Transcript of 'The Wirecutter Show': The True Cost of Recovering from the L.A. Wildfires, Part 1

Hey, everyone. It's Rachel. We wanted to share a show from our colleagues over at Wirecutter today from their podcast. It's part of a three-part series that they've made, and it's time to the anniversary of the devastating fires in Los Angeles a year ago. But it covers things that are relevant to everyone because with climate change, severe weather, disasters, they're, of course, becoming worse and more frequent everywhere. This series, it focuses on two of Wirecutter's writers who were affected by the fires, and it looks at these kinds of disasters in all sorts of really specific and important ways. How to be prepared, what you should keep in your house, all sorts of lessons you only learn when you personally live through a tragedy like that. Again, this show is part of a three-part series, and for the other shows, look for the Wirecutter podcast wherever you listen. Okay, here's their episode.

We're coming up the west side of the burn scar now. But you can also still see the difference between the mountains that are green and the mountains that are burned.

This is my colleague, Michael Cohen.

My name is Michael Bradley Cohen. I am a deals writer at Wirecutter. For all of those who follow along over Black Friday.

Michael goes by Mike, and he used to live in the neighborhood we're driving through right now, Altadina, just outside of LA. Exactly a year ago, on January seventh, 2025, the Palisades and Eaton fires erupted. They would ultimately become among the most destructive in California's history, eventually burning down more than 16,000 structures, including nearly 6,000 homes in Altadina. Mike's home was one of them.

I lived in Altadena. It was the first home we ever bought. It has gotten so much better already. And even driving up Lincoln, all of this was covered in ash and debris and everything. And to see all the lawns back and to see people here is all really exciting. Again, we're still just skirting the burn scar, but we'll turn right on Alta Dina Drive, and then we'll head in.

I'm Christine Seer-Claeset, and this is The Wirecutter Show. Today's episode is the first in a three-part series. It's an expansion of what we normally do on this show. We're going to focus on the disaster collectively known as the LA Wildfires. We'll be talking about some specific pieces of advice in the context of emergency preparedness, but we're also going to hear the human side of this story. We'll talk with Mike and another colleague of ours, Gregory Rihann, who lived through the Eaton fire, about the things they've learned over the past year, about the unpredictable of natural disasters, and just how long, arduous, emotional, and expensive the road to recovery can be. You'll also hear the voices of my executive producer and co-host, Rosie Garen, and producer Abigail Keel, who were on the ground with me reporting in LA in December 2025.

So now things are starting to look empty.

Yeah. So right when we turn off Lincoln and we start getting into the west side of Altadina, now it's more…

Is this the house that's just being built or is that…

Yeah, that one's going up, that one's going up, that It seems like survived somehow. It looks like maybe it had roof damage only because the roof's two different colors.

This is extraordinary.

This is just lot after lot after lot of nothing. Yeah. If you put your hazards on, most people… Now Now that we're in the burn zone, nobody's here unless they want to be. There's no real through traffic, so you can drive as slow as you want.

But then you have an entire block right here. It looks like untouched, it looks like.

I can't paint a picture of the negative space with my words well enough to describe. They're supposed to be houses and people and kids on bikes and people walking dogs and somebody watering their lawn. And instead, it is this weird mishmash of a ghost town, a burned shell. And then every once in a while, a stretch of houses.

We're dedicating three special episodes to this conversation because, frankly, there is a lot to learn, and not just for people who live in Los Angeles or other wildfire prone areas, but for anyone who might face a natural disaster and wonder, what can I do to prepare? At Wirecutter, we offer advice and recommend gear to prepare for natural disasters. Unfortunately, climate change is making these weather events more frequent, more intense, and more unpredictable. Just Just in the last year, we've seen cataclysmic floods in the Texas Hill country, deadly tornadoes in many parts of the US, and increasing flash floods across the country, just to name a few. Mike and Gregory lived through a disaster. And because the Wirecutter ethos runs deep, they were thinking the whole time like true Wirecutter writers, people who consider the details, who take notes on the lessons they could share with others. They came through it with guidance that could apply to any natural disaster, like what you need to understand about home insurance in case you ever really need to use it, or the ways you can invest in your home and community now, wherever you live, that may pay off in an emergency a lot more than you think.

