors to learn about their rebuild process.

We are at my home.

It burned down in the fires in January, and we're now at the scraped, cleared-out lot.

And so, these are the plans of the house that's gonna be here.

I really wanted to incorporate things that will really make our home resilient against potential future fires, like having metal roofs.

We have kind of a six-inch non-combustible region here at the bottom of the house, and just every must-have was all about fire-hardening the house.

And it gives me a lot more confidence, especially as you build back and you think, "Is this gonna be insurable?"

At least if I'm grounded in some standard, I will give insurance companies no choice but to make my house insurable.

Maiya: Even if you do everything right, there are no guarantees.

Many insurers are still reeling from the billions of dollars in wildfire losses over the last decade.

As the risk increases, they raise premiums, leave the state, or face bankruptcy.

I met with Keegan to try to understand what the path forward looks like.

Over the last seven years since we lost my parents' house, I've just been trying to understand the problem as a whole.

But what exactly is the problem?

People who actually do the work in terms of the mitigation at their home to prevent their home from burning down, they're not getting rewarded, because people are still getting dropped after doing the work.

I definitely have the perception that insurance is just out to get you.

Yeah.

And I think that's just kind of, like the wider narrative around insurance.

Traditionally, they've been the boogeyman and it's just, like, a horrible industry that they're trying to take advantage of people.

But the bottom line is that I think we need to understand what the tool is of passing our risk as homeowners and as a community off to somebody else.

We all have the same goal, right?

Nobody wants their communities to burn down.

Well, they are worried about their bottom line.

Yeah, of course.

This is gonna help their bottom line, but... Their bottom line means that houses aren't burning.

And they can start adequately pricing what the risk is and how to encourage people to mitigate it.

Right, and so we need to create a model to show insurers, to show homeowners, to show the community, "Hey, we can both work together here where we're all winning," right?

And the stakes are high.

The world's top economists have deep concerns about the viability of the insurance market in California and across the U.S.

Both banks and insurance companies are pulling out of areas, coastal areas, or areas where there are a lot of fires.

So, what that is going to mean is that, you know, if you fast forward 10 or 15 years, there are going to be regions of the country where you can't get a mortgage, there won't be ATMs, there won't-- the banks won't have branches, and things like that.

Maiya: Keegan had the opportunity to meet with Pete Walther, CEO of the largest insurance broker in the world.

Pete, thank you so much for coming out.

It really means a lot.

And, frankly, like, when we go out and do assessments in people's homes, to be able to have that relationship with you guys, to be able to say, "Hey, look," like, "Do the work, you're gonna get rewarded."

Well, I gotta tell you, the work that you are doing personally and with the Brigade is some of the most inspired work I've seen.

In 1980, we used to have a billion dollar-plus insured event every 83 days.

In 2024, it was every 11 days.

Wow.

We know the built environment that we live in today was built for yesterday's climate.

Our job is to bring you scale and to also be a bridge for you and the community members to the insurance companies.

And I think the more we can get people in sync, working together, I think we're gonna build really resilient communities across the state.

Maiya: Keegan told us that he believes the only way to solve this problem is to prepare homes at scale.

Similar hardening can be done in other regions for hurricanes, tornadoes, even hail.

And collaborating with the insurance industry to reduce risk and cost may be the best way to achieve it.

But how did the homes that were prepared before this fire fare?

One of our big goals, Tyler and I's big goal, was, what if we could get out there, assess and mitigate a bunch of houses in an area that is going to burn at some point?

To document it, and then for a fire to come through, and for those houses to survive on their own accord.

And we have several stories of places that we went to a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, did assessments with homeowners that were willing to do the work, that did the work, and sure enough, the houses survived on their own accord.

Maiya: Keegan took me to one of the houses that he helped prepare.

So, the first house is right up here on this driveway.

Okay, cool.

And we'll go walk up there.

Right-- literally right next to it.

I'm assuming this was a house-- that looks like it was a house that completely burned down.

Yeah, so there was actually three houses in this driveway... Oh, wow.

...that burned down, and then this is the fourth.

And it's on slope, about 30 years of fuel coming off the back of this.

And it saw extreme fire behavior, no doubt.

This home is kind of the perfect quintessential example of somebody going and doing the work and the house surviving on its own accord.

This is crazy.

So, this is a house that's still standing.

You said there were three other homes on this lot and in this driveway that completely burned down.

Maiya: These homeowners didn't implement all of the home-hardening measures recommended by IBHS, but they did take the three most critical steps-- roof, vents, and Zone 0.

♪ Keegan: Doing home hardening is not sexy.

It's not like a cool thing that people are posting on their Instagram and talking about to their friends-- "Oh, check this out, I put on this 16th-inch mesh over my vents," right?

Big events like this, there is nothing you can do.

There's nothing I can do.

There's nothing the best resources in the world can do.

Yeah, sure, they can save a few structures here and there.

But the only way to scale is to do that long-term preparation through home mitigation, full stop.

♪ ♪ Maiya: Just a couple doors down from Rabbi Amy's synagogue, the Presbyterian church burned to the ground.

Now, Amy and Pastor Grace are coming together to imagine a new future.

We're so tired of the energy it takes to muddle through all the crap we have to muddle through.

Yeah.

And plan and tear down and clean.

Insurance... Insurance and forms and calls and follow-up and I'm hoping the one-year anniversary will actually serve for a lot of us as a way to mark a year... honor... Yes.

...everything that's happened in that year.

We're still here, and we are together in a way we never have been before, and we will come through this.

♪ Coming to get my mail, it's saying I'm still home.

This is still my house.

I still live here.

♪ They said the lots would take two years just to clear the lots.

The lots were all cleared in six months.

So it's the same philosophy.

"Hey, if the lots can be cleared in six months, we can be built back in two years."

This is a hopeful situation.

I am putting systems in place, so for future disasters, I can give a blueprint.

Maiya: What happened in LA was a tragedy, one of the worst in our country's history.

But it also gives us a rare opportunity to understand why these fires happened, why they were so destructive, and what we can do to keep other communities from burning as our world grows hotter and weather gets wilder.

A year later, one thing feels clearer than ever.

We do have the science to protect people and homes.

Fire doesn't have to destroy communities the way that it did here.

For me, the biggest takeaway is that wildfire-prepared homes are the key to keeping communities safe.

It'll take commitment and collaboration, but I met incredible people in LA who are already doing the work, proof that real progress is possible.

We can build more resilient communities and reverse the trend of fire disasters.

The solutions exist.

Now we have to act on them before the next firestorm.

♪