When the January wildfires burned through the city of Los Angeles, consuming over 57,000 acres in just three weeks, more than 150,000 residents were forced to leave behind their homes.
As they fled, they didn’t know what their lives would look like after the fires –– they didn’t even know if they would survive –– but they hoped that if they did, they would be able to return to their neighborhoods and go back to their normal.
A year later, many are still trying to figure out how to rebuild their lives in a world where climate-amplified disasters like the fires become more frequent and intense.
Among those were members of our USC community who experienced profound losses due to these fires, yet found strength and hope in their neighbors and friends, which enabled them to respond in ways they perhaps never thought possible.
Five of our faculty and staff members share their experience of living through the disaster, how it changed them and how they bring these experiences back to their work and the USC community.
Scott Uriu
Scott teaches students how to build houses for a living. It never occurred to him that one day, he’d see his own Altadena home of 28 years destroyed.
The devastation was so severe that when he first returned home after the fires, he struggled to navigate around his neighborhood.
“My son Isaac was a little hesitant about going up there, and I said, ‘No, don’t worry about it, we’re right there. We’re a block away.’ I turned the corner, and the street signs were still up. We were four blocks from where I thought we were.”
As he walked around, Scott noticed that a lot of the foliage and trees were fine, but most of the houses in his neighborhood were burned to the ground. “I realized that we do not build in any reasonable manner for neighborhoods in climate zones like this.”
Architects have long called for more sustainable architecture, but the high price tags associated with fire-resistant building means few people want to pay for it. But the way his community at the USC School of Architecture has responded to the fires continues to restore his faith in humanity. Scott and his colleagues are now advocating for better, more climate-resilient practices through several volunteer architecture groups, including the American Institute of Architects Pasadena & Foothill Chapter.
But rebuilding doesn’t always mean starting all over again. After allowing a forensic scientist to go through the rubble of his home, Scott discovered that some of his family’s belongings had burned at temperatures as high as 4,500 degrees. Still, a few managed to survive; among them were pieces of a vase that Scott’s aunt gave to him.
“I glued them back together with gold in this Japanese way called Kintsugi. It’s taking something that was shattered and making it into something more beautiful and strong.”
Jody Tolan
The last time Jody saw her house standing, the sky looked strange –– an auburn, fiery color –– as flames spread from the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains to Mount Wilson, “at the fury of Mother Nature.”
She turned around to lock the door as she was leaving, and her son asked why. “‘When this is over, I don’t want people just walking in the house,’ I said. He shook his head and walked away. He didn’t say anything at that point.”
Now, the community that she lived in for 13 years looks monochromatic, after the Eaton Fire ravaged most of the homes in her neighborhood of Altadena. But the hillsides still look green.
“The natural beauty of Altadena is still there. A lot of trees survived, the grass is growing, the birds were singing, and the bugs and the lizards are back.” When one of the crew clearing her burnt lot was raking, he jumped up in surprise after finding a giant lizard under the brush. “He was so funny. That was a good sign.”
Jody has learnt to carry the grief of what she has lost every single day while still going on. “Where did I get this resilience from? I’m getting used to using the word trauma. Trauma in your life.”
In her work as a USC Marshall School professor and in her personal life, she tries to give people and other living things who are suffering and have suffered more grace and compassion, because “if you haven’t been there, it’s a lot worse than you can imagine.”
“Every week I go up there, I talk to the trees, and I just tell them to hang in there. And maybe I’m talking to myself… They’re big oak trees; they have survived through all sorts of other things, so just hang in there. It’s going to get better.”
Nicole Maccalla
Just three hours after evacuating, Nicole and her 17-year-old son Sebastian came back to their Altadena home to fight the Eaton Fire. “Nobody was saving the homes. I had to go back and fight the fire.”
Sebastian sprayed structures with water from the roof while Nicole went door to door, ensuring her elderly neighbors were safe and helping them turn off the gas lines. Every 30 seconds, they heard an explosion: power lines, cars, propane tanks. The whole sky was filled with smoke, yet there was no firefighter to be seen.
When they returned a few days later, they were greeted by dead silence. All the sounds of life in Altadena were gone.