Through this series, we hope to highlight the hard-won lessons they've learned to help you think through ways to prepare for disasters that you might face. We'll be right back. About six months ago, I helped edit a series of articles for Wirecutter about emergency preparedness. We covered topics like how to build a personalized disaster prep kit, what to keep in your pantry for emergencies, and how to shop for a generator. Many Wirecutter writers and editors live in Los Angeles and experienced last year's wildfires firsthand. Although there had been a lot of coverage of the fire's destruction, our colleagues wondered if there was anything we could add to the conversation to shed some light on the complexities of surviving and moving through the aftermath. That's when our colleague, Gregory Han, reached out.

I'm Gregory Han. I'm a contributor at Wirecutter, but also a design writer and co-author of three books, the latest with my wife about trees, previously about mushrooms rooms. I live in Altadina.

Gregory was born and raised in Los Angeles. His home is still standing, but it was severely polluted by the fire, and so he and his wife were displaced for months. We asked him to work with Mike on a story about their collective experiences in the aftermath of the fires.

We started just having conversations about what we were going through.

Yeah, I think one of the first things that we really connected on was almost reframing the scope of the article that at one point was how to rebuild in the six months after a fire. We both chuckled because we were like, Six months after the fire, you will still be mired in a thousand governmental agencies. We were in the midst of those, not in a place or position where we could speak to with perspective what was working, what wasn't working.

I knew so many of my neighbors and people within the community were completely lost. We really did identify the key points of, this is what you can do, because so much felt like, what do we do? What can we do?

We reframed it more as things we wish we had done or known better or practiced before the fire. Something everyone can read before any disaster happens. Here are some really actionable steps that you can take, and we hope you never have to deal with There are many things you can and should do to prepare for a disaster, like making an evacuation plan and packing a go bag.

You can read Gregory and Mike's advice in their article from July, linked in our show notes. But there are some lessons they've learned that they never could have seen coming. To understand those lessons, we need to head back in time to get to know these guys a little better, to hear how they came to live in Altadena and what they lost. Gregory and his wife, Emily, never thought they'd be able to afford a home in Los Angeles. They're both freelance writers. Gregory covers design and has written for places like Dwell and Apartment Therapy. So he was always looking at beautiful houses and thinking, Wow, wouldn't it be incredible if I could own my own home someday? He and his wife wanted something surrounded by trees, a true oasis.

The year before we found our home, we were hiking the trail. There's a Gabilino El Prieto Trail. I looked up and there was a large sycamore tree branch with a fox on it. I was looking in, I was like, That's the first time I've seen a California fox out here. Then I looked to the right on the canyon, and there was all these homes lining the canyon. I was like, I want to live up there one day. We were just joking because at that time, we didn't have any money.

In 2021, Gregory's mom got sick. After she died, he was devastated. He and his sister had to navigate managing her affairs. They ended up selling her home, and suddenly it seemed he and Emily could afford a down payment on a house of their own. And they started their search in Altadina. They especially loved the area of Altadina, Lining the Canyon, a neighborhood called the Meadows. It sits in the far up a winding road and overlooks the San Gabriel Valley, and it backs right up to the Angelies National Forest. One day, a house came on the market that had been owned and built by a mid-century industrial designer named Niels Diffrient. It had five giant sets of glass sliding doors on one side of the house. It was dripping with mid-century details. It was perfect.

The first thing that I was like, Oh, my gosh, I made it in life. It's a a regular driveway. It's a small one, and it's one that my truck can barely navigate. But it was really the trees, the oak trees that are surrounding the neighborhood. They're mature, they're beautiful. They're part of our home.

