Rebuild:LA

Send us Fan Mail This week's show is a visual feast for anyone who loves native plants or wants to learn more about them. Host Cameron Barrett tours a micro-forest in Northeast Los Angeles, located in Ascot Hills Park, with micro-forest designer and native plant horticulturalist Katherine Pakradouni. The micro-forest is living proof that Los Angeles's native wildlands no longer contain t...

Send us Fan Mail This week we wrap up our series on wildfire evacuation with another harrowing story of survival. Caroline Nick, her husband, and her kids fled the Palisades Fire in January 2025. They thought they had time, but ended up dead-stopped in traffic as the fire crept closer. They abandoned both cars and made a run for it up Pacific Coast Highway. You’ll hear her conversation with host C...

Send us Fan Mail This week, we continue our series on evacuation when host Cameron Barrett chats with Palisades Fire Survivor Erin Kyle Osborne. When Erin evacuated on January 6, 2025, she had packed the car with her daughter, her daughter’s friend, the cats, and a few precious things she had time to grab. But the minute she hit Palisades Parkway, she joined thousands of others trying to flee. Tur...

Send us Fan Mail In this week's Rebuild:LA, we begin a series on wildfire evacuation. After the panic that ensued as thousands of residents tried to evacuate from the Palisades and Eaton Fires in January 2025, Los Angeles County fire departments turned to technology for help. Host Cameron Barrett talks to the Glendale Fire Department's Community Risk Reduction Officer to learn what mobil...

Send us Fan Mail The California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection has withdrawn its Zone Zero emergency regulation package from the California Office of Administrative Law (OAL). The Board later said the withdrawal is procedural and that it's working through technical edits and questions with the OAL. The Board expects to make changes and resubmit the regulations. But no one has shared a...

Send us Fan Mail Last week, state legislators wrapped up their session and sent several bills to Governor Gavin Newsom's desk, all aimed at strengthening wildfire resilience and recovery. This week, host Cameron Barrett brings you a legislative roundup of the bills that could help LA recover and speaks with Senator Ben Allen. Allen's district includes Pacific Palisades, and one of the bi...

Send us Fan Mail WE'RE BACK! All-new season. All-new podcast. Now with video! And we're kicking off the new season and the new Rebuild:LA with one of our most controversial topics - Zone Zero. On August 19th of this year, the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection - the policy-making body of CAL FIRE - passed its final draft of Zone Zero.  There are still procedural hoops to ju...

Send us Fan Mail In our last Encore Episode before the premiere of Season 5, we revisit the Future Organization and its founder, Aimery Thomas. After the Eaton Fire, Thomas and his partner, Leila Towry, looked around their destroyed Altadena neighborhood and realized their training as researchers of vulnerable populations uniquely positioned them to help their community. They decided to survey 1,2...

Send us Fan Mail Our latest Encore Episode brings you back to just a few weeks after the Palisades Fire and introduces you to someone who fought that fire…from the skies. Linnea Edmeier is the Public Information Officer for CAL FIRE’s Aviation Unit. She responded to the Palisades Fire hours after it broke out, deploying to Catalina Island, where she and CAL FIRE pilots set up a base of operations...

Send us Fan Mail We’re busy retooling our podcast, and the new Rebuild:LA will premiere September 1st! In the meantime, another ENCORE EPISODE comes your way. Episode 50 first aired on November 11, 2025, and was the first of a two-part episode featuring Eaton Fire survivors Angela Giachetti and Andrew King. Their evacuation stories are as frightening as they are frustrating. Neither King nor Giach...

Send us Fan Mail We’re busy retooling our podcast and the new Rebuild:LA will premiere September 1st! In the meantime, another ENCORE EPISODE comes your way. Episode 59 originally aired on January 5, 2026, and marked the first anniversary of the Palisades and Eaton Fires. Host Cameron Barrett and the MySafe:LA production team recorded the episode at an art exhibit marking the anniversary, at the C...

Send us Fan Mail We’re busy retooling our podcast, and the new Rebuild:LA will premiere September 1st! In the meantime, another ENCORE EPISODE comes your way. Episode 30 originally aired on June 20, 2025. Host Cameron Barrett sat down with friend, colleague, and former Glendale Fire Chief Sylvio Lanzas, who had recently retired to join the private sector as the Chief Operating Officer for a compan...

