Rebuild:LA

Send us Fan Mail Oscar Hood is trying to stop a Palisades Fire from happening in Orange County. As the County Coordinator for Wildfire Prevention and the Government and External Affairs Analyst for the Irvine Ranch Conservancy, he’s managing over 40,000 acres of open space in one of California’s smallest, yet most populous counties. How is he and his team working to keep wildfire at bay in the OC?...

Send us Fan Mail It’s like a Zamboni for firefighting. We’re talking about BurnBot’s RX2, and if you haven’t seen video of it in action, make sure to click on the resource link below. The company brought together two widely different California realities - Silicon Valley technological innovation, and the ever-increasing risk from wildfires. This week on Rebuild:LA, host Cameron Barrett talks to th...

Send us Fan Mail In 2017 Jennifer Gray Thompson found herself living in her car with her dogs after evacuating from the Tubbs Fire in Sonoma County. The experience made her feel alone, lost, and unable to navigate back to the life she had enjoyed before she came face to face with a deadly mega fire. Her solution? The creation of After the Fire, a non-profit that has become a leading resource for c...

Send us Fan Mail The Palisades and Eaton Fires destroyed a lot of history. Will Rogers’s ranch home, Pasadena Waldorf School, Robert Bridges House, The Bunny Museum, Andrew McNally House, Theater Palisades, and The Zane Gray Estate are just a few of the thousands of structures lost in the fires. They all were touchstones in the communities where they were located. What does their loss mean to the...

Send us Fan Mail When you’ve been in the California fire service for 48 years, like Chief Kim Zagaris, you’re likely to take a long view of how we’re doing when it comes to wildfire response. Chief Z as many know him, was State Fire and Rescue Chief for the State of California, Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) until just a few years ago,, when he retired and become the Wildfire Po...

Send us Fan Mail There have always been people who have stayed behind to try to protect their homes during a wildfire. It happened in the Palisades and in Altadena this January. As always, there were varying results. Some claimed to have saved their homes and even those of their neighbors. Others may have lost their lives trying. It’s never been a thing any emergency services department, or any pr...

Send us Fan Mail This week social scientist Aimery Thomas of the Future Organization joins Cameron Barrett to talk about ARISE - Altadena Resident Impact Survey and Evaluation. It’s a report he and his partner compiled after they surveyed 1,200+ Altadena residents in the wake of the Eaton Fire. The results are as fascination as they are disturbing, uncovering a web of neglect in fire prevention, e...

Send us Fan Mail Our conversation this week is with Palisades Fire survivor Kari Weaver, who lost her home in the alphabet streets. It’s been 8 months since that windy, dry Tuesday morning, January 7, when the Palisades Fire started in the highlands. And it was only a few hours later that the Eaton Fire came roaring out of Eaton Canyon and wiped out much of Altadena. A lot has happened in those ei...

Send us Fan Mail California Senator Ben Allen is our guest this week, squeezing our interview into his jammed legislative schedule. Allen grew up in Santa Monica and represents California Senate District #24, which includes his hometown, as well as Malibu and the Pacific Palisades, two communities devastated by January’s Palisades Fire. This week he’s in Sacramento presenting legislation to help r...

Send us Fan Mail The death toll from the January Firestorms has climbed to 31 with the discovery in late June of the remains of Juan Francisco Espinoza, a 74-year-old man who didn’t escape the Eaton Fire when it raged through Altadena. The discovery of yet another victim six months after the fires makes it clear that we need to start working together to get wildfire evacuations right. Last week, i...

Send us Fan Mail This week is the first half of another conversation we’re stretching over two episodes, and that’s because of the complexity of what we’re discussing - evacuation. Why didn’t it work in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena when wildfires raged through both communities this January? Why does the death toll for the fires keep rising? Los Angeles County Sheriff’s just recently identifi...

Send us Fan Mail This week Cameron Barrett sits down with two Fire Chiefs who have just completed projects in their respective homes to give them the best chance of making it through a wildfire. Chief Frank Bigelow is CAL FIRE’s Deputy Director of Community Wildfire Preparedness and Mitigation. Chief Jose de Jesus Lopez is a retired Assistant Chief for Los Angeles County Fire Department, and curre...