They placed a bid and crossed their fingers. In 2022, after a lot of back and forth, they moved in.

It was going to be our forever home, and hopefully, it will be our forever home.

My Mike and his wife, Chelsea, moved to LA in 2022 from the East Coast. Mike was raised in New Jersey and was used to renting tiny apartments in New York City for what felt like way too much money.

I think when we were living in New York, we felt like we'll never be able to buy a place that we would want to live in. That was part of what led us to California, was how much more we could get for the money that we had.

Mike and Chelsea also came into some money for a down payment a bit unexpectedly. When the company she worked for and where she had equity was sold. Mike says they bid on something like 24 homes but kept getting priced out.

Then our friends introduced us to Altadina, and it's this funny little funky, half hippie, half mountain folk, tiny town on the corner of Los Angeles. We actually went and saw the house that we ended up buying, and we didn't even take a video. We just walked in. We were like, This This is it. This is great. Yeah, here's all the money we could ever imagine having. My wife got the call from our realtor later that day, and she was like, They said yes. My wife dropped the phone.

In May of 2022, they moved into a two-bedroom, one bathroom bungalow, built in the 1920s. Mike says it wasn't big enough to feel like a forever home, but it was a really nice start.

I always wanted to plant trees wherever we would end up living. I was always planting things on the fire escape in Brooklyn. All of a sudden, I felt like I had an empty green canvas where everything could grow. We had dozens of fruit trees. We had a lemon tree, a bear's lime tree, a pomegranate tree, apricot tree, pluote tree, apple tree, pear tree, clementine tree, a bunch of orange trees, and it felt amazing. You guys want to come into my house? I love to, yeah. Bring out that picture so you can be reminded of what it used to look like.

The day we visited the site of Mike's former home in December, it was warm and sunny. Most of the large trees on his block had been burned or cut down after the fire, so there wasn't a lot of shade. We could see a big dirt square in the middle of the property.

So this was the footprint side of my house, where these things are? Yeah. Those are the corners. This was the front door. You walked right in. Fireplace was here. Had a little entryway table here. The guys drive around because there's not a lot of restaurants or anything anymore. So the few construction sites that have people going, the taco trucks go to them, which is great. So this is pretty much the whole thing. That little brick wall is non-structural. That was just a garden wall outside of the house. And so there's this front yard here where stuff is actually starting to grow back. The olive tree is growing back. This used to be a big old olive tree. One of the rosebushes is growing back. Remember the orange tree that I showed you guys? That little guy is growing back. Bear's lime tree is starting to grow back. There is a persimmon tree, a lemon tree.

Standing in the middle of Mike's plot, the neighborhood felt pretty empty. There were a few brand new buildings a ways off, one or two structures that had survived the fire in the surrounding blocks, and a lot of space. Even still, it was easy to see the appeal of Altadina. People's landscaping had grown back. We passed a little bench for kids to wait for school. The house numbers were still painted on the curb. I could imagine the neighborhood that he told us had been here. Lots of cute little homes close together, shaded by trees, kids running around on Mike's cul-de-sac street. It was clearly emotional for Mike to be back, even almost a year later.

We used to walk our dog up here. There's next to no sidewalks in Altadina, but there's also not a lot of traffic. Because it has this funny little small town feel. So everybody just walks their dogs on the road. And the mountains used to be like, gorgeous in the morning and covered in green.

It sounds like for both of you, Altadina had a draw, and I'd like you to explain in your own words what that draw was for you to move to Altadina.

For me, it was community. The community of Altadina was the people who lived on the same block, the friends we had who'd lived in Altadina for years, who lived walking distance. It was Farnsworth Park, which was the park at the top of the hill that we would take the dog to every night. And unofficially, of course, it is not a dog park, but about 20 different other Altadina folks would show up and we'd all let our dogs run around and catch up and ask about at an the weather and who's seen the peacocks and who had a bear sleep in their backyard. And it had this mix of old and new. And there were people who had been there for generations. There were people who, because it's an unincorporated town, It meant that there were certain rules and laws that didn't apply. There were people who owned horses, and they would just take the horses walking down our streets. That's not something that you'd imagine seeing when you wake up to take your dog for a walk in the morning. But I would walk my dog with a guy who walked his horse.

