♪ [Sizzling] Maiya May: Beginning on January 7, 2025, the world learned what far too many survivors already knew-- wildfires are changing.

[Firefighter yelling] But the LA Firestorm is just the latest in a string of fires causing unprecedented destruction in the modern era.

♪ These fires are suddenly unstoppable, and there's one simple variable that explains the change-- speed.

I'm Maiya May, the host of "Weathered," and I'm on a journey to understand where we are and where we're going in this moment of extreme change, and to learn how we can stop the next tragedy, before it's too late.

Our film crew was on the ground from day one of the fires, and we had inside access to top fire officials and cutting-edge research.

We learned what went wrong, why fires are moving so fast, and the one thing that can stop this growing trend in fire destruction.

Officer: Police!

Man over radio: Fire down!

Fight the fire down!

[Smoke detector sounding] Man: Fire, dude.

Yeah, let's get out of here.

[Wind rumbling] Man: Oh, ****!

Oh, my God, man.

This is... Oh, God.

It's all gone.

♪ Anthony Marrone: The Palisades and the Eaton Fire have been a turning point.

We're experiencing things that we never experienced before.

And as a public official, I have to tell the truth, even when the truth is difficult.

Maiya: To unpack that truth, we're going inside the LA Firestorm.

♪ ♪ [Wind whistling] Here's what we know about the lead-up to the fires.

After two unusually wet years, Los Angeles, California entered an extreme eight-month dry spell with no rain, accompanied by record-breaking heat.

In these conditions, all you need is wind and an ignition to see extreme fire.

And looking at urban fire disasters over the last century, we see a clear uptick in the last decade.

With this surge in destructive fires, relying only on professional firefighters for protection is no longer enough.

Keegan: I grew up in Malibu.

I knew several people over the years that lost houses.

Fires happened at a pretty frequent pace every six, eight years, but it was never something that was really interesting at all.

And then the Woolsey Fire happened, and a lot of my friends, including my family, lost their house.

♪ And I just couldn't let that go.

And so, I got oddly obsessed with what to do better for the next time.

I remember at a community meeting where we had all the fire chiefs, I remember just saying-- yelling at him, "Everyone just wants to hear you say sorry!"

Maiya: But Keegan, along with his friend Tyler, channeled that anger to help start the Community Brigade, a network of community members living in fire-prone areas who wanted to play an active role in preventing destruction during the next fire.

Keegan: The Brigade ultimately was born out of the Woolsey experience.

We were just like, "Oh, we got this.

"We're going to buy a truck, "and we're going to buy a bunch of hoes, and we're going to handle the business next time."

Creating an ad hoc, kind of cowboy group of firefighters.

That's what we thought then, at least.

Maiya: Over the following years, the brigade grew and began collaborating with fire departments to prepare for the inevitable.

In fall of 2024, 40 members received their fire certifications.

But nothing could have prepared them for what was coming next.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, into a portion of Thursday, we are expecting some very strong, potentially damaging Santa Ana winds.

We'll be looking at, you know, 50-, 60-mile-per-hour winds, 80-mile-per-hour winds.

Relative humidity values are going to drop to at least 10%.

Reporter: Any fire start could lead to rapid spread in these types of conditions.

Keegan: We just finished training in October.

We've done a bunch of tabletops, field drills, exercises, etc.

But we're tee-ballers.

This was the World Series of firefighting.

Marrone: In the past, I would have asked that they leave during the evacuation order.

Now I'm asking that they stay, because they're going to be able to help us.

♪ ♪ Man: I noticed smoke in the background over the hills about 10:30.

Oh, fire on the other side of the hill.

Looks pretty close.

And the wind started to get stronger.

Maiya: By 10:15, air tankers are on site.

Keegan over radio: It is pushing directly towards Palisades.

This thing's got a wide path of travel already.

Um, I think it's gonna make a good run.

This was still all blue sky right here, and we were off the flank of the fire, but that changed really fast.

And then I started to see the firefighting planes dropping water.

I could see flames starting to lick up over the ridge on the other side of the ridge, and then, at that point, I turned around, got back down to the guys, and said, "Hey, we're going to be impacted here."

And then the wind shifted just a little bit, and boom, this first street was impacted by fire almost immediately, just in a few short minutes afterwards of this.

It was almost nighttime here from how thick the smoke was.

[Over radio] Looks like the fire is going to hit the back of these houses in about 5, 10 minutes.

Maiya: The first broad evacuation order comes at 12:07 p.m. Man over speaker: Emergency evacuation of this area is required.

Maiya: Dozens of homes ignite, and firefighters are unable to contain the fire.

Keegan: Next thing you know, there's sheriffs that are grabbing garden hoses and sheriffs grabbing fire hoses and helping put out spots.

