You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand.
KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. I'm Michael Monks from KFI News. This is La Fires, A Path Forward, our special look at what happened and what happens next. ELI Mayor Karen Bass is said to expect a thorough review of the preparedness and the response. She's faced considerable criticism for being halfway across the world in Ghana as the fires broke out, despite days of
weather forecasting suggesting something disastrous could happen. In her second live news conference after returning, she discounted questions about people calling for her resignation and.
Let me just say because I answered some questions like that in the morning, and let me just state now, number one, these fires are burning now. Our job is to make sure that people stay alive, that we save lives, that we save homes, that we save property. And I also said that when the fires are out, we will do a deep dive. We will look at what worked, we will look at what didn't work, and we will
let you know. Until then, my focus is on the TV screens behind you that are showing devastation that has continued. Thank you answered it in the morning, answered it now, won't answer it again.
A week and a half later, Mayor Bass appointed the city's recoveries are Steve Silberoff. He's got a long history with civic, business and philanthropic groups, including the Dodgers and the city's Police Commission.
And what we need is and what I hope people will start with is today is hope there is an A to Z for each one of us, and a is today, and we're going to get there step by step, and the city is going to help to the extent that can, and we will have to outsource to the extent it can't. That there's going to be a bus to yes, and if people want to get on the
bus with us, get on them. If they want to spend their time throwing embers right now next Tuesday when it's windy, by spending their time on that kind of stuff, just don't get on our bus.
But that ended up causing more political fallout for the mayor because Soberoff's bus was set to lead to half a million dollars for him for three months of work. The outcry was strong and swift, and now he's working for free, the preparedness, the response, and now the aftermath will continue to raise questions and stakes for local government. LA County Supervisor Lindsay Horvath represents Pacific Palisades a supervisor. Obviously, this has just been a terrible disaster that LA County
has experienced in multiple spots. At the same time, I'm curious as a government official, what have you learned about local government specifically in LA County as we've dealt with this.
I think LA County has a commitment to emergency preparedness and investing in keeping people safe, and they're given the climate hazards and risks that we face in our region. My district, the third District of Los Angeles County, is the most disaster prone district of any county, of any district in any county in the entire country. So not only is it something that we must continue to invest in, it must be a way of life for all of us.
The supervisor, I'll note whether it's reopening pch or getting people back to their properties, just to inspect or how the repermitting process is going to go. It seems like there are different speeds that people want, regardless of which side they're on. Maybe they're a politician, elected official, maybe they're a resident. This is too fast, this is too slow. What has it been like trying to find that perfect goldilocks temperature? As we the rebuilding phase.
Well, I think there's no question we want to move with a sense of urgency because, especially in this debris removal phase, the household hazardous materials in an uncontrolled environment are just not safe for anyone. So we absolutely want to move quicker. And I'm glad to see that so many teams have been deployed by the us EPA on the ground to move Phase one faster than was originally predicted. We're doing so because of all the teams that have
been deployed. We're doing so without cutting corners, which is incredibly important because we don't just want to move quickly, we want to move safely, and so we're doing both at a pace that's never been seen before. And it's because of the number of teams that are on the ground. It's because of the kind of expertise that's on the ground. We have folks who were involved in some of the fires in Northern California and now we and some of
the disasters that we've seen throughout the country. So we are bringing the best thinking to this effort, which allows us to do both. We can move quickly but also do so safely, and by working with people who are informed and who have experience on the ground, we're able to help people have certainty around what these milestones are.
And I know, when the world is swirling around you and things feel uncertain, the thing that you're really holding onto is information that's verified, that's trusted, and that allows you to start putting together what looks like and you know what the journey is going to look like for you to get back home. And that's really what we're trying to do.
This is really going to put local government to the test in a lot of ways, and already has in fact.
But I'm wondering, big picture, what do you see going forward being the relationship between local government and the people of your district the Palisades specifically based on the experience they had here, whether it was related to the amount of time they had to get out, the response to the fires, and here in the aftermath as we move towards rebuilding, do you see any loss of trust or any opportunities to build trust or rebuild any loss trust.
You always think that this, uh, this experience teaches people what they can count on us for how we will work together in that rebuilding process.
UH.
They're watching to see if we clearly answer their questions, which is why I'm committed to an after action process that helps us learn from this experience not only as a practice of good government, but because people want answers. They deserve answers, and that is how you continue to
build trust. I think you know, the work that we have to do is among government agencies and making sure that you know, in a time of crisis, we know how to you know, check logos at the door and really just get to work and assigning tasks and making sure that we are all focused on that that shared vision of serving our constituents to the best of our ability.
