Episode 2: Resiliency and Rebuilding

Julia Ehlert Nair: Welcome to the second episode of After the Fires, from the Caltech Science Exchange. I'm Julia Ehlert Nair, a writer and science communicator at Caltech. In this limited series, find out what scientists at Caltech and JPL are learning in the wake of the LA fires, as they're learning it. Today, you'll hear from an expert on natural disasters who the New York Times once called "the Beyonce of earthquakes," Lucy Jones.

Lucy Jones: I'm Lucy Jones. I'm the founder of the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society, as well as the research associate here at Caltech—and background in seismology now working across all aspects of disasters and their impact on society.

Julia: For decades, Lucy has been the person Southern Californians turn to for straightforward, no-frills information and perspective after an earthquake.

"Dr. Lucy Jones retired today. She was one of the most popular people on earth—whenever it shook."

"In the LA area, if you go all of Southern California we've have a few fives like down on the San Jacinto fault, but for the LA metropolitan area, this is the first five since Chino Hills."

"Jones says the quake itself was less than a second long, but likely felt longer depending on where you were."

"I think those of us who felt it are surprised at how long the duration was given the magnitude."

Julia: So, why did we go to a seismologist to talk about recovery from fires? Lucy's expertise on quakes has given her unique insight into many other emergencies. She researches and advocates for smart personal behaviors and public policies to prepare for and recover from all forms of natural disasters.

The lessons on recovery Lucy has learned studying earthquakes apply to the January 2025 firestorm as well. And it turns out one of the most important factors influencing resilience and recovery is community.

Lucy: Community is really important to human beings. We feel better when we're with other people, and we will take risks that we aren't willing to take just for ourselves. You know, researchers have looked at how communities recover from disasters, and the most important factor is something they call social capital, which is the value you derive from your interchange with other people and places with high social capital where people are connected to each other are the places that recover from the disasters. And we've seen it here in the immediate aftermath of the fires, the way people are really stepping up. People want to do something for those who've suffered. And there's such an outpouring of connectedness.

Julia: Lucy is experiencing all this firsthand, not only as a researcher, but also as a neighbor. She and her family live close to the burn area, near Caltech's campus, and like so many in the community, many of her friends, neighbors, and colleagues were directly affected.

Lucy: You know, when we think about risk or any sort of natural hazard, there's competing parts of our brain. There's the analytical side, but there's also an emotional side of the brain that evolved as we became humans. We need to feel safe, right? We are driven by that. The one exception is when we are out to help other people. You know, as we evolved, the people who would take risks, who would go out and defend the tribe against the invaders, we honor them, the, the warriors, the first responders that would take the risk to themselves to protect others. So, it's the one exception we have to our drive to really feel safe. And so, we feel more empowered, we feel better, we feel part of a community when we do something for someone else in the face of the disaster.

"We are also seeing Angelenos, southern Californians rise up to help each other out.

"I wanna show you what's happening here. Just take a look around me. We're talking everything from items for babies to clothing. In fact, this is happening round the clock."

"I came to get some supplies and clothing. We were displaced—due to the fire, so, I lost everything."

"We're trying to set up resources for them to be able to stay on their properties and rebuild."

"This new collaborative coalition is made up of 80 organizations from the community immediately ready to aid from rent money, permits to build, to even furnishing your temporary housing."

"We're answering and immediately solving unmet needs."

Julia: Lucy has studied natural disasters and their impact on individuals and communities for decades. "Natural hazards are inevitable; human catastrophes are not," she says in her book The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do about Them). As a framework for thinking about disasters, researchers talk about the three 'R's.

Lucy: That's resilience, response and recovery. Resilience is what you've done before the disaster. So that when it does happen, you can come back more quickly. Response is what happens right when the disaster happens and the, you know, the, the firemen coming out and the cleanup of the toxic waste and all of those sort of things. Recovery is the process of coming back. And we used to talk about it, of coming back to what we were before. But in a time of climate change, we need to be talking about coming back to something that's more resilient than what we had before. So that we can take the fire that comes along.

Julia: Lucy argues that, historically, governments from the local level on up have not always given each of the three 'R's the same attention.

Lucy: These three 'R's of a disaster are treated very differently within our political system. And at the federal level we have legislation for response. It's called the Stafford Act. And it governs the participation of FEMA and its operation with the state emergency managers who in fact actually do the response with, with funding from FEMA. But the resilience part mitigation is very spottily covered. We have no overarching plan. And recovery is also similarly not legislated. It is done ad hoc six months after the disaster, FEMA leaves the Housing and Urban Development takeover. And I think as our disasters become more common, we need to look as a society writ large, how do we wanna handle it? Doing only response is inadequate. The re resilience and the recovery have to be part of the disaster cycle and we need to acknowledge that.

Julia: In the case of the LA fires, the immediate response period may be over. But the recovery period has only just begun. Lucy warns that it's going to be a long process and, ultimately, resilience is not an assured outcome.

Lucy: It's going to be going on for years. We're gonna get overwhelmed with all of the, the hard part of working towards recovery of all of the disruption and what we've lost along the way. And we have seen plenty of people, communities that come apart at that time. Let's talk about long-term recovery. We know about the problems we face immediately after the disaster. We've gotta clean out the waste and we've gotta be able to see what can be rebuilt. And then there's a really long process. We try to come back and rebuild structures but also rebuild community.