It was just pure mayhem, honestly.

And everybody's getting their teeth kicked in.

♪ Maiya: By 1:08 p.m., streets are gridlocked, and residents abandon their cars to evacuate on foot.

[On radio] You've got gridlock on Palisades Drive, abandoned vehicles, Sunset completely impassable.

Reporter: They have to do what they have to do.

They need to clear a path.

So, literally, they're moving the car.

Maiya: By 2:30, the fire is racing towards Pacific Coast Highway, and firefighters are scrambling for resources.

[On radio] We're going to need emergency air.

We're running out of bottles, and we're trying to protect these houses and get people out.

Keegan: The plants in the front of the yard start catching on fire.

The bush on the side of the house starts catching on fire.

[Man yelling instructions] All the smoke alarms in the neighborhood are going off.

[Smoke alarm sounding] Man: Fire, dude.

Yeah, let's get out of here.

We tried.

We tried, bro.

Sorry.

[Smoke detector sounding] We tried our best.

Yeah, when this tree falls over...

Sorry, bro.

We gotta get out of here.

Oh, ****!

[Radio] ...Our mission right now is life safety.

EVAC is our concern.

Maiya: And then, just after 6 p.m., 30 miles away, the Eaton Fire starts in the hills above Altadena.

Man: Holy ****!

Firefighter: Response time from Fire Station 66 is probably two to three minutes.

Upon arrival, they had a large amount of fire, pushing hard towards the nature center.

Maiya: By 6:36 p.m., helicopters arrive, but the nearly 100-mile-per-hour winds are so violent that aerial firefighting is quickly grounded.

[Over radio] We're gonna have to shut down the water dropping operation.

Maiya: At 7 p.m., Fire Chief Anthony Marrone begins his drive from Palisades to Altadena.

Marrone: When I saw it at, you know, 27, 30 miles away, my heart just sunk, because I thought, "How are we going to respond to this?"

Maiya: Before evacuations have been ordered, residents near Eaton Canyon are already fleeing.

[Fire roaring] Man: Holy **** Man: Up there, that looked like a river of lava just flowing down the hill.

It's like, no stopping it.

From 6:18 that night till 6:00 the next morning, we had continuous 80-mile-an-hour gusts.

There's no stopping a fire that's getting pushed by an 80-mile-an-hour gust.

Maiya: The first evacuation order goes out near 7:30 p.m. for Altadena, east of Lake Avenue.

Meanwhile, in Palisades, aerial efforts are grounded at 7:45 p.m. Man over radio: Based on the wind conditions right now, we're ineffective, and we're not going to compromise safety.

So, copy the traffic, we lost the aircraft.

Maiya: Both fires swell in size.

Evacuation notices have been issued for East Altadena, but West Altadena is still waiting for word to leave.

I thought, "Well, I'll sit here "and listen to the radio in the car and see what's happening."

And I'm hearing that the fire is going east, and I'm thinking, "That glow is not two or three miles away.

It looks a lot closer."

There's still nothing telling me to evacuate, but the sheriff came up, and he said, "Lady, get out, evacuate.

The fire is coming."

[Firefighter yelling] [Wind rumbling] It was chaos in the streets.

You had people trying to get out, burning power poles.

You had wires down, heavy smoke, which limited visibility.

So we went straight into rescue mode.

Officer: Police department, evacuate immediately!

The smoke was so thick, and it was just raining embers everywhere.

Man: I don't know how anybody got out of there at 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, because it was pitch black.

Man: Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Look at this.

Woman: The smoke was so thick and black.

It was horrible.

Maiya: The fires burned through the next day and into the night, incinerating thousands of acres and entire neighborhoods.

Man: Full house on fire.

Maiya: By late Wednesday, January 8th, the winds subside, allowing firefighters to begin containing the fires.

But the battle is far from over.

The fires continue to burn for several more weeks, as crews work to bring them under control.

♪ Alright, so we're headed to meet up with Sebastian, and he's a young man from Colombia who is actually working as a live-in caregiver in the Pacific Palisades.

And we are going to take him back to his home for the first time since he evacuated.

It's a single mom with an autistic kid, so I started working with them, taking care of this kid.

And, yeah, I started living with them, so it became a home.

So, this is-- this is-- that's become your family.

Yeah, yeah, they're like my second family.

♪ Wow.

I think here was Rialion.

Oh, God, it's all gone.

Oh, my God.

The hotel, oh, God.

I know the owner of this little place right here.

Oh!

[Speaking Spanish].

Oh, my gosh.

♪ Oh, my God, man, this is-- Oh, God.

That's our place right there.

That one right there.

It's all gone.