And I know that on the county side, we have experienced doing that among our departments from the many crises we've faced, and that is the experience we've we've brought to the fires that we're now recovering from, and we will continue to use that expertise to inform how we serve our constituents going forward.
The cost of the wildfires has been staggering. Property losses alone have been estimated at more than one hundred and fifty billion dollars, but the cost doesn't stop there and may hit all of us in different ways. That's next when LA Fires A Path Forward continues after this report from the KFI twenty four hour News Rum.
You're listening to KFI AM six forty on.
Demand AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. I'm Michael Monks from KFI News. This is LA Fires A Path Forward, our special look at what happened and what happens now. The losses in Altadena and Pacific Palisades are staggering. More than sixteen thousand structures burned to ash, including homes, churches, schools, libraries, as strong Santa Ana winds fueled fires across nearly forty thousand acres in just those
two parts of LA County. The property and capital losses alone have been estimated to be between ninety five and one hundred and sixty four billion dollars, with insured losses estimated at seventy five billion dollars. That's according to the latest research by the UCLA Anderson School of Management. The losses are crippling here, but they're so big they would completely wipe out smaller cities.
I feel compared you to with other cities, so you will look at older Colorado is a small city that is for a pole, six buildings like annual GDP for that small city, so it's almost a destroyed, like reduced the gb GDP of that small city.
Julian Lee is an economist at the UCLA Anderson Forecast. Her research, along with william U, suggests the wildfires have cost La County nearly half a percent of its gross domestic product. It's not just private or public buildings that were lost. Roads, bridges, utilities were also erased by the flames. Those repairs and replacements will come in a significant cost. On top of that, there are environmental concerns the labor market.
The UCLA study shows there were about one thousand businesses in three zip codes burned by the Palisades and Eaten fires, with a total of between five thousand and eighty five hundred employees with total wages over a billion dollars. The loss of productive income over a year is estimated at twenty five, fifty and seventy two percent in those three areas.
For example, during the wildfires, there may be some evacuation, so our employees cannot work at the effective areas. Then they influence the labor productivity. And also it also has some impacts of example, government expenditure and their revenue because of that. So yeah, so that could be that the GDP number, the half percent reduction in GDP can incorporate those kinds of things during the economic production process like labor productivity, capital productivity, and something like that.
The home insurance market is also expected to take a hit along with your wallets. The state has already struggled with keeping insurers in the marketplace at affordable rates. That's because the threat of fires or other natural disasters has been deemed too much for some companies to bear. Thousands of policies have been canceled and others have been refused
to be issued. And the fires broke out in Alta, Dina and the Palisades just days after the state announced its sustainable insurance strategy, which could cost everyone with the policy.
This is because in the beginning of this year, in twenty twenty five, the California Department of Insurance implement a new regulation. So because of this new regulation, first, it allows insurers to they can transfer the risk of those natural disasters to local residents. So this is the first time they are allowed to do this, so they can file application for increasing their premium premium rates. So because of the welfare's insurers are going to file applications for
increasing their insurance rates more than before. So California, local California residents, I mean all the California evidence homeowners are going to face increasing insurance rate.
The regulation allows insurers to take a look at forward looking probabilistic models to set their premiums, including reinsurance costs in their rates, and they can also seek approval to assess all policyholders in the state if claims exceed the program's capacity. The state has required insurers to increase their number of policies by five percent each year until eighty five percent of the state in wildfire areas is covered.
UCLA predicts that all homeowner insurance policies are likely to see a rise in price, but the study also says the state plan is supposed to introduce more insurers in the market, which could eventually lead to more competitive policies, but the cost of housing itself in an already expensive county could also go up.
The loss of properties reduces the housing supply, which could also boost the demand, particularly for rental units in the regions. On years the affector the rages, so it predicts that the housing offer the housing market that if housing prices will still increased in the long term. Of Based on our study for the historical wildfires over.
The past ten years, there have been permits issued in La County for around twenty to twenty five thousand new housing units each year, but the fires took out between two thirds and three quarters of the yearly housing supply. The study suggests price hikes in the housing market could be expected in the long term, especially if more building doesn't take place quickly. The UCLA researchers say California's most pressing issue should be to invest in wildfire mitigation strategies,
noting that newer buildings had a better survival rate. Newer regulations like using artificial intelligence and drones to detect and put out wildfires could be helpful, they say, along with managing forests and brush upgrading utilities and controlling homeless camps, strengthening building codes, and subsidizing what they call home hardening.
