How Communities Recover from Disasters with Lucy Jones
After the January 2025 LA fires burned thousands of homes in Altadena, Pasadena, and the Pacific Palisades, the Caltech Science Exchange asked Lucy Jones to share her insights on how communities recover from natural disasters. A seismologist, Jones is a visiting associate in geophysics at Caltech and the founder of the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society.
Read on for more of the conversation:
Are there distinct phases in our response to disasters?
We sometimes talk about the three Rs of disasters: resilience, response, and recovery. Resilience is what you do before a disaster so that when it does happen, you can come back more quickly. Response is what happens during the disaster: the firefighters coming out, the cleanup of the toxic waste, and those sorts of things. Recovery is the process of coming back to what we were before but more resilient. We call it recovery to resilience.
These three Rs of a disaster are treated very differently within our political system. At the federal level, we have legislation for response. It's called the Stafford Act. It governs the participation of FEMA and its operation with the state emergency managers, who, in fact, do the response with funding from FEMA.
There is no federal legislation for recovery, and the resilience part is very spottily covered. We have no overarching plan. Recovery is ad hoc. Six months after the disaster, FEMA leaves and Housing and Urban Development takes over. But they create new rules and have to be appropriated each time. There's no guarantee of support.
I think as disasters become more common, we need to look, as a society, at how we want to handle them. Doing only response is inadequate. Resilience and recovery are part of the disaster cycle, and we need to acknowledge that.
What are some early steps in our long-term recovery?
We know about the problems we face immediately after the disaster. We have to clean out the waste and see what structures can be rebuilt. But we also have to rebuild community, rebuild the businesses.
Small businesses are essential to a community. The restaurants and the other types of retail—they are part of who we are and why we feel like we belong in a certain place. Some of them burned. They are going to try to figure out how to rebuild. But there are a lot of others that weren't burned but are losing their customers—people who can't live here right now, who are busy with recovery, or who are freaked out and start shopping somewhere else.
During a disaster, how do our emotions affect the decisions we make about risk?
When we have an immediate problem, like we have had with the LA fires, emotions are up front, and we avoid risks. We are driven to feel safe. So, our decisions have to go beyond reasoning and analysis to engage the emotional part of the question.
The one exception to our risk avoidance is when we help other people. We saw it here during the fire in the way neighbors helped evacuate neighbors and caregivers came back to evacuate patients in assisted living centers. In the immediate aftermath of the fires, people are still stepping up. People want to do something for those who have suffered. There is such an outpouring of connectedness.
How do we stay strong through a long recovery?
Recovery is a long process. It will go on for years. And that emotional response to the disaster that we're feeling right now, just a couple weeks out, will start to fade. We will get overwhelmed with the hard part of working toward recovery, with the disruption, and what we've lost along the way. We have seen plenty of communities that come apart at that time. The degree to which we can come together and agree on how we work together is key.
The big challenge in recovery is keeping people here. There is a risk of losing the community when its physical space is damaged. We can't lose too many people and still be what we were.
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. So, a big goal for the next year is to make sure the process of returning and rebuilding doesn't become so traumatic that people walk away.
What's the antidote? How do we keep people from being depressed? We need to hold on to the joy we have in our community. When we do something for someone else in the face of a disaster, we feel empowered and we feel better.
We need to hold concerts and events, not just for the next three months but for the next three years, so that this remains a place that you want to be in.
We can find the resources to come back. What we need to find is the will, and I think we have it.
What have the LA fires taught us about how to rebuild?
After a disaster, most of the time we're learning what we already knew, but we're now seeing it play out.
Building codes are not retroactive. Older buildings are built to older standards. When we learn how to build more fire-resistant buildings, that doesn't change the existing stock. That's part of our problem.
We've also seen the impact of what specialists like to call the WUI, the wildland-urban interface. You can't get rid of a WUI; there is always an interface between where you have people and where the wildlands are. If we put in a buffer, all we're doing is putting in more wildland to burn. Instead, you can manage that interface. In places where it's really clean, it's a lot easier to defend than places where people have built up in the canyons in a mosaic of wildland and houses. Those are much harder to defend. I think we can learn some lessons about how to manage that interface.
Los Angeles County and the City of Pasadena offer classes that help neighbors help each other during disasters before first responders can arrive.