Send us Fan Mail Part II of our conversation with State Fire Marshal Daniel Berlant finds us tackling one of the most contentious topics in wildfire prevention - Zone Zero. The state is still trying to define exactly what Zone Zero will entail, but homeowners are already filling social media and text strings with nightmares of having to create moonscapes of bare dirt around their homes to qualify...

Send us Fan Mail This week is the first of a two-part conversation with State Fire Marshal Daniel Berlant. He leads the wildfire prevention and preparedness efforts for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE). California is home to nearly 40 million people, who live all over the 164-thousand square acres of land that make up the state. The third-largest state in the co...

Send us Fan Mail It’s been six months since the firestorms of January tore through the communities of Pacific Palisades and Altadena. The worst wildfire disaster in Los Angeles history, the Palisades Fire killed 12 people, destroyed 6,837 structures and burned 23,448 acres. The Eaton Fire was even more destructive, killing 18 people, destroying 9,000 structures and burning 14,021 acres. Six months...

Send us Fan Mail What if saving California’s chaparral ecosystem means we’d be protecting California communities from wildfires? Richard Halsey, the founder of the California Chaparral Institute, says our state’s most abundant biome, chaparral, actually protects our communities from widespread wildfire disasters. And he says the more the state mandates the clearance of native habitats like the cha...

Send us Fan Mail MySafe:LA's Wildfire Fair took place this past Sunday at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. Our non-profit organized the event to help residents have a one-stop solution to finding wildfire information and products. The fair featured 25 booths where attendees could learn about a wide array of products from spray-on fire retardants, to emergency vests pre-lo...

Send us Fan Mail Our guest this week is Silvio Lanzas, the former Fire Chief for the City of Glendale, and the current Chief Operating Officer for the fire retardant manufacturer M-Fire. The company produces and applies a product called AF31 that is water-based and food-grade, and can be sprayed on houses, car batteries, and whole forests. It was invented more than 30 years ago in the UK, it’s mad...

Send us Fan Mail Five months after the Eaton Fire came charging out of the wildland and destroyed much of the historic city of Altadena, there are still hundreds of families who haven’t been able to return home or start the long process of recovering. This week’s guest says there is a correlation between a family’s insurance carrier, and their ability to recover their lives and rebuild their futur...

Send us Fan Mail In this week’s Episode host Cameron Barrett interviews software developer Jason Brooks who took his experience surviving the Tubbs Fire that destroyed Santa Rose in 2017, as inspiration to design an app that has helped more than a million people make their homes safer from wildfire. Brooks’ app, Fire Aside, is now being used by dozens of municipalities in more than half a dozen st...

Send us Fan Mail In 2020 California passed AB 3074, which established Zone Zero - an ember-resistant zone within five feet of homes in High and Very High Fire Severity Zones (HFHSZ and VHFHSZ). The law was never implemented because the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection needed to identify exactly what would be allowed and not allowed in Zone Zero. Two things have happened recently. 1. The...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is a thought leader and non-profit founder Spencer Glendon, who we met last week in part one of our discussion on how climate change is making our lives riskier, and forcing us to rethink where and how we live. The Palisades and Eaton Fires are just two examples of that increased risk. Glendon brings his expertise in Engineering, and Economics, as well as his exp...

Send us Fan Mail This week’s guest is a thought leader taking on the daunting task of teaching people about climate change and how best to adapt to it. Spencer Glendon is the founder of Probable Futures, a non-profit that is helping businesses and communities understand that our weather is no longer something we can rely on, but instead is causing increased risk to our safety. The Palisades and Ea...

Send us Fan Mail Dante Cornejo is MySafe:LA’s wildfire coordinator for Los Angeles County and is host Cameron Barrett’s guest this week. Dante has done assessments on hundreds of homes as part of his work, evaluating the wildfire risk of residences all over the County.  In this episode, he talks about those assessments, and list things you can do today, even if you don’t have a lot of time or mone...

Send us Fan Mail When the Palisades Fire ripped through Los Angeles, the Department of Recreation and Parks got to work on myriad fronts. Park Rangers, who are actually trained in wildland firefighting, battled dozens of smaller spot fires in parks all over the city that day. Rec and Parks facilities re-invented themselves as evacuation sites and shelters for displaces residents. And two equestria...