Julia: With so much work ahead, where can residents even start? One place? Your favorite locally run coffee shop or pizza joint that's been looking a little quieter lately.

Lucy: An essential part of a community are the small businesses that operate there. The restaurants and the, and the other type of retail. They're part of who we are and why we feel like we belong in a certain place. Some of them are burned out. They're going to be trying to figure out how to rebuild. But there are a lot of others that weren't directly burned, but are, you know, losing their customers. The people who, who can't live here right now cause of the utilities or whatever, or who are freaked out by it and, and start going to shop somewhere else. If we want our community to come back, we've got to be patronizing those businesses on the edge of the disaster that need to stay as well and aren't going to have the insurance and aid that the ones who were actually burned do.

Julia: But patronizing local businesses really just means supporting people. The people, and connections between them, are what make up a community. So, what does it mean to rebuild when your neighbors, your classmates, the people you saw on the drive to work every day are all displaced—maybe indefinitely.

Lucy: The big challenge in recovery is keeping the people here, you know, right after the disaster, most everyone is saying, I want to return. I don't want to lose what I have. But as it takes a long time, as the bureaucracy becomes overwhelming, we're going to see people giving up. And what we've seen in other fires is, and, and other big disasters, is that people want to stay and it becomes so difficult to handle all of what's required in recovery that they change their minds. And so, a big goal for the next year is to make sure the process of returning and rebuilding doesn't become so traumatic that they walk away.

Julia: Again, politics come into play here.

Lucy: We need to really work in local government to make it easy for people to come back. And that's doable if you think about it. Right?

Julia: And don't discount the importance of having fun, together.

Lucy: And we need to hold on to the joy we have in our community. You know, we need to be holding concerts. We need to be holding events and not just for the next three months. This needs to be for the next three years. So that this is a place that remains a place you want to be in.

Julia: Going back to Lucy's primary discipline, earthquake science and engineering, for a moment: Many of the leaps forward we've seen in earthquake early warning systems, building safety codes, and other forms of preparedness are the result of lessons learned after major events. For example, after the 1971 San Fernando earthquake collapsed hospitals and splintered freeways, Caltech scientist Clarence Allen explained that major quakes tend to happen on known faults and successfully helped lobby for a national program to limit construction across dangerous faults.

In the same way, studying the LA fires can lead scientists and engineers to find better ways to rebuild lost structures, manage fire-prone landscapes, and help people and policymakers prepare for the inevitability of future disasters, especially in our changing climate.

Lucy: Most of the time we're learning what we already knew, but we're now seeing it play out. Building codes are not retroactive. So older buildings are built to older standards. And when we learn how to build more fire-resistant buildings, that doesn't change the existing stock. And that's where part of our problem lies.

Julia: We are also learning more about a term you may have heard lately, the "WUI," or wildland urban interface.

Lucy: There is always an interface between where you have people and where the wildlands are, but you can manage that interface. And in places where it's really clean, it's a lot easier to defend than places where you have people built, built up in the canyons and a really mosaic of wildland and fires. Those are much harder to defend against. The clean WUI is not the complete solution. Generally, Altadena has a pretty defined WUI, uh, and they were able to hold it in several locations. Once they lost it, then the fire grew between the houses, right? I think we can learn some lessons about how to manage that interface, but we need to remember that yet. Don't get rid of it. If we put in a buffer, all we're doing is putting in more wild land to burn.

Julia: You might expect someone like Lucy, who confronts natural disasters in her daily work, and sometimes her daily life, to lose hope. But the opposite is true. So, let's end on a message of hope.

Lucy: You know, let's think about Altadena, Pasadena, and five years from now and we've recovered from this fire. What does that look like? We have a thriving community. We have people that have stayed. We have churches that have rebuilt. We have businesses that are operating again. And we have people that feel part of this community, right? That's what we're aiming for as we go through recovery. But, you know, maybe five years or 10 years or 20 years from now, this type of wind event happens again and we end up with another fire trying to work its way through our community. And if we've rebuilt the right way, we will now have more buildings that are really fire resistant, that are built to a better standard. We will have a better operating water system that's really able to take this all in. And we need to have both. We need that thriving community, but we also need that fire resistant community. And as we go through rebuilding over the next few years, our big challenge, our big hope is how we bring these two goals together and accomplish both at the same time.

Julia: Thanks to Lucy Jones for speaking with us here at the Caltech Science Exchange. Before we sign off, an update on the data shared in episode 1: Caltech professor and geochemist Francois Tissot and his lab have now completed sampling of more than 50 homes in Altadena, Pasadena, and greater LA and released some preliminary results on lead levels indoors, outdoors, and in tap water samples. Read a Q&A with him and see the data at scienceexchange.caltech.edu/lead.

And, related to disaster response, we also have a request from our colleagues at the Southern California Seismic Network: They are looking for people to complete a survey about the emergency alerts many residents received on their cell phones during the January fires. Your response will help improve alerting systems for earthquakes and natural disasters in the future. Fill it out at scsn.org.

For now, thank you for listening.

I'm Julia Ehlert Nair signing off for After the Fires, a limited series from the Caltech Science Exchange. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to listen to future episodes on the debris flow modeling and the fire-flood cycle, and more research updates from Caltech. And visit scienceexchange.caltech.edu for explainers on the LA fires and other topics like AI, quantum science, and earthquakes.

This episode was produced by the Caltech Office of Strategic Communications and Caltech Academic Media Technologies.