♪ I can't imagine what you're grappling with emotionally during this time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's too much.

It's too much.

Maiya: Sebastian told me his employer, like many others in California, had been dropped by their homeowner's insurance company just months before this fire.

♪ But I need to understand these fires.

What happened?

Why did it get so out of control?

And maybe most importantly, how can we prevent this from happening in the future?

So, I met with Dr. Lori Moore-Merrell, who served as the top U.S. Fire Administrator from 2021 to 2025.

She was essentially the chief of all fire chiefs and the first person in her position to bring a national focus to the rise of large-scale urban conflagrations, fires that wipe out entire communities.

The Orange County Air Ops team flew Dr. Lori over the LA fire parameters to survey the damage and witness the destruction in its full breadth.

♪ Dr. Lori: From the Eaton Fire, where you can see how it just came right down the mountain and swept through the community.

The ember cast here was totally significant in this fire.

Embers that had to have been massive to have ignited so quickly and just fed this fire on and on and on from structure to structure.

When we have those kinds of variables with the drought, the wind, the close proximity of the structures, it was almost as if the variables have come together and such that this was inevitable.

I feel like you have such a unique perspective with your role.

Does that make you angry?

I know this could have been avoided.

We've been saying for years in the fire service, warning that this is going to happen.

We watched the Marshall Fire in 2021 in Colorado.

We watched Lahaina on Maui in 2023.

And now this.

These are all conflagrations that are not trees burning, not a wildland fire, not even an interface fire.

These are urban-suburban conflagrations.

This is structure-to-structure fire spread, both radiant heat, ember cast, that really show the power of what fire can do.

But also, it gives us true information about how we can stop this, how we can not waste this tragedy, use this information to prevent next.

Maiya: By the end of January, the Palisades Fire and Eaton Fire had together destroyed over 16,000 structures and killed 29 people.

♪ And people are upset.

Early analysis of what went wrong quickly uncovered fire department funding cuts, low water pressure in fire hydrants, and lack of fire engines.

There have been quite a bit of comments over social media about the local water supply.

What is going on with the water situation?

Why was there no water in the hydrants?

They can't fight a fire without water.

Man: Do you regret cutting the fire department budget by millions of dollars, Madam Mayor?

Multi-million-dollar cut.

When you go through something traumatic, it's a natural instinct to point and try to figure out who to blame.

Maiya: But could this much destruction be blamed on a lack of funding and aging infrastructure?

Everyone I asked gave me the same answer.

I mean, is that just a lack of resources?

Because, I mean, that's something that I've been hearing.

Just-- No.

In the national media.

Never.

You could not have had enough resources to prevent the destruction at this level.

Is there any amount of resources to stop a fire of this scale?

I could have had every engine in LA County, I couldn't have stopped this.

Maiya: I even asked LA County's top fire chief-- if he had enough resources, could he have put out the fires?

Could we have used more engines and more firefighters?

Certainly.

Would it have made a difference?

I don't believe so.

♪ So, if more water, more trucks, more firefighters couldn't stop the LA Fires, was this disaster preventable?

And how is it possible that the biggest and best firefighting force in the world couldn't put out the blaze?

Well, let's take a look at how firefighting works.

[Man speaking indistinctly over radio] Maiya: First, we'll look at how a wildfire is fought before it reaches a community, while it's still in the wildlands.

♪ Man: Over a 10-year period, I was a wildland firefighter for both the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service.

I had many varied experiences doing just about everything in fire, except jumping out of airplanes.

Primary tactic is to corral fires by creating an unburnable line around them.

You encircle the whole fire perimeter with a trail built to mineral soil, nothing burnable there.

And then you start burning inside that line to kind of rob the wildfire of any fuel to burn.

So, you use hand tools-- shovels and Pulaskis and rakes-- and you can use heavy equipment, like bulldozers and plows.

Then you add in the air show with helicopters and planes dropping water, retardant.

And when you get those different crews and parts working together, that's when it's very effective.

But you don't really put out the fire.

You put a fire line around the fire, and over time, the fire will just kind of burn out of any burnable fuel.

Maiya: The overwhelming majority of wildfires are extinguished quickly, and the LA County Fire Department is one of the most elite fire suppression organizations in the world.

If anyone can put out a blaze before it reaches communities, it's them.

So, the threat in Los Angeles County, you know, I say that it's probably one of the most dangerous places around, because we get the kind of weather that very few places on the earth get.

Coupled with the vegetation and the topography, the number of people that we have living here, and it makes for a very threatening environment.

Pilot: Our air operation here is extremely demanding.

We have a complex aircraft, we fly it single pilot, we fly it day, night, under night vision goggle.

A very diverse and demanding environment that we operate on doing a very complex mission.

