MIKE: 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.
CHRISTINE: This is my colleague, Michael Cohen.
MIKE: My name is Michael Bradley Cohen. I am a deals writer at Wirecutter for all those who follow along over Black Friday.
CHRISTINE: Michael goes by Mike…and he used to live in the neighborhood we’re driving through right now: Altadena, just outside of LA.
Exactly a year ago, on January 7, 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…
MIKE: 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 Altadina Drive and then we’ll head in.
CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset. 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 LA Wildfires”. We will 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 Han, 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 LA in December 2025.
ROSIE: So now things are starting to look empty. Empty.
MIKE: Yeah. So right when we turn off Lincoln and we start getting into this s the west side of Altadena, now it’s mor…um….
CHRISTINE: Is this the house that’s just being built or is that…?
MIKE: Yeah, that’s that’s one going up, that one’s going up. That one it seems like survived somehow. Looks like maybe had roof damage only ’cause the roof’s two different colors.
ROSIE: This is extraordinary. This is just a lot after a lot after a lot of nothing.
MIKE: 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.
CHRISTINE: But then you have an entire block right here that’s like untouched it looks like.
MIKE: Like I can’t paint a picture of the negative space with my words well enough to describe like there’s supposed to be houses and people and kids on bikes and people walking dogs and somebody watering their lawn 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.
CHRISTINE: 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.
We’ll be right back.
CHRISTINE: 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 first hand. 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 Han, reached out.
GREGORY: I’m Gregory Han. I’m a contributor at Wirecutter, but also a design writer and the author of three books or co author of three books. The latest with my wife about trees, previously about mushrooms. I live in Altadena.
CHRISTINE: 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.
GREGORY: And then we started just having conversations about what we were going through.
MIKE: It was originally looking like “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.
GREGORY: 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?
MIKE 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.
CHRISTINE: Now, 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 to own my own home one day? He and his wife wanted something surrounded by trees. A true oasis.
GREGORY: The year before we found our home, we were hiking the trail. Gabriolino El Prieto Trail, and I looked up, and there was a a large sycamore tree branch with a fox on it. And I was looking in, I was like, that’s the first time I’ve seen a California fox out here. And then I looked to the right of the canyon, and there was all these homes lining the canyon. I was like, I want to live up there one day. And at that time we were just joking, because at that time, we didn’t have any money.
CHRISTINE: In 2021, Gregory’s mom got sick. After she died, he was devastated. He and his sister had to navigate managing her affairs. They ended up selling her home.. and suddenly, it seemed he and Emily could afford a down payment on a house of their own. And they started their search in Altadena. 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 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 5 giant sets of glass sliding doors on one side of the house. It was dripping with midcentury details. It was perfect.
GREGORY: The first thing that you’ll see, and that I was like, Oh my gosh, I made it in life. It’s a circular driveway. It’s it’s a small one, but and it’s one that like my truck can barely navigate…That that that was the first thing I noticed. But it was really the trees, the oak trees that are surrounding the neighborhood. They’re mature, they’re they’re beautiful, they’re just like they’re part of our home.
CHRISTINE: They placed a bid and crossed their fingers. In 2022, after a lot of back and forth…they moved in.
GREGORY: It was gonna be our forever home and hopefully it will be our forever home.
CHRISTINE: Mike and his wife, Chelsey moved to LA 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.
MIKE: I think when we were living in New York, we felt like we’ll never be able to buy a place and afford it, or we’ll never be able to buy a place and 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.
CHRISTINE: Mike and Chelsey 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 different homes…but kept getting priced out.
MIKE: 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. And my wife dropped the phone.
CHRISTINE: In May 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.
MIKE: 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, plu-ot tree, apple tree, pear tree, clementine tree, a bunch of orange trees, and it it felt amazing.
Wanna come into my house? I love to, yeah. Absolutely. That’s going. Bring out that picture so you can be reminded of what it used to look like.
CHRISTINE: 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.
MIKE: 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 [honk] 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. One of the rose bushes is growing back. That remember the orange tree that I showed you guys? That’s that little guy is growing back.
Bear’s lime tree is starting to grow back. There is a persimmon tree, lemon tree.
CHRISTINE: 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 the school bus…the house numbers were still painted on the curb. I could imagine the kind of neighborhood that he told us had been there. 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.
MIKE: 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.
CHRISTINE: 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.
MIKE: For me, it was community. Our 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 or village, I don’t know the technical, untechnical term. It meant that there were like certain rules and laws that didn’t apply…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.
CHRISTINE: 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.
GREGORY: 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 site that 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 everyone 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.
CHRISTINE: 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.
GREGORY: There’s something as somebody who’s grown up with the Santa Ana’s part of my life. I’ve just always been very uneasy about their arrival.
CHRISTINE: Although many people might associate fire as the central problem of the LA 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 Ana’s 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.”
GREGORY: I was definitely on edge prior to the wind arriving. And I was aware of the severity of that possible weather situation because of a local young meteorologist who gave microclimate reports of just Altadena, and he warned people maybe a week in advance…His name is Edgar McGregor…he’s an amazing human being. And he warned everybody. So I was already like OK, the wind has arrived.