Their house survived, but the insides were covered with ash. “You think about the things that were burning: refrigerators, furniture, paint, drywall, electronics, barbecues, propane tanks, electric vehicles. All of that was put into the air, carried with that smoke and intruded into all the standing structures.”
Navigating all the insurance claims, finding safe and affordable housing, along with the physical health risks and cognitive burdens, hasn’t been easy for Nicole.
“I have been very transparent with my students at Rossier that I’m not completely here. For the first two months, I was cognitively impaired with fire brain. Slowly, every week, I’m getting a little bit more of my cognitive function back, but I still search for words, and I’m still not okay.”
But “recovering with dignity” is important to Nicole. So, she is creating a map that tracks levels of indoor contamination through pollutants such as lead that are normally invisible to the eye. Her data is based on testing reports from professional industrial hygienists commissioned by Altadena resident group Eaton Fire Residents United.
Nicole sees this as a great opportunity to leverage her expertise in data and inquiry-led decision making. “This rapid use of data is a new exploration for me. We’re in a situation where we need data to impact practice today. How do we collect information that people believe is valid and reliable, and use that to save people’s lives literally right now?”
Varun Soni
In his job as the Dean of USC’s Office of Religious Life, Varun helps students find meaning in all aspects of their lives. But when the fires burned down his Palisades neighborhood and completely changed his family’s way of life, Varun couldn’t find meaning in any of it. “I can never say to myself that this happened for a reason, because I don’t believe that.”
Although his house survived the fires, the ash and smoke still forced his family to leave. At first, the ordeal brought up a lot of emotions, especially anger, which surprised Varun because he had always encouraged his students to adopt a growth mindset during times of struggle.
“We had worked so hard, we moved mountains, we lived in our dream house, in our dream neighborhood. It took us decades to get there. We thought we’d be there forever, and now it’s all over. I had a lot of struggle in knowing that I wasn’t the guy that for 15 years I had told my students I was. I wanted to be that guy, but I just wasn’t.”
So, Varun decided to look at this experience as an opportunity for growth and adventure. “I can’t find meaning, but I can make meaning out of it, and that’s what I’m trying to model to my students and to my kids.”
Part of this journey for him has been to simply double down on all the things that he already believed in: living in the moment with the people you love, having a sense of adventure, and remembering that “our possessions don’t define us, that a home is not a house.”
“The art that moves you, the songs that sustain you, the rituals that give order to your life, the community that sees you, the stories that you tell. You can’t put a price on any of that, and that’s the stuff that means more than anything else.”
Gale Sinatra
As a psychologist and educator, Gale has spent years researching what effective science and climate communication looks like. Yet, as her Altadena home burned in the Eaton Fire, she realized how little progress had been made.
“We didn’t bury the power lines, we didn’t build a fire break, we didn’t make sure we had a sufficient water supply. I feel like I didn’t do enough and try hard enough.”
But this disaster also highlighted other aspects of climate disaster-related losses that Gale hadn’t investigated before: that it isn’t just one house or home gone. The entire community is now gone, and so are its lived experiences — spending Christmas with her neighbors across the street, eating at her favorite pizza place, visiting the post office. “Everybody should be active in their community in a way that I wish I’d been.”
Inside and outside her classroom, Gale now focuses on bringing home the idea that a “climate-safe environment” no longer exists, so that we can build more resilience into our communities to withstand these climate events.
“People don’t want to spend money, but this is probably going to cost Los Angeles County billions of dollars. We’re gonna spend it either before or after the disaster. Why not spend it before?”
Fortunately, her students already understand this, and she feels hopeful when they engage in discussions about sustainability and climate change. But the whiplash from the current federal government as it pushes back on the burgeoning climate momentum makes her frustrated, despite the positives.
“I still do have some hope, but I’m not going to lie, it’s a little bit difficult to hang on right now.”
Portraits by Malcolm Caminero ‘26; text by Yana Savitsky ‘25 and Grace Galante ‘25; edited by Rhysea Agrawal, Engagement Coordinator, Center for Climate Journalism and Communication