So, when you see a fire that is moving towards homes, it definitely puts an added sense of urgency with what you're doing.

There's, you know, over a hundred cameras in the LA Orange County areas, and they've got a camera 365 days, 24 hours a day.

They'll be able to pick up a little bit of smoke in a location and then get a response out really quick.

The conditions we can fly in and how much water we can drop is unparalleled to any other era of firefighting.

Maiya: Since 1983, an average of nearly 70,000 fires burn each year in the U.S. Nearly 98% of them are controlled by firefighters before becoming large and destructive to human communities.

But dry, windy conditions change everything.

[Wind rumbling] Alkonis: If you haven't been in a wind-driven fire, day turns into night.

There's so much particle in the air that you have no idea that it's daytime.

And you've got flame lengths 30, 40, 50 feet high, and you've got so many embers being tossed at 50 miles an hour, spotting about a mile in front of you.

And to think that you're gonna stop it by putting a hand line or putting a dozer quickly around it, it's not going to happen.

Maiya: Strong winds blow embers over even the largest fire line, and air operations become far less effective.

If it's so windy that the water literally isn't even really hitting the ground, then what are you doing, other than accepting a large level of risk?

Maiya: During the Eaton Fire, pilots supported the initial attack but were quickly grounded because of strong, chaotic wind.

[Radio] Due to wind conditions, you're going to be breaking off.

All air resources are going to be clearing the incident.

[Radio 2] Branch 7 copies, aircraft to shut down.

If firefighters can reach a fire before it begins growing exponentially, it can be put out, even in windy conditions.

But the window of opportunity is becoming smaller and smaller, because fires across the U.S. are moving faster.

Over the last 20 years, fires in California have grown 400% faster.

We'll find out why later, but with traditional wildland firefighting tactics losing their effect, have we reached a tipping point for wildfire?

Or is there still a way to change course?

To answer that question, we have to understand another factor that makes these fires so destructive.

♪ Once the homes start to burn, at scale, you've already lost.

♪ Fighting a structural fire, a first alarm, which is how firefighting resources are apportioned, is at least 15 firefighters for one house.

Four engines, a truck, and a BC is a general response.

If one home is burning, any fire department anywhere can suppress that.

At 10 homes, we now need 150 firefighters.

If we're going to effectively go in and, no kidding, put that fire out, we need 150 firefighters, and we need them right now, because fire, the growth curve is exponential.

Maiya: Once the fire reaches homes, it changes into something else entirely.

Once you have urban conflagration, structure-to-structure fire transmission, then all of the things we are talking about from a wildland setting are no longer effective, because we are in a fundamentally different fire.

The building itself, the structure can sustain a longer ignition compared to a tree.

A tree can burn for, I don't know, a minute or two.

A structure can burn for an hour.

It's the contents of those homes and businesses, because that becomes fuel.

And now we're producing very large, long-burning embers that can fly with the wind to ignite.

Man: When we have dense neighborhoods, we have more cars, we have more fences, we have more sheds.

Maiya: Now, we have two factors that combine to make fires unstoppable-- ember cast and structure-to-structure ignition.

And under these conditions, the wildland firefighting playbook goes out the window.

Air Ops is grounded, and embers jump the fire lines, so, emergency response shifts from firefighting to an all-out race to save lives.

And that's exactly what happened in LA.

♪ It was a wildland fire for probably about four to five minutes.

This fire burned straight downhill into structures and then started burning structure to structure.

The priority was rescue.

So, we're going to take care of life first and then save property as we can.

The conditions were so bad that I couldn't see the end of my hood.

I had two hands come across my hood, put on my brakes.

It was a middle-aged lady, and she says, "My dad is trapped in the house.

He can't get out."

So, we immediately ran up to the house, grabbed him, got him out to my vehicle, and our fire personnel and our law enforcement personnel went on calls for service like that all through the night.

Officer: Police department!

Maiya: While assisting with evacuations in Pacific Palisades was the first priority for Keegan and the Community Fire Brigade, they also spent time doing last-minute preparations on homes, clearing flammable items away from structures and extinguishing spot fires before they could ignite homes.

But this was a decision that Keegan still grapples with.

Somebody died on PCH.

Somebody died at Las Flores.

Somebody died in Big Rock.

Did we help a couple of structures survive?

Maybe.

How do you measure the importance of structures versus lives?

I just keep going that over in my mind, is, how much time am I willing to wager prepping and doing triage with time that I could be trying to convince another person to leave?

In that moment where you're trying to get people out, you're seeing people's homes get destroyed, I mean, what's going through your mind?

I live in the community.

My kids go to school in the community.

And I'm assistant chief here for the community.

It's heartbreaking.

Heartbreaking.