CHRISTINE: Gregory’s plan was to evacuate. And he wasn’t necessarily going to wait for an order. The Meadows, his neighborhood, can only be reached by one road. He knew that road could become clogged if people panicked…and he knew he could be trapped if anything were to happen to it.
Once Gregory felt how strong the winds were blowing on January 6th, he decided to leave.
GREGORY: And so, you know, everybody had asked, Oh, did you leave because you were worried about fire? I was like, No, I’m what was worried about wind. I’d grown up with the Santa Anna was blowing so hard the gusts breaking windows of our my childhood home…And I thought we have ten sliding door glass sliding door windows a around the house. We’re just encased in glass. So I thought well, let’s just a little careful and leave,
CHRISTINE: On the afternoon of January 6th, Gregory, Emily and their two kittens left Altadena with enough clothes for ONE overnight. He took a laptop and some cat food.
GREGORY: And we thought we’d be gone for a day, maybe two days…Before I knew there was a fire in our neighborhood, we could see the palisades on fire. And then I looked at news stories and said “oh wait, Altadena’s on fire”…but it was on the other side of where we lived. So I was like that’s scary, but I think we’ll be ok.
…then as the day progressed, the fire completely changed its direction. And I became very aware that we were not going to be returning home.
…And I knew I had to be really precautious because my wife was recovering from cancer and and surgery and and and we had these two kittens and I was like, I wanted to get back home. I wanted to look. You know, there’s a a degree of curiosity, of morbid curiosity in a disaster. You want to see like what’s happening, even if it puts you in danger. And I had to squash that back and say, no, we’re gonna just hole up here, be safe, and monitor from afar.
CHRISTINE: Gregory and Emily wouldn’t move back into their home until the weekend of July 4th, almost six months later.
Mike didn’t have to evacuate his home in Altadena…because he wasn’t there. He and his wife were on vacation in Troncones, Mexico with some family friends. They saw the news about the winds and kept a close eye on whatsapp threads with their neighbors. That afternoon, people were talking about the weather, but no one seemed panicked yet.
MIKE: Like someone sent a picture of all the avocados that had fallen off of their tree because of the winds, and they were like, My backyard is made of guacamole. And then someone else, you know, sent a picture like, Oh, my fence came down. Well, it was definitely time for a new fence.
The Palisades fire started first. And there was in a very guilty, weird way a relief almost like, oh, a fire did happen, but it didn’t happen to us…And then the fire started in Altadena, right in the corner of Altadena.
…And someone shared with us this app, Watch Duty, and we all downloaded it and we were all glued to it because it had the most up-to-date information about how big the fire was and where it had reached.
…And then quickly it turned into who is gonna be the first to say that they’re evacuating? And so on text chains, on Instagram, on Facebook, WhatsApp groups, people were all kind of saying, Hey, we live around here, we’re thinking of evacuating. Has anybody else thought about that? And then other people would be like, oh, we live even further from the foothills. We’re already evacuated.
CHRISTINE: In an emergency, LA County is responsible for sending out evacuation orders via cell phone in Altadena. Almost immediately after the Eaton Fire started in the nearby foothills, an evacuation order went out to parts of Altadena. But, in West Altadena, those evacuation orders didn’t go out until 7 hours after the fire started. And for reasons we still don’t know, Mike says he and his neighbors never got the warnings.
MIKE: Somehow Eastern Altadena did in certain parts. And Pasadena was put on alert for like I think it’s get ready, set, and go is like green, yellow, red. And they were very clear in some of the instructions. Don’t try to evacuate before your neighborhood needs to be evacuated, because then you might be clogging the streets for other people who do need to evacuate. Luckily, everyone on our block had evacuated and everyone was safe. But no one had actually received any of the emergency alerts before it happened.
CHRISTINE: Mike’s neighbor, Jamie, was staying at Mike’s house to look after his dog, Oona. Mike and his wife encouraged Jamie to leave in the early evening of January 7th.
MIKE: And he’s a long time Altadinian. He’s a lovely old hippie gentleman who told us he said, you guys are New Yorkers, you don’t understand. This is a lot of hoopla. It’s just a lot of wind.
…We went to bed in Mexico, surrendering to the fact that we would find out whether our house was still there and that we couldn’t get our dog sitter to leave.
…We got woken up in the middle of the night by our neighbor who was across the street waiting in her car for her evacuation orders that never came. And she was the one who called and said, Are you in the house? The lights are on. And she’s like, You gotta get out. Your yard is on fire, your house is on fire.
CHRISTINE: Mike’s neighborhood no longer had power. His lights were on thanks to solar panels but he couldn’t call his dogsitter. He DID have a doorbell camera and a doggy cam…and he immediately tried to log on to reach his dogsitter that way.
