As tens of thousands of Los Angeles County residents spent the last two weeks trying to stay alive and save their homes from burning, there was little time to consider how these fires would change the region.
But as the flames die down, a massive challenge lies ahead: picking up the pieces and forging a path forward.
In a two-hour special hosted by Margaret Carrero and Charles Feldman, L.A. leaders, residents, and first responders looked back at how the Palisades and Eaton fires ripped through communities – and forward to the immensely complicated questions about how to rebuild.
Listen here:
The residents who survived the fire
Kalima Blue Ford, who lived with her 98-year-old mother in Altadena, was among the thousands who lost their homes in the Eaton Fire. She said her family had lived in the house for over 50 years.
“We have so many family memories, and the thing about us is, you know, in time of crisis we usually turn to each other and support each other,” she said. “But we're all in the same situation because we all lived in Altadena, and so now we have to turn to our greater community for support and rebuilding and, you know, and comfort.”
Ford said her family plans to rebuild their home on the same property, which she believes their insurance policy will cover.
“We’re firm on rebuilding because if we sell, number one, they're gonna try to purchase our land for little or nothing, but then we’ll be priced out,” she said. “So I’m telling everyone, rebuild, rebuild, rebuild.”
KNX New reporter Nataly Tavidian also lost her childhood home, where her mother and brother still lived, in the Eaton Fire. She walked us through one of the toughest days of her life.
“It was four or five in the morning, and the sun wasn’t up yet, and my friend at KCAL was in that neighborhood – she gets into work at three – and she called me,” Tavidian recalled. “She said, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Nat.’”
Tavidian waited for her mother and brother to wake up so she could break the news that the house was gone.
“That's when my life started flashing before my eyes,” she said. “I'm having my own moments of all the birthdays and all the graduations and all the parties and everything, every sweet 16 that ever happened in that house.”
The reporters who covered the disaster from the frontlines
Covering the fires was an intense experience for the KNX News staff, with reporter Emily Valdez calling the scene in Altadena a “nightmare.”
“It was never-ending,” said. The amount of just people, you know, being evacuated, running in desperation, the chaos, the flames there, the active fire, the smoke, the nowhere to turn, it was crazy.”
Reporter Pete Demetriou, who’s covered wildfires in Southern California for decades, said he realized the Palisades Fire was going to be catastrophic as soon as he opened his front door that morning.
“When I stepped out of my home in Santa Monica and looked over to the Palisades and I already saw the loom up at 10,000 ft, and they said the fire's only just started, I said, if it’s loomed up at this level, one, we have a lot of fuel,” he said. “Number two, there’s a lot of wind driving it. We’ve got real serious problems here.”
KNX News’ director of news and programming Alex Silverman pulled triple duty during the fires: guiding reporters to hot spots, feeding them up-to-date information, and reporting from the fire lines himself – all while worrying about the safety of his staff.
“We had Pete Demetriou driving down Pacific Coast Highway with flames on either side,” he said. “Hearing that on the radio, knowing my responsibility, in part, is to make sure that people are okay, you know, it makes your heart skip a few beats.”
The leaders who will chart the path forward
Rebuilding two historic neighborhoods could very well become the most complicated public works project in the history of Southern California.
But Steve Soboroff, the businessman and civic leader tasked with overseeing the recovery efforts in the Pacific Palisades, sees his task as a simple one: building everything back exactly where it was before, as quickly as possible.
“I’m here to rebuild, not reimagine, not to look forward 500 years for the next tragedy,” he said.
Soboroff said there will be discussions with insurance companies about changes that can be made so the rebuilt houses are less vulnerable to a future disaster, but residents who want to make substantial changes to the architecture of their homes can “go back to the city just like you’re doing a new project.”
As for arguments from environmentalists that homes shouldn’t be rebuilt in such fire-prone areas at all, Soboroff said, “that’s not my issue.”
On the other side of the county, L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger said that many Altadena residents, like Kalina Blue Ford, fear being pushed out as the neighborhood rebuilds.
“When I talk to people in Altadena, they want to build back to the way it was – but better, stronger,” she said. “It's important as leaders – both at county level, state level, and the federal level – that we work to ensure that every single individual, no matter what your socioeconomic class is, is provided an opportunity to build.”
There are two key voices that didn’t join KNX News’ special: L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom. KNX News repeatedly reached out to both leaders, but neither agreed to be interviewed or face tough questions about preparation, resource deployment, and budget cuts leading up to the fires.
However, the man who ran against Bass for mayor in 2022 – real estate developer Rick Caruso – was eager to discuss his vision for the future. Caruso, who built the Palisades Village, said that “what’s predictable can many times be prevented.”
“We know that we had brush that had been growing for 40-plus years in the area,” he said. “We know we had a fire in this area 6 years ago, in the Brentwood area, so we got warnings a couple of days ahead of time that there was going to be quote-unquote catastrophic winds. And so I think a lot of it could have been mitigated or maybe even prevented.”
Caruso said there should be an investigation into the city’s lack of preparation before the fires to understand what went wrong and “prevent it from happening again.”
Listen to the full two-hour special above.
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