Why didn't we get to that one person's house where that person died?

And that's, like-- that's the really heavy part.

Maiya: As I talk to first responders after these fires, it's become clear that they were up against an impossible task filled with impossible choices.

And what we need to prevent the next tragedy is time.

There may be a way to slow urban fire disasters down.

But, first, I want to find out why these fires are getting so much faster and more destructive.

I'm a fire chief, and I'm not a scientist.

But when I look back over my career, I cannot deny that fire season is now longer.

I cannot deny that fires are harder to extinguish.

I'm not gonna argue what's causing the climate to change.

I'm here to tell you that I have a front-row seat to the results of this changing climate.

♪ Maiya: To understand the changes we're seeing today, we need to understand the past.

In the early 1900s, a new organization called the Forest Service was formed, and its mandate was to put out all fires as quickly as possible.

The early 1900s were hot and dry.

And that didn't just cause the Dust Bowl.

There was also a lot of fire.

In fact, many researchers believe that there was more fire then than there is now.

By the 1940s, firefighting had become professional and efficient.

But wildfire was still a huge problem in the West.

Then ocean currents shifted, bringing cooler, wetter conditions to much of the Western U.S.

It also made fires far easier to fight.

We had these incremental wet periods during the summer.

Incremental rains every week or two is just enough to tamp down fire behavior and support the fire managers to get out there and suppress those fires.

Maiya: And under these conditions, firefighting worked.

Acres burned per year plummeted.

That's where we started, in the Western United States, really interacting with the landscape and developing our expectations on what the landscape could provide for us.

And that's the period of that great expansion.

We see communities expanding.

We see the land utilization expanding.

We've expanded our recreation resources.

We've expanded our water infrastructure.

We've expanded our power infrastructure.

And we've expanded our timber bases under the expectation that that's sustainable into the future.

Maiya: And, most importantly, we expanded where we lived.

But then, things changed again.

By the 1980s, the Western U.S. had left that cool, wet period.

The number of acres burned per year began to rise.

But now, there are whole towns, cities, farms, and infrastructure filling in our fire-prone areas.

And now, we layer on top of that expansion the warmest year in human history.

On our current trajectory, the warming we've seen could double by the end of the century.

And this really matters when it comes to fire, because, as temperatures increase, the ability for the atmosphere to hold water vapor also increases, and it's exponential.

You can basically think of the atmosphere as a giant sponge that can absorb and then release water.

The warmer the atmosphere, the bigger the sponge.

And this has two effects.

First, when that moisture is released, it leads to more extreme precipitation.

But when conditions are dry, a thirstier atmosphere does the opposite.

It pulls moisture from the land, sucking water from plants and soil, creating the perfect conditions for fire to spread faster and burn hotter.

This dramatic shift between extremes is what some scientists call weather whiplash.

And that whiplash had a big role in the LA Firestorm.

All right, so we've been hearing a lot about climate change and how it may have influenced these fires, so we're actually going to meet up with someone who can explain it to us.

So, let's go.

Oh, wow, I'm back in school.

How you doing?

I'm Maiya.

Hey, Maiya, I'm Park.

Nice to meet you.

You can think of wildfire as being a light that is either on or off, but with fire, you can only turn on the light if you have four switches on at the same time.

Maiya: These switches include fuels, aridity, fire weather-- like strong, dry winds-- and ignition.

2023 and 2024 was extraordinarily wet.

Lots of new plants grew.

This is just a record of the greenness in coastal Southern California for the last 40 years.

And this past spring was near record high... Wow.

...meaning that probably we haven't seen fuel loads like this more than once or twice in the last four decades.

Wow, and that was due to all of those atmospheric rivers that we saw rolling through California.

That's right.

And that leads us to the next ingredient, which is aridity.

This year has been an extraordinarily unlucky year so far.

Usually, we get our first rain by sometime in October or November, and here we are in mid-to-late January, and we still haven't had our first rain.

The vegetation and structures are probably drier than we've seen anytime in the last 150 years at least.

Another contributor to that is temperature.

Heat works to dry out fuels, because heat causes the atmosphere to be thirstier.

Another factor is wind, right?

That's right.

Now, this, though, is the middle of Santa Ana wind season.

Santa Anas are strongest and the most common in December and January.

Usually, they can't drive fire, because, usually, everything's all wet by then.

What made this year extraordinary was the huge amount of fuel, the very, very dry conditions because of lack of precipitation and the high temperatures, and then, to cap it off, a really strong Santa Ana wind event.

And there is one more factor, which is ignition.

Yeah, that's right.

So, in coastal Southern California, when we have these fires going in Santa Ana wind events, essentially, all the fires were caused by people.

Lightning does not occur during these events.

