Rebuild:LA

Send us Fan Mail Months after the Palisades and Eaton Fires swept through Los Angeles County, many people are still struggling emotionally. So much so, that California Assemblymember John Harabedian has introduced legislation that would require insurance companies, as part of disaster claims, to cover up to 12 sessions with a mental health professional. This week, we talk to Dr. Veronica Viesca ab...

Send us Fan Mail For 30 years, the aerial firefighters of Quebec have had an agreement with California. When we call for help, they come. Pascal Duclos is the Chief Pilot of an elite firefighting force called the Quebec Scoopers. They fly a unique aircraft, the CL415, which was designed and built in Canada to do one thing - drop water on wildfires. And that's exactly what Duclos and his team...

Send us Fan Mail The second half of our conversation with Jon Brown brings him out of the ashes of the Palisades Fire, and right into a property fight with the owners of the mobile home park where he lived with his wife and two young kids. The Palisades Bowl was one of the last rent controlled neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and when the Palisades Fire swept through, nearly 400 people were left home...

Send us Fan Mail Jon Brown is one of the 400 residents of the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Home Park that no longer has a neighborhood to go home to. All 170+ homes are gone, flattened by the Palisades Fire. Jon joins host Cameron Barrett for a two-part conversation about how he and his young family escaped the fire. But Jon’s story is bigger than just running from the fire. In fact, the fire was...

Send us Fan Mail Cameron Barrett’s guest this episode of Sean Scott, a contractor by trade, and the author of a book you want to get on your shelf as soon as possible. The Red Guide to Recovery is a spiral bound Bible for homeowner who is navigating a disaster, whether that’s something as personal a a burst pipe, or as catastrophic as the Eaton or Palisades Fires. It’s even a terrific resource for...

Send us Fan Mail So much has been written and said about the Palisades Fire, that it sometimes is confounding how the “other” fire that burned through a community in LA County in early January, goes unmentioned. The Eaton Fire started within hours of the Palisades Fire. It came roaring out of Eaton Canyon, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, just 20 miles northeast of downtown LA, and d...

Send us Fan Mail Jim Kniss makes his living flying over wildfires, making GIS and infrared maps for firefighters. It's all pretty cutting edge technology. But what he's most passionate about is a little more old school. He's working to get Beacon Boxes into rural neighborhoods in fire-prone areas of California. He and the team at FireMapper, LLC have already installed dozens in Beve...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Chris Potter calls it VERM, or vegetation ember index. He’s an earth scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, and he’s developed a new mapping product that shows VERM areas. And VERM areas are those places most vulnerable to fire. In other words, he and his research team are predicting the next place a destructive wildfire will strike. The product is free be...

Send us Fan Mail Monday, March 31, 2025 (an extended date) is an important deadline if you’ve been effected by the Eaton or Palisades fires. That’s when you have to register for FEMA benefits if you’ve had losses. It’s also the deadline to register for SBA loans from the Federal Government. These are the kinds of details Joel Wish and his disaster recovery experts make sure their clients don’t mis...

Send us Fan Mail Sue Pascoe, her husband, and their two dogs evacuated the Palisades Fire on January 7, 2025 with a couple of overnight bags and the dogs' food bowls. They'd evacuated plenty of times before. This would be like the last few times. They'd be back home the next day. But by the next day, her home was gone. Like thousands of other families, the Pascoes lost everything. S...

Send us Fan Mail Nearly two months after wildfires swept through the communities of Pacific Palisades and Altadena, the dust and ash have settled. People are now taking stock of what they have and whether they’ll be able to rebuild. Can they afford what they once had? Should they build back bigger? Smaller? Should they build back at all? In this episode we talk to homebuilding innovator Alexis Riv...

Send us Fan Mail The National Fire Protection Association has been creating fire code in American since the late 1800's. We have the NFPA to thank for fire sprinklers in apartment buildings and fire doors in high rise buildings. In the 1980's, the NFPA realized that wildfires were igniting in unusual places in North America, and they decided to do something about it. They wanted to &quot...

Send us Fan Mail 5,000 Los Angeles school children were affected by the Palisades and Eaton Fires. That's a lot of kids who either lost their homes, or their schools, or both. Cameron Barrett asks licensed children and family therapist Chloe Canton to help explain the trauma kids are going through right now, how to spot the warning signs of children in crisis, and what we can do to help kids...

Send us Fan Mail Rich Thompson is an incident meteorologist (IMET) with the National Weather Service, which means he predicts weather during disasters to help first responders during the active phase of an incident. He was on the ground during the Palisades Fire and describes the conditions in early January as a "once in a career" weather event. He chatted with Cameron Barrett about what...

Send us Fan Mail Councilmember John Lee of Los Angeles' CD #12 sits down with Cameron Barrett to talk about his district's recovery efforts in the wake of the January fires, how he plans on managing the independent investigation into the Palisades Fire as the head of the Public Safety Committee, and so much more in this episode of Rebuild:LA. Resources: Councilmember John Lee - https://c...

Send us Fan Mail Eunisses Hernandez is the Councilmember representing District #1 in the City of Los Angeles. Her constituents live miles from both the Palisades and the Eaton Fires. No one in Council District #1 lost a home to fire. But many have lost jobs, employers, and even clean air to breathe. Host Cameron Barrett sits down with Hernandez to discuss the ripple effects of the fires that have...

Send us Fan Mail We mark the month anniversary of the January firestorms with our first survivor story. Cameron Barrett sat down with retired Superior Court Judge, Justice Tricia Bigelow. She barely had time to evacuate her Pacific Palisades home, but was chased from two more places she had gone to seeking shelter, as the Palisades Fire kept advancing. This is her incredible story. Resources: Make...

Send us Fan Mail Greg Doyle has been shooting photographs of wildfires for the last 12 years. His works has been featured in fire magazines and websites, including www.wildfirela.org. It's safe to say that in those 12 years, Greg has never been as busy as he has been this past January. In fact, the last four months have seen him driving all over Southern California, documenting some of the mo...

Send us Fan Mail When homeowners who lost everything in the Eaton and Palisades Fires called their insurance companies, some of them had a rude awakening, adding more misery to families who had already lost nearly everything they owned. What happens when you lose your home to wildfire? Do you have enough insurance? Can you even get enough insurance in California in 2025? What about your mortgage?...

Send us Fan Mail Linnea Edmeier sits down with host Cameron Barrett, to bring us her story from thousands of feet above the Palisades Fire. Edmeier is the Public Information Officer for CAL FIRE's Aviation Unit, and was deployed to the Palisades Fire. There she recorded the conflagration, keeping tabs on the dozens of flights in the air night and day as thousands of firefighters battled one o...

Send us Fan Mail For the last 30 years, Madeline Bernstein has been fighting the good fight to help rescue, shelter, and find forever homes for the pets of Los Angeles. She is the president of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. During the Palisades Fire in January 2025, Madeline evacuated twice. Each time she quickly gathered her belongings, and her mo...

Send us Fan Mail In the first episode of the Safe Community Project's Rebuild:LA, we talk with MySafe:LA Executive Officer David Barrett about how his non-profit is helping HOAs, neighborhoods and individual homeowners find ways to make their houses safer from wildfires. As Los Angeles begins to rebuild in the wake of the Palisades and Eaton Fires, MySafe:LA is offering a path forward to make...