There are studies showing that the buildings that are built after two thousand and eight are less likely to be destroyed in a websare. That is because California implement regulation in two thousand and eight requiring new buildings to adopt mitigation strategies. However, most of the majority of the housing stock in California are older buildings. They were built before two thousand and eight, so a government might need to expand their grant for repro food in those old homes.
In effect, I mean in high risk areas, so that may be active. There's a need for more investment in that.
Even as La County's emergency alert text messages went awry during the fire, sending evacuation scared to everyone, one piece of technology was a must have during the disaster. We talk with the man behind the Watch Duty app when La Fires. A Path Forward continues next after this update from the KFI twenty four hour newsroom.
You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand.
KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. I'm Michael Monks from KFI News. This is La Fires A Path Forward, our special look at what happened and what happens now. As the flames blew closer to homes and Pacific Palisades and Altadena, more and more people found themselves turning not to government alerts but to their phones
and the watch Duty app. It was a lifeline for many, especially as the La County alert system suffered mistake sending alerts to everyone in the county even if they weren't affected the big fires in January. We're not the first time people counted on this app. John Mills is the founder and CEO of Watch Duty. John, this app has not just been popular, it's been a lifeline for a
lot of people. And you wrote an editorial for the La Times that said, it really shouldn't be that it's sort of a failure of government.
Tell us what you mean, Yeah, that was I started this out of frustration that this is not how the world works. I would have assumed that, you know, the same folks who build roads and schools and infrastructure were going to be building alerting systems to keep us informed.
And although they exist, they're not really properly used. They leave a lot to the imagination, as you probably saw on the Palisades fire specifically, and also the delays in the Eden, fire alerts went out to the wrong areas at the wrong times with some of the wrong information, and it ends up causing even more panic.
And I feel like.
Until you go through the situation, you don't really quite understand it.
But like the user experience of disaster is something we really think about.
And so what I can tell you from going through it and being around people is cognitive ability goes down when you're panicked, and then when you get lackluster information that leads you to ask more questions.
You don't know what to do, and it makes the situation worse.
And so after living through that several times and realizing that no one was going to fix it in any reasonable timeframe, I decided to do something about it.
You saw a popularity spike for this app Watch Duty last fall when we had some wildfires in southern California, so you knew well at advance of what happened in the Palisades, what happened in Altadena, that the government was not living up to its potential, let's say, in the way that it notifies people about these looming disasters, especially
as the unfold. I want to know when those alerts went out from the government from La County to every body in the county, no matter where you live, that the time to evacuate was now, and that was obviously a mistake of failure. What were your thoughts in that moment.
Well, it's a great question. I mean, I mean a couple of things.
I mean, first of all, we've been around for three years, a little over three years, and so this is not the first time we've seen these types of problems. It's not just specific to any any government per se. So I'd rather spread the blame on us as taxpayers and voters as well as them, as we all need to get better.
It just we saw something.
Really bad in LA which obviously we saw the Franklin and the mountain fire before that, which I think is what you're referring to.
And then actually before that was the line, the bridge and the airport fire.
I'm surprised I can remember all these off the top of my head, but it's kind of how we live there are back to your question there. Right now, we only have one or two reporters who are living in LA so they got the alerts and then we have ways to scrape in mind that day, but what we saw first was actually an incredible spike in traffic. We started receiving about one hundred thousand requests a second, about three million or so a minute, and our service began melting. Luckily,
we were able to keep everything online. But that's how I knew something really bad. It happened, and then we quickly realized, oh my goodness. They send out a WILLA, a wireless burdency alert which goes to all the active cell phone towers in the area and the neighboring area as well, because cell towers reach over borders, and so you know, something like twelve million people got an errant emergency alert, and so we knew because again our servers were just going haywire.
And luckily we didn't have any outages, but it was harrowing for the whole team.
You mentioned reporters there, John, How does the watch Duty app work?
Yeah, so, Watch Duty, simply put, is really a service, not an app. So people interact with an app, but behind the scene there are dozens and dozens of active and retired first responders, radio operators, dispatchers, reporters, and people who have experienced listening to wildland fire on the emergency radios meaning we hear them talk to each other on the fire ground. And so those folks we call them reporters, have really been reporting on this activity for years.