Unfortunately, when conditions are this extreme and perfect for fire, it's almost inevitable that there is going to be an accidental spark somewhere, and those accidental sparks have a really easy time lighting very destructive fires under these crazy weather conditions.

It just seems like a perfect storm.

It has been a perfect storm, but this type of event is the type of event we expect to see more of in the future.

At this point, Park's research shows that only one of these factors has definitively changed due to global warming-- temperature.

Record-breaking heat removes moisture faster, priming vegetation, fences, hedges, and homes.

And that explains why fires are moving so much faster.

[Fire crackling] [Wind blowing] So, we're in Altadena today, and we are going to meet up with survivors of the Eaton Fire.

And just driving through, the impact of this fire feels different.

The whole community is gone, and it's really been difficult for me to take everything in, but I'm very interested to hear from survivors and hear where their headspace is.

Hello, Lynnelle.

Hi!

How are you?

How are you?

I'm good, I'm good.

Maiya.

Maiya, Charles Bryant.

Glad to meet you.

Nice to meet you.

So, tell me where we are right now.

Altadena, post-Eaton Fire, and you're at our home.

This is where your home used to be.

Right.

♪ You guys are gonna rebuild on this property?

Yeah.

I've got the rendering already.

I got my drawings done.

Oh, my goodness!

Yeah.

You are ready to go.

I'm ready.

Yeah, we can submit tomorrow, if we want to.

The level of despair is something that, fortunately, we haven't felt, but it's so real.

And I think for this community, I think that despair goes beyond the, you know, "I've lost everything."

I didn't realize 80% of Black families own their homes here.

And I think that's amazing.

And I think just not knowing how the community is going to look moving forward is also playing into that feeling of despair.

It really is.

Because you take the fact that the homeowners are multi-generational.

So, you've got somebody whose parents might have bought their home in the '50s and the '60s, and they've lived in the house, or they have sent-- there's people at our church who might be seven family members all lost their homes.

So, it's not just losing your house, it's losing your sense of who you are, and it's also losing your community.

Maiya: Even before the fire, Altadena had been gentrifying rapidly.

The Black population had dropped from 43% in 1980 to 18% in 2025, and the future is uncertain.

And the fear is losing that sense of community.

The silver lining of the fire is that it's brought a spotlight back to the fact that this was, and still is, a Black community, and how important it is that we had owners, property owners, business owners, and so forth.

And I think it's adding a light to the fact that there's something here that's worth investing in.

So many innovations that have come out of disaster, you know, and why can't the rebuilding of Altadena be one of those things?

I mean, why not?

Yeah.

Maiya: Disasters like this threaten the very fabric of communities, dismantling decades of generational wealth in minutes.

But many other residents I met said they wanted to rebuild in Altadena.

My main concern is to preserve the community as it was before the fires even happened.

And right now, I'm worried, and my neighbors are worried, that even if we rebuild, is it even insurable?

And is that insurance going to be affordable, or are we going to be priced out?

Maiya: The process of rebuilding is hard.

To get some perspective on just how long it takes, I asked Keegan about his community's progress after the 2018 Woolsey Fire.

Can you tell me about the Woolsey rebuild?

Like, how many... Because that was six years ago.

Yeah.

Is that community completely rebuilt?

No, so, I mean, just in the city of Malibu, for example, about 450 homes burned down.

And of those 450, I think less than 200 even have their certificate of occupancy today.

Wow.

Maiya: We can't control where wildfires ignite or the weather that makes them so fast and so destructive, but we can control how we rebuild and how prepared we are for future fires.

So, you've been through quite the transformation since the Woolsey Fire.

Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Yeah, I mean, during the Woolsey Fire and directly after, I was that uninformed resident that was frustrated, angry, and I was the one that was out there yelling at the fire chief, saying that they should have done something different or better.

A lot of that anger I had and frustration was just based off of poor understanding.

And then I stumbled on Jack Cohen.

That was the, like, "Aha!"

shift for me.

Keegan: There goes Jack.

Man: Get some good video?

Keegan: Got Jack running into the smoke.

[Helicopter whirring] Jack: I became a research scientist, a fire scientist, in 1976.

I've been doing fire since as long as I can remember.

♪ From my standpoint, one of the major contributions of the research that I've done is to redefine this problem.

The main point here is that it's a home ignition problem, not a wildfire control problem.

[Fire roaring] The big problem with us defining wildland urban fire disasters as a wildfire problem is that we focus on and put all of our energy into attempting to eliminate the wildfire to begin with instead of taking the opportunity to be more practically effective with regard to changing the ignitability of the thing that gets destroyed, which are the structures.

[Fire roaring] Maiya: What Jack discovered is that the way a wildfire enters a community isn't through a wall of flames, but something much... smaller.

