|
Exactly
one year ago, I drove up Pacific Coast
Highway just before dawn.
|
|
Toppled
utility poles and downed wires littered
the street. In a tunnel of thick black
smoke, flurries of glowing red embers
raced across the road, out to sea. Hours
passed, but the sun never rose. Everything was
gone.
|
|
In
the face of all this horror, everyday
people responded not with fear or hate,
but with courage and love. It’s human
nature — a reflex to disaster more
certain than the sunrise.
|
|
Amid
a chaotic
evacuation in the Palisades, I
watched residents use their minivans to
pick up their neighbors who had been
traveling on foot and shuttle them to
safety. A volunteer community brigade
marched door to door ensuring others got
the evacuation orders.
|
|
In
Altadena, employees with the small local
water utilities raced across
town protecting and fixing the
water systems firefighters relied on.
Afterward, hundreds
volunteered with the National Day
Laborer Organizing Network to clear
debris from the streets, parks and
churches of Pasadena.
|
|
|
In
the year that’s followed, the same
locals have stepped up to hold their
governments accountable and fill in
where leadership was vacant — even when
some people, including some of their
peers — considered that work
controversial. They’ve all nonetheless
helped their neighbors in tangible,
meaningful, ways.
|
|
Here
are their reflections (edited for length
and clarity) on the year and the futures
they imagine.
|
|
Keegan
Gibbs leads the Community
Brigade program with the Los
Angeles County Fire Department. During
the Palisades fire, the group’s roughly
50 volunteers went door to door ensuring
residents had evacuated, fought spot
fires and transported animals to safety.
The group also routinely helps
homeowners understand how to harden
their homes against wildfire. This fall,
the brigade doubled its
size, with new recruits going
through basic firefighter training.
|
|
Gibbs:
Across Malibu and the Santa
Monica Mountains, the Community
Brigade envisions a critical mass of
residents who have taken
responsibility for their home
“ignition zone,” creating
neighborhoods where wildfire can move
through the landscape without becoming
a community-level disaster.
|
|
In
this future, the Brigade is a trusted
local institution and a proven model —
demonstrating that shared
responsibility and disciplined
preparation can fundamentally change
wildfire outcomes and be adapted
across the West.
|
|
|
Kari
Nadeau, a professor at the Harvard
T.H. Chan School of Public Health, helps
lead the LA Fire HEALTH
Study, a first-of-its-kind
research effort by universities and
hospitals to understand the fires’
contamination and the subsequent health
impacts over a 10-year period. The
researchers have found that firefighters
who fought the L.A. blazes had elevated
levels of mercury and lead in their
blood compared with other
wildland firefighters and that the fires
corresponded with increased
emergency room visits for
heart attacks and respiratory illnesses.
|
|
Nadeau:
I think,10 years from now, we’re
going to look back and say, we really
tested for as many exposures as we
could in the air, water and soil, and
then we looked at whether or not they
affected short-term and long-term
health outcomes. That will not only
help L.A. and policymakers, but it’ll
also be scalable to the rest of the
world — because the human body is the
human body.
|
|
Jane
Lawton Potelle founded Eaton Fire
Residents United, a grassroots
organization of residents with
still-standing homes contaminated by the
Eaton fire. The group — led mostly by
women — assembled the first
comprehensive evidence of widespread
contamination within homes.
Now, they’re
pushing public health
agencies to adopt best practices to
remediate homes and keep residents safe,
and they’re calling on insurance
regulators to ensure survivors have the
financial means to follow them.
|
|
Potelle:
If the government doesn’t
intervene, then five to 10 years from
now our communities will still be
living with contamination in homes and
soil, driving preventable health harms
while shifting massive long-term costs
onto families.
|
|
EFRU
hopes to see the “clearance before
occupancy” approach communitywide so
that all surviving homes, schools,
businesses and public spaces affected
by fallout from the L.A. fires have
been restored to verifiably safe and
healthy living conditions.
|
|
Keep
up with
California
|
Your support helps us deliver the news
that matters
most.