MIKE: And when we log on to when we tune into the doggy cam, the fire alarms are already going off. They’re blaring in the house. The house is filled with smoke, and I’m shouting into my phone, Wake up, the house is on fire. Jamie, I’m whistling for my dog. She actually comes into view first, and she’s barking at the fact that the house is filled with smoke and she can hear my voice coming from somewhere. Jamie wakes up and takes a look around and says, We’re safe for now, but we’re leaving. We got to watch him exit that one camera and walk out the front door on the doorbell camera. He only lived about a block up the street, so they just walked up to his car and then they eventually drove away. And then my wife and I just sat in bed and watched the feed of the house. As it filled with smoke and the flames came through the windows, and the sparks just poured off the roof. And the trees in the yard burned. And we felt so helpless. And it felt so unreal…There’s nothing we could do, no one we could call. And we just watched until the whole screen just filled with smoke and black and flashes of flames, and then eventually the feed cut out.
CHRISTINE: Mike’s home was completely destroyed by the Eaton Fire. His dog, his dogsitter and the neighbor who called him all survived. Some people in his neighborhood did not. Of the 19 people that died in the Eaton fire, all but one of them were in western Altadena.
Is there anything from this experience in this early part of the disaster that I mean, it could be practical. What are some pieces of advice that you would give someone in who maybe hasn’t experienced something like this before?
MIKE: Two answers to this question. Like a personal side of things, it would be when you’re going through a disaster like this, it tells you really quickly what is most important and what is worth packing in a bag. And that’s probably a small bag.
…From a practical standpoint, when a natural disaster is happening, if you’re looking around for the people who know what to do, they might not be there. So you have to be that person for yourself. If you think of disasters like a plane crash or when the subway gets stalled, and they say, like, please wait for organized instructions from uniformed crew members. In a disaster, it’s probably happening so fast that there aren’t uniformed crew members with organized instructions. So you have to be in charge of your own survival.
CHRISTINE: Mike says the fire was a terrifying wakeup call for him and for many people in his neighborhood…that emergency services aren’t always there in an emergency.
But, he says, one big lesson has stood out to him over the last year: He is so grateful that he knows his neighbors.
MIKE: The silver linings that I remember are all the ways that different people in our community have shown up for each other. I found out that my house was in fact a total loss because a friend that I made at the dog park drove by the next morning and sent us a video of our house still smoldering. I got introduced to a nonprofit that helped us get a grant because a friend of ours up the street also applied, because a friend of theirs who was their neighbor also applied. Or we’re trying. Because nobody else is going to do it for us. So that’s really been the silver lining.
CHRISTINE: Gregory, from your experience, what in the same way are some pieces of advice that you would give someone who maybe hasn’t experienced something like this before?
GREGORY: There’s a level investment that you need to make within your own immediate community that will be become very, very valuable almost immediately in in regards to knowing information because information gets cut off so quickly in a disaster…instead of expecting other people to be there for you, I think it’s important to prepare to be there for other people too. And if we all operate that way, then we’re all gonna help each other get through it. I don’t think I don’t think the lesson here is to become a prepper. I was I became a prepper in a certain regard, but what I really found out was I had so many gaps of knowledge. And people I didn’t know who lived across the street had knowledge. And we helped each other all throughout this process. And we continue to help each other through this process.
So that is a resource you can’t buy, but it’s something you can invest in by just saying hello and speaking to your neighbors and connecting in a way that may pay pay off in in life-death situation.
CHRISTINE: This is Gregory and Mike’s first big lesson a year out from the Eaton Fire: invest in your community. A good first step is to create an easy way to communicate with your neighbors. This could be a text chain or a group chat – through something like WhatsApp or GroupMe. And this might naturally evolve through whatever you’re doing in your daily life. Mike’s neighborhood thread started as a group of local dog owners before the fire.
You could also join a volunteer organization in your community. After the fires, Gregory joined a group to do brush cleanup. Working alongside his neighbors for hours at a time has helped deepen his connection with the people who live close to him.
The next lesson Gregory and Mike learned – or maybe one they’re still learning – is about recovery. What do you actually need to THINK about and DO once the immediate disaster is over in order to begin piecing your life back together?
That’s what we’re going to talk about next time.
MIKE: They will ask you for the list. This is the list of every single thing in your home if you were to take your home and dump it out. Most people can’t tell you everything that’s in their backpack right now if you were to dump it out and itemize it. Imagine having to do that with single drawer in your entire home
CHRISTINE: Find part two of this series, right here, on Friday.
ROSIE GUERIN: This series was reported and hosted by Christine Cyr Clisset. The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by me, Rosie Guerin, and produced by Abigail Keel. This series was fact checked by Cole Louison, and the audio was mixed by Katie McMurran. Engineering support from Maddy Massiello and Nick Pittman. Our interview with Gregory and Mike was recorded by Tim Moore at York Recording in Los Angeles. Original music for this series by Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, Rowan Niemisto, Catherine Anderson, and Pat McCusker. Special thanks to Harry Sawyers and Jen Gushue for editing Gregory’s original article and to Daniel Ramirez from New York Times Audio. Cliff Levy is Wirecutter’s Deputy Publisher and general manager. Ben Frumin is Wirecutter’s editor-in-chief. Thanks for listening.
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