Well, as it turns out, we're talking about a burning ember landing on the structure and the debris that maybe is in the rain gutters and igniting that debris that then puts flame on the eaves that then spreads into the attic of the house and totally consumes the house.

Maiya: And with that, Jack created the modern understanding of how fire enters communities.

He found the mechanism that burns houses and how wind creates so many ignitions.

We have large ember production.

Researcher: Thousands of embers.

Park: Embers the size of golf balls.

So many embers spotting, you know, in advance of the fire.

Jack: So, we had to do experiments where we could generate a blizzard of burning embers on a full-scale house and then begin to experiment with where the ignitions occur and see if a specific design was vulnerable to ignition from burning embers.

♪ Maiya: And a few years ago, I visited the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety to see one of these ember experiments in person.

So, we're in the main chamber, right?

Yeah.

What makes this place so cool?

This is the only place on this planet that we can test full-scale buildings and then add fire to them.

And this is how you generate the wind?

Correct.

We have 105 fans here.

Wow.

And we have the capability to generate a real hurricane.

Just how fast can these winds blow?

So, we can go up to 120, 125-miles-an-hour wind.

Yeah, you don't want to be in the chamber when the fans are on.

What we have here is a mock test building.

Half of it is wildfire resistant, and the other half of it is more traditional building structure.

And here in the wind chamber, we're going to shoot embers at it.

And when they come and impact the building, we're going to see the difference in wildfire resistant building and non-wildfire resistant building and how they perform to that ember exposure.

[Over loudspeaker] Fans are on.

We're about to start generator starter procedures.

Man: Control room ready.

[Beep] Copy.

Test starts 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Generators on.

[Beep] All right, all crews are going.

[Beep] ♪ ♪ [Fire roaring] Maiya: These experiments identified the most important steps to hardening homes and stop wildfires from becoming urban conflagrations.

The stats show that the majority of the loss, maybe up to 90% in wildfire-prone areas, are because of embers.

Basically, when embers accumulate around the buildings, it ignites the recipient fuel, and, well, the recipient fuels becomes flames.

The flame near the structure is the recipe for disaster.

And the wind is like blowing these embers around.

Exactly.

We're not talking about 100 or 200 embers.

We are literally talking about thousands of embers hitting the wall, falling at the base of the wall, and then if there is any combustible in that area, that's fair game.

Maiya: In order to protect your home from embers, there's a lot that you can and should do.

But there's a few very simple, very effective steps that you can start with.

Man: You have to have a class-A, non-combustible roof.

That's non-negotiable.

That said, there are very few non-class-A roofs left.

Number two is you have to have ember-resistant vents.

If the vents are not ember-resistant, either 1/8th or finer mesh, embers will find the void spaces, and it won't matter how many other mitigations are placed.

And the third thing is you have to have Zone 0, five foot of non-combustible, inclusive of wooden fences.

If you have those three, I think that's the baseline.

Maiya: Zone 0 includes removing things like bark chips, vegetation, lawn furniture, and fences.

Decks are also vulnerable to embers, especially the area underneath the deck.

The first six inches of vertical wall at the bottom of your home should also be noncombustible so that any embers that fall around your home can't ignite the structure.

Those three things done across a community could likely slow a fire from igniting the first houses long enough to give first responders a fighting chance.

Roof, vents, and Zone 0.

Embers cause most of the destruction we see in these urban conflagrations, but they aren't the only thing we're worried about.

In addition to that, we need to harden the home against flames.

Maiya: This includes installing non-combustible siding, enclosing your eaves, and installing multi-pane tempered glass windows and fire-rated doors.

And then extending out from your home to a 30-foot perimeter.

Sheds and outbuildings can act as a fire bridge to your home, so harden those as well.

♪ But do these home-hardening measures still apply in extreme fire events like we saw in LA?

So, when the first building ignites and when we add wind to this, the flame stretches and tilts down.

When the distance between the structures is shorter than the flame length, basically, we are holding a blowtorch on our homes.

And the heat, the flux put off by a burning home far exceeds anything you see in a wildland setting, both in the peak temperatures and the time.

A home burns for a long time.

Maiya: When a wildfire becomes an urban conflagration, our houses, our businesses, our belongings become the fuel.

And those fuels are supercharged.

But even in these conditions, the experts we've talked to all say that home hardening is still our number-one defense, because it limits the number of homes that will catch on fire and buys us time to deal with the ones that do.

Man: So, it takes longer for the fire to make its way through the labyrinth of treatments we've imposed.

Well, then firefighters don't have as much fire to fight.

And that fire that they do have to fight will be moving more slowly.

Researcher: We can't stop wildfires.