The West side of Altadina, where Mike's house was and where the fire hit the hardest, had historically been a middle-class Black community. Many homeowners of color had been pushed into West Altadina in the mid-20th century by a discriminatory bank lending practice called redlining. Nearby white neighborhoods like Pasadena used this process to keep those residents out. A disproportionate number of homes destroyed in the fire were in historically Black Altadina. Over the years, these families stayed and passed down their homes. This contributed to the racial diversity of the neighborhood Mike and Gregory moved into, with many Black, Asian-American, and Latino families.

There's just this diversity of ways to live life that are evident across Altadina that I was always drawn to. I think also the neighborhood that we found felt very much like the neighborhood I grew up in, in the North Valley. I had memories of strong community, like block parties and parents having everybody on speed dial. Somehow that survived in Altadina. The neighbors are immediately warm. The first month We were there. We were inviting to people's backyard parties, birthday parties. We didn't know these people, but they were like, You're our neighbor now.

Gregory and Mike both felt lucky to have landed in Altadina. It's a community, they said, that looked out for each other. And that community would become an invaluable resource during and after the Eaton fire. We'll talk about that when we come back.

There's something, as somebody who's grown up, I've just always been very uneasy about their arrival.

Although many people might associate fire as the central problem of the LA wildfires, extreme wind had just as much to do with the disaster. In early January, 2025, the Santa Ana winds peaked in Los Angeles. These extreme winds and dry conditions caused small fires that may have otherwise been contained to spread quickly. Joan Didian wrote about the Santa Anas in an essay first published in 1967. She wrote, The violence and unpredictable ability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles. Accentuate its its permanence, its unreliability. The winds show us how close to the edge we are.

I was definitely on edge prior to the wind arriving, and I was aware of the severity of that possible weather situation because of a local young meteorologist who gave microclimate reports of just Altadina, and he warned people maybe a week in advance. His name is Edward McGregor. He's an amazing human being. He warned everybody. I was already like, Okay, the wind has arrived.

Gregory's plan was to evacuate, and he wasn't necessarily going to wait for an order. The Meadows, his neighborhood, can only be reached by one road. He knew that road could become clogged if people panicked, and he knew he could be trapped if anything were to happen to it. Once Gregory felt how strong the winds were blowing on January sixth, he decided to leave.

Everybody had asked, Oh, did you leave because you were worried about fire? I was like, No, I was worried about wind. I'd grown up with the Santa Ana's blowing so hard, the gusts breaking windows. My childhood home, my bedroom window broke on me once and in our living room once, and I thought, We have 10 sliding door windows around the house. We're just encased in glass. So I was like, Well, let's just be a little careful and leave.

On the afternoon of January sixth, Gregory, Emily, and their two kittens left Altadina with enough clothes for one overnight. He took a laptop and some cat food.

And we thought we'd be gone for a day, maybe two days. Before I realized there was a fire in our neighborhood, we could see the Palisades on fire. Then I looked at news stories and said, Oh, wait, Alta Dina is on fire. It was on the other side of where we live. I was like, Okay, That's scary, but I think we'll be okay. But then as the day progressed, the fire completely changed its direction, and I became very aware that we were not going to be returning home. I knew I had to be really cautious because my wife was recovering from cancer and surgery, and we had these two kittens, and I was like, I wanted to get back home. I wanted to look. There's a degree of curiosity, of morbid curiosity in a disaster. You want to see what's happening, even if it put you in danger. I had to squash that back and say, No, we're going to just hole up here, be safe and monitor it from afar.