Right when we found them all they.
Had their own Facebook and Twitter pages and different regions like you know, like Cole Yukon in Lake County and Maureene up in Reading.
They had the voice of their community.
Already, and they were doing this job well before Frankly I moved into Sonoma County.
But once I.
Moved here and I realized what these people were doing, I thought to myself, Man, if we could ban them all together, imagine how powerful they would all be. And so that's how Watch Study was born, and that's how it operates.
We've heard from La County officials that they planned to investigate what went wrong with their own emergency alert notification system.
They reached out to you at all.
Have you been approached by this government or really any government on how to improve their own efficiencies?
Absolutely, I mean we work with so many including La County Emergency Operations Center.
You know, they're really trying.
Everyone's trying to do better and we want to be of service, and so we do work with many governments and many governments give us information in real time because they know that we have more users than anybody else. Users are residents, right, and so they they're starting to embrace it and ask us for help, and we are here to serve them.
We think about apps, we think about Silicon Valley, we think about how rich people can get even if an app is a flash in the pan and very short lived. That's not the case with this one. This was started as a volunteer funded nonprofit. Is that Is that still the case even after all this popularity.
Yeah, I don't see. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, you know. But I mean back to the point earlier. It is like, you know, I want better for my community. I want better roads, better schools, better infrastructure like this is this is a public benefit, right, this is a life and death It's kind of hard to imagine profiteering off of something that's so viscerally important and frankly extremely dangerous.
So we have no plans of changing anything soon.
And luckily we've had many donors come to our rescue. Google dot org is one of our largest donors, and many people paying twenty five dollars for the extra services in the app makes a huge difference. Right, This all this money, even though it's a small amount compared to how many users we have, helps to keep our free service free. Like it's like remind people, you know, we've been doing this for a long time. Right, it just becomes more and more valuable. There's really not I don't say,
not much to learn. I'm just so used to the devastation. This one happened to be incredibly deadly and a lot of structures were lost, But we see the loss of our habitats, our forests, our communities, and so you know, it's just the mission gets stronger.
Right.
We didn't all of a sudden like flip the table, raise a bunch of money, go to get some private equity capital and start running a different business. You know, our roadmap is the same, our hiring strategy is the same. Exactly what we thought was gonna happen is happening, and so for us, it's just if business as usual. Unfortunately I wish it wasn't a business, but I guess it is.
The wildfires have been destructive, they've been tragic, but they've also given LA the opportunity to show its softer side, helping neighbors in need.
It's unbelievable. It's almost like a big old city has become a small town.
That's next when La Fires. A Path Forward continues after this report from the KFI twenty four hour newsroom.
You're listening to KFI AM six forty on demand.
KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. I'm Michael Monks from KFI News. This is La Fires A Path Forward, our special look at what happened and what happens now. The tragic loss of Pacific Palisades and Alta Dina to wildfires has led to an outpouring of sympathy, offers to help, and cash lots of money. La is a city of very rich and very poor. It's home to some of the world's most recognizable celebrities, and Hollywood has shown up here in the early days of the recovery.
Fundraising efforts at the Grammys and a special star studded fire aid concert brought in one hundred twenty five million dollars, But regular La folks are also stepping up, showering their neighbors with love, support and money. They're also volunteering. A lot parts of La are notoriously disconnected, maybe by culture, maybe by traffic, but the wildfires have brought southern California together in an unprecedented way. I spoke with Pastor Matthew
Barnett of the Dream Center to talk about it. He says his organization has helped people through serious difficulties in recas and years, especially COVID.
Then we get to twenty twenty five and I was just kind of giving a little prayer and I said, God, can twenty twenty five just be the year of peace? And then Wow, I mean, we're faced with this just unbelievable thing that's happened. I never dreamed that, you know, we would just once again make ourselves available at the Dream Center and you know, put our food trucks out there in the parking lot and say if anybody wants to come by and get take care of your need
and feed you and help you. And I didn't realize that that thirty days would literally change our life, as you know, thousands of cars would come through and get food and resource and drop off supplies and things that would really become the foundation of all that we're doing with the fires here in now Sadena and all that work that's going on, and the daily distributions and our lives have changed forever.
What are you seeing from the families who come down and need these days?
