Lisa Sweetingham sent her 13-year-old daughter to school on January 7, 2025, and crawled back into bed. She was aware of the red flag warnings issued for her Palisades neighborhood but didn’t think much of the fire risk; she was sick and wanted rest.
A few hours later, her husband woke her and said there was a fire on the ridge. They needed to leave.
“We’d never evacuated before. We just didn’t take it that seriously,” said Sweetingham, who grew up in the area and graduated from Palisades High School.
She walked outside and stood with neighbors watching the fire in the distance. Planes flew overhead, dropping water on the flames, with little impact.
“In the 20 minutes that we stood there watching, it seemed like the fire had doubled,” she remembered.
She and her husband quickly gathered their pets, computers and passports. At 1 p.m., Sweetingham went to collect her daughter from an evacuation point, while her husband drove to his mother’s house nearby to make sure she evacuated safely, along with her cat. They all met up at a hotel in Westwood, where they assumed they’d spend the night, then return home when the evacuation orders lifted.
Sitting at dinner, Sweetingham was on a text chain with neighbors who had stayed behind and reported that no fire engines were anywhere to be seen. She opened the Ring app on her phone and watched in real time as her home security camera showed flickering flames on a neighbor’s roof.
“I shared the video with her and I said, ‘I’m pretty sure this is your roof,’” Sweetingham recalled. “I was the one who let them know that their house was on fire.”
Ten minutes later, Sweetingham’s Ring camera went offline. She knew the fire had reached her door.
“It was honestly devastating,” she said. “We spent a couple of weeks just in shock.”
Sweetingham’s home and her mother-in-law’s house were two of the 6,845 structures destroyed in the Palisades fire. Twelve people were killed. Sweetingham, an investigative journalist and author, as well as a 2001 graduate of the Columbia Journalism School, is shocked by the institutional systems that failed to protect her community—from overwhelmed fire departments, to a lack of water, to a mayor who was out of town when the fires broke out.
“I don’t think it’s fair to put the onus on homeowners,” she said, wondering who will be responsible to protect the neighborhood the next time a fire breaks out. “If the fire department does not even show up, or put out previous fires properly, it can’t be on us.”
Hence her question for State of the Planet: Is there a city, state or country that is actually prepared for wildfires and doing it well?
“Honestly, no single place has ‘solved’ it,” wrote Jeffrey Schlegelmilch in an email to State of the Planet. Schlegelmilch is the faculty director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia Climate School. Schlegelmilch previously said that rebuilding the Palisades will necessitate a “whole of society approach,” meaning it will require a combination of government policy and homeowner cooperation to rebuild resiliently. He agreed with Sweetingham and added: “If our politicians and leadership can’t get their act together to be there for their constituents when they need them the most, it begs the question on why we have them in these roles at all.”
Eighteen months after the disaster, less than 1% of the destroyed structures in the Palisades have been rebuilt and received certificates of occupancy, according to the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety. The City of Los Angeles published a “Wildfire Resilience Planning” report that focuses on vegetation management, the water system, the electrical power system and evacuation planning to improve traffic capacity in the event of a fire. But the reality of how well the Palisades is rebuilding and preparing for the next climate disaster is “mixed,” according to Schlegelmilch.
“On the positive side, California has strengthened its [building] codes, and the city commissioned serious resilience and infrastructure planning. But the ‘whole-of-society’ part is where things tend to fall short,” he wrote.
As the city works to implement projects outlined in its Wildfire Resilience Planning report, there are things individuals can do to make their homes more fire-resistant.
“Home hardening is, without question, the most important thing a homeowner can do,” said Lisa Dale, a senior lecturer in climate who researches wildfire at the Columbia Climate School.
Dale suggested moving wood piles away from residences, installing non-flammable roofs, and using fire-resilient materials to build homes. But home hardening works best if entire communities apply the techniques, because it only takes one vulnerable home to ignite and put the rest of the neighborhood at risk.
“There’s a lot of grant funding that’s only available at the neighborhood scale,” said Dale. She added that, while there are a lot of programs that can support individual homes, a community should seek group funding to support home hardening as a collective action solution.
Today, Sweetingham is living in her third rental home as she and her husband slowly rebuild her mother-in-law’s house into a place they can all live together. They are considering installing double-paned glass, eliminating eaves that could catch embers and possibly using a special Japanese wood that is fire-resistant.
“A lot of it feels like theater,” said Sweetingham. “It feels like what we need to do to secure insurance.” But she noted that some neighbors are exploring similar rebuilding solutions: “I think they also feel the same way I do, which is like, ‘Let’s do this.’”
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