Subscribe to
the Los
Angeles Times.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Spencer
Pratt is a reality TV
star-turned-fire accountability
advocate, turned mayoral
candidate who has successfully
lobbied Congress to open an
investigation into the handling of
the Palisades fire response
and recovery. He has helped lead and
publicize lawsuits against
the city and state and provided some of
the first evidence that the Los Angeles
Fire Department knowingly left the
Lachman fire smoldering, limited its
firefighting operations to avoid
sensitive plants and subsequently
covered it up.
|
|
Pratt:
The most important lesson I learned
this past year is that you cannot rely
on our state and local government.
... I remain hopeful that we can
rebuild our family town. If the state
and local government won’t give us the
opportunity to start, I will continue
asking the federal government to step
in and help. There has to be a way to
cut through the red tape and get
people back to their hometown.
|
|
Pablo
Alvarado is the co-executive
director of the National Day
Laborer Organizing Network, which
not only cleared Pasadena’s streets but
also trained hundreds of workers on how
to safely operate in the burn areas,
distributed more than a thousand
personal protective equipment kits, and
provided assistance to more than 13,000
families affected by the fires and ICE
raids.
|
|
Alvarado:
We don’t know what this political
year will bring, or what the next five
or 10 years will look like. But we do
know this truth: Rebuilding will
happen, and it is impossible to do it
without migrant labor. Our work makes
reconstruction possible. Yet while our
labor is welcomed, our rights are not
respected.
|
|
From
Katrina to these fires, we have
learned the same lesson again and
again: No one is coming to save
workers — not FEMA, not local
governments, not corporations. That is
why our message has always been clear:
Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo. Only
the people save the people.
|
More
recent wildfire news
|
|
On
Wednesday’s one-year anniversary of the
fires, survivors of the Eaton and
Palisades fires returned to their
communities to mourn the loss of their
neighborhoods and neighbors, and to
demand accountability and action from
their governments. You can read
our coverage here.
|
|
A
year into recovery, Times reporter
and Altadena native Colleen Shalby
reflects on her community’s
devastating loss, the pride she feels
for her hometown and her persistent hope
for the next generation of Altadenans.
|
|
At
a fire anniversary protest in the
Palisades, Spencer Pratt announced his
candidacy for Los Angeles mayor.
“Business as usual is a death sentence
for Los Angeles, and I’m done waiting
for someone to take real action,” he
said.
|
|
The
city of Los Angeles routinely ignored
state fire safety regulations dictating
the width and slope of roads for
evacuation and firefighter access as it
permitted development in areas with very
high fire hazard, a new lawsuit
alleges.
|
A
few last things in climate news
|
|
Federal
tax credits for residential solar,
batteries and heat pumps expired at the
end of 2025, reports
Bloomberg’s Todd Woody. Tariffs
probably will also push up prices for
solar panels and batteries, which are
primarily imported from China and
Vietnam and other countries.
|
|
One
company with deep ties to California
stands to benefit from President Trump’s
military intervention in Venezuela:
Chevron. It is the only foreign oil
company to maintain continued operations
in Venezuela through decades of
tumultuous politics, The Times’ Jack
Dolan reports.
|
|
As
Congress works to avert an
end-of-January government shutdown, its
latest spending package would largely
keep the Environmental Protection
Agency’s budget intact, reports Liza
Gross for Inside Climate News. The
Trump administration had initially
proposed a 55% cut to the agency’s
budget; the latest proposal cuts it by
only 5%.
|
|
This
is the latest edition of Boiling
Point, a newsletter about climate
change and the environment in the
American West. Sign up here
to get it in your inbox.
And listen to our Boiling Point
podcast here.
|
|
For
more wildfire news, follow @nohaggerty
on X and @nohaggerty.bsky.social
on Bluesky.
|
