Michael Cohen

And instead it is kind of this weird mishmash of a ghost town, a burned out 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 in the last year, we've seen cataclysmic floods in the Texas Hill Country, deadly tornadoes in many parts of the U.S., 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.

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 Hahn reached out.

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.

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.