You know, when we when we started the food line, it was interesting because we were seventeen minutes or so away from Altadena in downtown area, and I thought, well, I don't know if really people will come here. But once we set up that ground floor, that staging ground for what was going on, people were showing up. And sometimes they were showing up and they were just they were just getting out of their car in line and they would go up to people and hug them and
they would just cry and they would mourn. It was just really like a staging ground of generosity and kindness but also incredible grief, and you know, it was a
place for people on his shoulder to cry on. And so when all this started to happen, you know, the needs started to kind of determine what the what the call was for the day, and we began to realize people were looking through you know, bins define things and specific things, and we took all those donated clothes and turn them into a like a store for people to come in and get specialty items and and all that,
and so you know when you were walking. We're working with seven hundred and eighty families right now to try to help them unbelievable. And the thing that we're dealing with the most is people just really want them to walk them help them through life, you know, whether it be some finances that we've been able to give to help people in this bridge period between now and you know,
trying to rebuild their lives. They're all faced with unbelievable rent hikes, or face with housing issues and expiring vouchers and and so a lot of people have gone through unbelievable grief and trauma and now a lot of tears have wiped away, and now they're just finding a lot of closed doors in front of them that we're just trying to help them navigate.
I imagine that a lot of people who are in need of charity are often living on the edge, as it is, living in housing and security, food and security, money and security. But for a lot of the folks, maybe all of the folks who've been displaced by these fires, this was so sudden. What can you tell us about those differences and experiences?
You know, you know, we do ash outs every day, you know, we help people find their possessions. I think we one of the first ones actually in outfit of doing that. And you get a chance to talk to a lot of people, you know, you're standing on their lot and they're watching you go through their valuables and and things like that, and you realize really quickly that people are they don't have as much money sitting around as most people are saying, even with secure homes, I mean,
everything has gone into you know, the mortgage. They live in a very expensive city where it's very hard to survive and it's very hard to just do anything, and the cost of living. And so I was really really surprised to find out, you know, because I've worked with people in downtown in La most of my life, and you know, people that aren't paycheck to paycheck their moment
by moment. But I realized so many of these people, just their whole heart and soul went into that one you know, generational investment to give down to their kids, to their house. That they were really si wife, like you said, with unbelievable level of surprise and just the inability to really have a lot lying around to bridge that gap of how having a house to nothing and
then going all the way back the into rebuilding. And so that's what we're finding is that there's just a lot of people that if they had a little bit of resource in their hand, I believe they can really build back again. There's some great coaching and help and people on side of them. But I was just surprised to find the level of how difficult it is to survive in a city of Los Angeles. And just to make it, I think more people are living paycheck to
paycheck than anyone could ever possibly imagine. That's why I've discovered through all this, this.
Is a city of immense poverty and immense wealth living side by side each other. It's also a city that may be disconnected from one another depending on which side of town you live in. What do you see from your perspective in all of the years you've worked in charitable giving about LA right now, has the city risen to the occasion?
Yeah?
That's the wild thing. You know, when we just we just said everyone come to service on the food line, you know, COVID was hard because there's people had you know, barriers and things that you know that were there. But this thing has just been unbelievable. I mean, we had at one time we had twelve hundred volunteers in one day on our campus. We found a way to mobilize all of them, which is incredible. And there's people crossing freeways to say, I've never been in this area of
LA before. How far do you live? Five miles? You know, It's it's unbelievable. It's it's almost like a big old city has become a small town. You know, people come to this city, you know, they're dreamers, they have a lot of ideas about what life can be. And then if you just open up a door and let them come and serve, you'll find they're just like anybody else. They have a tremendous heart of generosity and they want
to give. And I was just laughing at just the unbelievable cross section of people that were there serving, you know, through the tragedy of all this, and it really is mostly tragedy, but there is a silver lining through this.
It's that LA has been really mobilized to where we've seen the best of our city and that's rally together and it's kind of beyond I've been here for thirty years, and this is beyond my comprehension anything I thought was ever possible to see this many people cross the three Ways and go to other neighborhoods, and then people would get so excited about serving they would just show up and they would next day we would have to direct them.
They would just go right to their post, and they just continue to do it for a week upon week, and so it's really exciting to see.
And as the recovery continues, as the reviews and investigations unfold, KFI News will be there to tell you about it. This has been la fires a path forward. If you miss any part of it or want to hear it again or share it, find it at KFIAM six forty dot com or on the iHeartRadio app. For producer Matthew Soffler, I'm Michael Monks.
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