Gregory and Emily wouldn't move back into their home until the weekend of July fourth, almost six months later. Mike didn't have to evacuate his home in Altadina because he wasn't there. He and his wife were on vacation in Chocones, Mexico, with some family friends. They saw the news about the winds and kept a close eye on a WhatsApp thread with their neighbors. That afternoon, people were talking about the weather, but no one seemed panicked yet.

Like, someone sent a picture of all the avocados that had fallen off of their tree because of the winds, and they were like, My backyard is made of guacamole. And then someone else sent a picture like, Oh, my fence came down. Well, it was definitely time for a new fence. The Palisades fire started first, and there was in a very guilty, weird way, a relief, almost. Like, Oh, a fire did happen, but it didn't happen to us. And then the fire started in Altadina. And someone shared with us this app, Watchduty, and We all downloaded it and we were all glued to it because it had the most up to date information about how big the fire was and where it had reached. And then quickly it turned into, who is going to be the first to say that they're evacuating. On text chains, on Instagram, on Facebook, WhatsApp groups, people were all saying, Hey, we live around here. We're thinking of evacuating. Has anybody else thought about that? And then other people would be like, Oh, we live even further from the foothills. We're already evacuated.

In an emergency, LA County is responsible for sending out evacuation orders via cell phone in Altadina. Almost immediately after the Eaton fire started in the nearby foothills, an evacuation order went out to parts of Altadina. But in West Altadina, those evacuation orders didn't go out until seven hours after the fire started. And for reasons we still don't know, Mike says he and his neighbors never got the warnings.

Somehow Eastern Altadina did in certain parts, and Pasadena was put on alert for, I think it's get ready, set, and go. It's like green, yellow, red. And they were very clear in some of the instructions, don't try to evacuate before your neighborhood needs evacuated because then you might be clogging the streets for other people who do need to evacuate. Luckily, everyone on our block had evacuated and everyone was safe, but no one had actually received any of the emergency alerts before it happened.

Mike's neighbor, Jamie, was staying at Mike's house to look after his dog, Una. Mike and his wife encouraged Jamie to leave in the early evening of January seventh.

He's a long-time Altadenian. He's a lovely old hippie gentleman who told us, he said, You guys are New Yorkers. You don't understand. This is a lot of hoopla. It's just a lot of wind. We went to bed in Mexico, surrendering to the fact that we would find out whether our house was still there and that we couldn't get our dog sitter to leave. We got woken up in the middle of the night by by our neighbor who was across the street waiting in her car for her evacuation orders that never came. She was the one who called and said, Are you in the house? The lights are on. She's like, You got to get out. Your yard is on fire. Your house is on fire.

Mike's neighborhood no longer had power. His lights were on thanks to solar panels he had on his roof, but he couldn't call his dog sitter. He did have a doorbell camera and a doggy cam, and he immediately tried to log on to reach his dog sitter that way.

When we tune into the doggy cam, the fire alarms are already going off. They're blaring in the house. The house is filled with smoke, and I'm shouting into my phone, Wake up. The house is on fire. Jamie, I'm whistling for my dog. She actually comes into view first, and she's barking at the fact that the house is filled in smoke, and she can hear my voice coming from somewhere. Jamie wakes up, takes a look around and says, We're safe for now, but we're leaving. We got to watch him exit that one camera and walk out the front door on the doorbell camera. He only lived about a block up the street, so they just walked up to his car, and then they eventually drove away. And then my wife and I just sat in bed and watched the feed of the house. As it filled with smoke and the flames came through the windows and the sparks just poured off the roof and the trees in the yard burned. And we felt so helpless. And it felt so unreal. There's nothing we could do, no one we could call. And we just watched until the The whole screen just filled with smoke and black and flashes of flames, and then eventually the feed cut out.

Mike's home was completely destroyed by the Eaton fire. His dog, his dog's sitter, and his neighbor who called him all survived, thankfully. But some people in his neighborhood did not. Of the 19 people that died in the Eton fire, all but one of them were in Western Altadena.

