The Daily
'The Wirecutter Show': The True Cost of Recovering from the L.A. Wildfires, Part 1
11 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What are the key details about the L.A. wildfires and their impact?
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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 timed 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.
So we're coming up kind of 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 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, Altadena, just outside of L.A.,
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Chapter 2: Who are Gregory and Mike, and how did they experience the Eaton Fire?
Exactly a year ago, on January 7th, 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 Altadena. 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 like all of this was covered in ash and debris and everything and to see all the lawns back and to see like people here is all really really exciting. Again we're still kind of just skirting the burn scar but we'll turn right on Altadena Drive and then we'll head in. I'm Christine Cyr-Clessette, 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 L.A. 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 Hahn, who lived through the Eaton Fire, about the things they've learned over the past year, about the unpredictability 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 Guerin, and producer Abigail Keel, who were on the ground with me reporting in L.A. in December 2025.
So now things are starting to look empty.
Yeah. So right when we turn off Lincoln and we start getting into this, the west side of Altadena, now it's more
is this the house that's just being built or is that yeah that's that's a that one's going up that one's going up that one it seems like survived somehow looks like maybe had roof damage only because the roof's two different colors this is extraordinary this is just right you go after a lot of nothing
Yeah, and if you put your hazards on, most people, now that we're in the burn zone, nobody's here unless they want to be. Like there's no real through traffic, so you can kind of drive as slow as you want. But then you have an entire block right here that's like untouched it looks like. Like I can't paint a picture of the negative space with my words well enough to describe like
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Chapter 3: What lessons did Gregory and Mike learn about disaster preparedness?
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.
We'll be right back. And I'm trying to answer some really big and urgent questions about life on a hotter planet. Like, who is most vulnerable to climate change? Should we redesign our cities? Should we be eating differently? What happens to the millions of people who live by the coast as the oceans rise? To make sense of this, I talk to climate scientists, inventors, activists.
Mostly, I document the impact of global warming. And that impact is highly, highly unequal. My colleagues and I are doing our best to answer complicated questions like these, but we can't do that without our subscribers. If you'd like to subscribe, go to nytimes.com slash subscribe. And thank you.
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.
I'm Gregory Hahn. 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. I live in Altadena.
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Chapter 4: How can investing in community help during a disaster?
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. And we both kind of chuckled because we were like, six months after the fire, you will still be mired in a thousand governmental agencies,
And 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 kind of identify the key points of like, this is what you can do because so much felt like, what do we do?
What can we do? And so we reframed it more as like 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 them.
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 Gabrielino El Prieto trail. And I looked up and there was a large sycamore tree branch with a fox on it. And I was looking and I was like, that's the first time I've seen a California fox out here. And 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. And we were just joking because at that time we didn't have any money.
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Chapter 5: What communication strategies are effective in emergency situations?
They especially loved the area of Altadena lining the canyon, a neighborhood called The Meadows. It sits in the mountains far up a winding road and overlooks the San Gabriel Valley, and it backs right up to the Angeles 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 circular 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 just like, 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.
Mike and his wife, Chelsea, moved to L.A. 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.
And 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.
And then our friends introduced us to Altadena and it's this funny little funky, half hippie, half mountain folk, like tiny town on the corner of Los Angeles. And 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 is it. This is great. Yeah, here's all the money we could ever imagine having.
And my wife got the call from our realtor later that day, and she's like, they said yes.
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Chapter 6: What emotional challenges do survivors face after a disaster?
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. And I was always planting things on the fire escape in Brooklyn. And all of a sudden, I felt like I had...
an empty green canvas where everything could grow. So we had dozens of fruit trees. We had a lemon tree, a bear's lime tree, a pomegranate tree, apricot tree, pluot 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'd 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 of my house. Where these things are, those are the corners. This was the front door. You walked right in.
Fireplace was here. Had a little entryway table here. It had a, the guys drive around because there's no, 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. Like that little brick wall is non-structural. That was just a garden wall outside of the house.
And so there's this like front yard here where stuff is actually starting to grow back. The olive tree is growing back. This used to be like a big old olive tree.
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Chapter 7: How did the fire change the community dynamics in Altadena?
One of the rose bushes 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 was 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 Altadena. 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 kind of 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. And we used to walk our dog up here.
There's like next to no sidewalks in Altadena, but there's also not a lot of traffic because it has this kind of 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,
Altadena had a draw, and I'd like you to explain in your own words what that draw was for you to move to Altadena. For me, it was community. The community of Altadena was the people who lived on the same block the friends we had who'd lived in Altadena 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 Altadena folks would show up and we'd all let our dogs run around and catch up and ask about, I don't know, the weather and who's seen the peacocks and who had a bear sleep in their backyard.
And it had this kind of 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 like certain rules and laws that didn't apply. So there were people who owned horses and they would just take the horses walking down our streets.
And that's not something that you'd imagine seeing when you wake up to take your dog for a walk in the morning.
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Chapter 8: What actionable steps can listeners take to prepare for a disaster?
But I would walk my dog with a guy who walked his horse. The west side of Altadena, 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 Altadena 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 Altadena. 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 Altadena 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. And I had memories of strong community, like block parties and parents having everybody on speed dial. And somehow that survived in Altadena.
The neighbors are immediately warm. The first month we were there, we were invited 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 Altadena. 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.
The Eaton Fire
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 L.A. 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 Didion wrote about the Santa Anas in an essay first published in 1967. She wrote, quote, The violence and unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles. Accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds show us how close to the edge we are.
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