That's correct, we cannot do that.

But we can stop conflagration.

We can bend down the risk curves by using these mitigation strategies that we don't see Altadena completely wiped out.

That's something that I am sure we can do.

Maiya: To slow a fire down enough to prevent a conflagration will take a strategic, community-wide approach to home hardening.

One or two homes being hardened is irrelevant.

It needs to be a critical mass at the critical location in order to be effective.

Maiya: But what if your neighbors haven't prepared their homes?

Does preparing yours on its own make any difference at all?

One of our big goals, Tyler and I's big goal, after Woolsey, very early on after meeting Jack and learning about his science and research, was, what if we could get out there, assess and mitigate a bunch of houses in an area that is going to burn at some point, to document it, and then for a fire to come through, and for those houses to survive on their own accord?

And we have several stories of places that we went to a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, did assessments with homeowners that were willing to do the work, that did the work, and sure enough, the houses survived on their own accord.

Maiya: Keegan took me to one of the houses that he helped prepare.

So, the first house is right up here on this driveway.

Okay, cool.

And we'll go walk up there.

Right-- literally right next to it.

I'm assuming this was a house-- that looks like it was a house that completely burned down.

Yeah, so there was actually three houses in this driveway... Oh, wow.

...that burned down, and then this is the fourth.

And it's on slope, about 30 years of fuel coming off the back of this.

And it saw extreme fire behavior, no doubt.

This home is kind of the perfect quintessential example of somebody going and doing the work and the house surviving on its own accord.

This is crazy.

So, this is a house that's still standing.

You said there were three other homes on this lot and in this driveway that completely burned down.

Maiya: These homeowners didn't implement all of the home-hardening measures recommended by IBHS, but they did take the three most critical steps-- roof, vents, and Zone 0.

♪ Keegan: Doing home hardening is not sexy.

It's not like a cool thing that people are posting on their Instagram and talking about to their friends-- "Oh, check this out, I put on this 16th-inch mesh over my vents," right?

Big events like this, there is nothing you can do.

There's nothing I can do.

There's nothing the best resources in the world can do.

Yeah, sure, they can save a few structures here and there.

But the only way to scale is to do that long-term preparation through home mitigation, full stop.

♪ If we fail to prepare our homes and communities, it will not only cost lives.

Faced with increasing losses, insurance companies will leave risky regions.

And no insurance means no mortgage, which means a dramatic decrease in home values, one of the most significant sources of wealth for middle-class families.

Here's what Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said about it in a Senate hearing.

How do you think we should be thinking about the challenges that these events are going to pose to insurance markets and to the overall financial stability of the economy?

Both banks and insurance companies are pulling out of areas, coastal areas, areas where there are a lot of fires.

So, what that is going to mean is that, you know, if you fast forward 10 or 15 years, there are going to be regions of the country where you can't get a mortgage, there won't be ATMs, there won't-- you know, the banks won't have branches, and things like that.

♪ Maiya: It feels like we're facing an unprecedented crisis, but, actually, we've faced and solved the problem of urban firestorms before.

For centuries, massive fires devastated cities around the world.

In 1666, the Great Fire of London destroyed over 13,000 homes and left almost 85% of the city homeless.

And, in some ways, it wasn't so different from today's wildfire-driven disasters.

The fire started during a period of drought and spread rapidly through tightly-packed wooden buildings and narrow streets.

The city burned for four days.

And in the 1871 Great Chicago Fire, we saw something similar.

The reason that Chicago burnt down-- I think it was twice-- was because the buildings were catching each other on fire.

Well, that's what we have now.

We have urban conflagration now.

And the reason that that's stopped happening other than wildfire was that insurers pulled out of Chicago and said, "We're not going to insure this kind of city unless you start implementing building codes."

But cities adapted.

Fire codes became stricter.

Streets were widened to slow fire spread.

Wood gave way to non-combustible materials like brick, stone, and steel.

And by 1920, the age of city-destroying fires was over.

And a similar transformation could happen in California.

I am an engineer and scientist at heart, and so I take this as a challenge and opportunity to look for great materials that are more fire-resistant and to build and design a house that is gonna be a lot more resilient if and when another fire threatens our area.

♪ Maiya: What happened in LA is a tragedy, but it seems clear that fire doesn't have to destroy communities in this way.

The Palisades and Eaton Fire can happen anywhere, but we have the science to protect people and homes.

The biggest takeaway for me is that large-scale home hardening is the key to keeping our community safe from fire.

It's gonna take a lot of work, but I met incredible people in LA who are already making it happen, so I know progress is possible.

We can build more resilient communities and reverse the trend of fire disasters.

The solutions exist.

The challenge now is acting on them before the next firestorm.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