If you were telling someone who had never been through what you've been through, who has never experienced a natural disaster, who's never experienced losing their home?

Is there any advice you would give someone?

Two answers to this On a personal side of things, it would be when you're going through a disaster like this, it tells you really quickly what is most important and what is worth packing in a bag. And that's probably a small bag. From a practical standpoint, when a natural disaster is happening, if you're looking around for the people who know what to do, they might not be there. So you have to be that person for yourself. If you think of disasters like a plane crash or when the subway gets stalled and they say, Please wait for organized instructions from uniformed crew members. In a disaster, it's probably happening so fast that there aren't uniform informed crew members with organized instructions. So you have to be in charge of your own survival.

Mike says the fire was a terrifying wake-up call for him and for many people in his neighborhood that emergency services aren't always there in an emergency. But, he says, one big lesson has stood out to him over the last year. He is so grateful that he knows his neighbors.

The Silver that I remember are all the ways that different people in our community have shown up for each other. I found out that my house was, in fact, a total loss because a friend that I made at the dog park drove by the next morning and sent us a video of our house still smoldering. I got introduced to a nonprofit that helped us get a grant because a friend of ours up the street also applied Because a friend of theirs who was their neighbor also applied. We look out for each other or we're trying because nobody else is going to do it for us. That's really been the silver lining.

Gregory, from your experience, What in the same way are some pieces of advice that you would give someone who maybe hasn't experienced something like this before?

There's a level investment that you need to make within your own immediate community that will become very, very valuable almost immediately in regards to knowing information, because information gets cut off so quickly in a disaster. Instead of expecting other people to be there for you, I think it's important to prepare to be there for other people, too. And if we all operate that way, then we're all going to help each other get through it. I don't think the lesson here is to become a prepper. I became a prepper in a certain regard, but what I really found out was I had so many gaps of knowledge, and people didn't know who lived across the street had knowledge, and we helped each other all throughout this process, and we continued to help each other through this process. So that is a resource you can't buy, but it's something you can invest in by just saying hello and speaking to your neighbors and connecting in a way that may pay off in a life-death situation.

This is Gregory and Mike's first big lesson a year out from the Eaton Fire. Invest in your community. A good First step is to create an easy way to communicate with your neighbors. This could be a text chain or a group chat through something like WhatsApp or GroupMe. This might naturally evolve through whatever you're doing in your daily life. Mike's neighborhood thread started as a group of local dog owners before the fire. You could also join a volunteer organization in your community. After the fires, Gregory joined a group to do brush cleanup. Working alongside his neighbors for hours at a time has helped deepen his connection with the people who live close to him. The next lesson Gregory and Mike learned, or maybe one they're still learning, is about recovery. What do you actually we need to think about and do once the immediate disaster is over in order to begin piecing your life back together? That's what we're going to talk about next time.

They will ask you for the list. This is the list of every single thing in your home if you were to take your home and dump it out. Most people can't tell you everything that's in their backpack right now if you were to dump all of it out and itemize it. Imagine having to do that with every single a drawer in your entire home.

This series was reported and hosted by Christine Sears-Claeset. The Wirecutter Show is executive-produced by me, Rosie Garren, and produced by Abigail Keel. This series was fact-checked by Cole Lewison, and the audio was mixed by Katie McMurren. Engineering support from Maddie Mazziello and nick Pitman. Our interview with Gregory and Mike was recorded by Tim Moore at York Recording in Los Angeles. Original music for this series by Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, Alicia Baetup, Ron Némistou, Katherine Anderson, and Pat McCusker. Special thanks to Harry Sawyers and Jenn Guschou for editing Gregory's original article, and to Daniel Ramirez from New York Times Audio. Cliff Levy is Wirecutter's Deputy Publisher and General Manager. Ben Frumann is Wirecutter's Editor-in-Chief. We thank you so much for listening.