Send us Fan Mail Do you remember what it was like in those first few weeks after the Palisades and Eaton Fires? The raw emotions? The confusion? The rumors?! We started Rebuild:LA in those dark days after the January 2025 Firestorms, and we've been trying to break through the noise ever since. Welcome to another Encore Episode as we retool our podcast for the fifth season, which premieres on...

Send us Fan Mail We’re busy retooling our podcast, and the new Rebuild:LA will premiere September 1st! In the meantime, another ENCORE EPISODE comes your way. Episode 52 originally aired on November 25, 2025. While that doesn’t seem that long ago, a lot has happened in the intervening seven and a half months - especially for our returning guest, Dr. Nicole Maccalla of Eaton Fire Residents United....

Send us Fan Mail On the first of September, the new Rebuild:LA will premiere. We’re entering into the scary world of video and will be bringing you the next crop of leaders, visionaries, and doers who are helping to Rebuild LA. Until then, we’re queuing up our most popular episodes and updating them where we can. So welcome to our first encore episode. The Hard Truth About Zone Zero first aired on...

Send us Fan Mail TreePeople has been around for more than 50 years and has planted millions of trees. The non-profit dedicated to maintaining and growing our forests, parks, and even street tree populations, sees trees as not only integral but necessary parts of our infrastructure. And they’re trying to get the rebuilding effort in Los Angeles to recognize the importance of what they call green in...

Send us Fan Mail There are state, county, regional, and city programs offering rebates, incentives, and planning assistance if you've been affected by the Los Angeles Wildfires and are considering building an electric home. We talk with three representatives from three different programs this week, in the second part of our two-part series on electrifying your home. Host Cameron Barrett welco...

Send us Fan Mail Are you rebuilding? Renovating? Adding on? Rethinking your living space? Have you thought about going all-electric? That’s what we’re talking about this week and next with three experts -  Patrice Hicks from RISE Homes, Erin Keller from the California Electric Homes Project, and Enayet Miah from Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power. They have the expertise…and perhaps the mo...

Send us Fan Mail We're getting our next two-part episode ready for you. It will drop at 1:00 am Pacific Time on June 16 and is the first in a two-part series on electrifying the rebuild in the Palisades and Altadena. We'll have three experts who will outline the substantial incentives available to those interested in de-gasifying their new homes. Don't miss it! Support the show

Send us Fan Mail The Palisades Fire created an ecological disaster as only a widespread urban conflagration can. But it also created a blank canvas and an opportunity, according to Sara Marti, the Communications Director of Resilient Palisades. The eco-centric non-profit began in 2019, offering free help in a wide array of environmentally friendly initiatives from clearing invasive species to elec...

Send us Fan Mail $2 million dollars. That’s what the California Board of Insurance (CBI) fined State Farm after spending 11 months looking into its illegal practices after the Eaton and Palisades Fires. They only had to investigate a fraction of the complaints against the insurance giant to see a clear practice of illegal delay and denial of claims made by fire survivors. And while $2 million doll...

Send us Fan Mail The second part of our two-part series with investigative reporter Liam Dillon has us looking forward. Dillon’s stories in the Los Angeles Times and POLITICO have examined the devastation left by the last 8 years of mega-fires in California. Dillon has looked at the Tubbs Fire that laid waste to Santa Rosa, and the Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise, among many others....

Send us Fan Mail 38%. That’s the surprisingly small percentage of residents who have rebuilt after wildfires in California since 2017. Recent building permit requests and housing starts in Pacific Palisades and Altadena are even smaller in number. What many elected officials promised would be the fastest recovery on record after the January 2025 Firestorm has not materialized. Why? That’s what hos...

Send us Fan Mail Last week on Rebuild:LA, host Cameron Barrett welcomed LA’s Deputy Mayor of Infrastructure and Climate Resilience, Randall Winston, to the show. The conversation was mostly about the first part of his title - infrastructure. What was LA doing to repair the Palisades and ensure it could withstand the ongoing threat from wildfires? This week, it’s about the second half of his title...

Send us Fan Mail On April 22, 2026, LA Mayor Karen Bass and LA County Supervisor Kathryn Barger traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Their purpose? To find out when long-promised federal disaster recovery funds would arrive to help Los Angeles rebuild. Without those dollars, LA can’t repair the roads in the Palisades, underground electrical power lin...