Rebuild:LA

Send us Fan Mail Sierra Kos tells us about the exhibit, With Us, an immersive LA fire experience, in this special bonus episode of Rebuild:LA. The event is on Sunday, January 4, from 12-4 PM and is free to attend. You can get your tickets here: With Us Tickets Kos and her collaborators wanted to bring the first-hand accounts of surviving the Palisades and Eaton Fires to the people of Los Angeles....

Send us Fan Mail The first of our special two-part holiday edition of Rebuild:LA has host Cameron Barrett sitting down with an Eaton Fire survivor and the president of an organization that lent him a hand. What makes the conversation unique is that both guests are Los Angeles Fire Department Captains. Captain Jerry Puga lost his home in the Eaton Fire, evacuating with his family just minutes befor...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Rebuild:LA, host Cameron Barrett talks with Erica Peng, a lecturer at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, who teaches leaders about how our fight-flight-freeze neurobiology shapes and undermines behavior and performance. Peng has partnered with the National Fire Protection Association to teach a unique approach to crisis leadership, explaining how our neurobiology ca...

Send us Fan Mail Imagine a rocket launcher…that shoots water balloons. Inspired by the defense technology known as Iron Dome, a group of Israeli entrepreneurs has developed a defense mechanism against wildfires they're calling FireDome. In host Cameron Barrett’s conversation this week with FireDome’s co-founder and CEO, Gadi Benjamini, we learn about a cutting-edge technology created to save...

Send us Fan Mail We know that the Palisades and Eaton Fires left devastation in their wake, devastation that wasn’t just burned structures and displaced lives, but dangerous contaminants that remained in our soil and groundwater. How far-reaching was the contamination, and how concerned do residents need to be? Thanks to the University of Southern California’s CLEAN Project, there is now a way for...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Nicole Maccalla spent the first two days of the Eaton Fire on the ground, fighting to save her home. She thought that if she could just keep her house from burning, she would be okay, and when the fire was finally out, she could return to the place she and her children had called home for the last 11 years. But what she found was a house that might have been still standing, bu...

Send us Fan Mail In the second of our two-part episode with Eaton Fire survivors Andrew King and Angela Giacchetti, host Cameron Barrett asks the two about their work on the Department of Angels' quarterly survey of fire survivors, Community Voices: LA Fire Recovery Report . The research is uncovering some difficult truths about the recovery and rebuilding efforts in Pacific Palisades and Alt...

Send us Fan Mail Andrew King and Angela Giacchetti didn’t know each other on January 7, 2025. They lived only a few blocks apart - in Altadena. When the Santa Ana winds got so strong that power started failing, King loaded his two kids and his wife into their minivan and took off to a nearby hotel in Pasadena. Better safe than sorry, he figured. Giacchetti and her husband were new parents. Their s...

Send us Fan Mail Malibu is no stranger to wildfires. The city had just recovered from the 2018 Woolsey Fire, which destroyed hundreds of homes on both sides of Pacific Coast Highway, when the firestorms of January 2025 struck. The Palisades Fire destroyed 700 homes in Malibu and drove clouds of soot and ash from the smoldering Pacific Palisades over the city and onto its world-renowned beaches. 70...

Send us Fan Mail The American Fire Service is in the midst of a rapid transition period that many have described as a crisis. From a massive brain drain happening in departments that are losing many seasoned firefighters to retirement, as well as a fundamentally different generation of firefighters coming up through a traditional system not known for easily changing, the fire service is facing cha...

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...