-This is a plumber's torch.

It'll get up to about 3,700 degrees.

-A wildfire is only about 2,000.

-2,000.

It smolders, and it'll burn out the foam on the first few layers.

The cement that surrounds the foam beads stays intact and dissipates the heat like a radiator.

You see, Karen's not moving her hand.

Imagine a fire.

You throw a piece of lumber in there.

This would have ignited by now.

[music] -In January, I was actually just getting ready to do a major remodel on the house.

I was waiting and waiting and waiting for my permit, and then the fire happened, so instead of doing a major remodel, I'm now building from the ground up.

-I lost my home in the fire.

I'm also a builder, so we've been helping a lot of people through Rebuild Altadena and moving forward in this whole process post-fire.

We're rebuilding this home with wood.

It's traditional stick-built because the local workforce knows how to build with wood.

We've been building with wood in North America for over 200 years.

If we built with other materials, the local workforce and the inspectors may not even know how to inspect it.

It's important for us to build with wood and get neighbors, family, and friends back home.

-With so many homes and businesses lost, we are already putting plans in place to make sure that we aggressively rebuild.

My office is leading the city effort to clear the way.

Red tape, bureaucracy, all of it must go.

-The fires in January, as horrific as they were, as traumatic as they were, were also entirely predictable.

We built these landscapes to burn because they were in fire zones.

[clip from The Green Fireman] -November 1961, the disastrous Bel-Air/Topanga Canyon fire forced hundreds of families to evacuate their homes.

The fires raged for four terrible days.

-If you want to think about incentives at the moment a disaster explodes and then its aftermath, what are we asking people and helping people to do?

By and large, the goal is as it was in 2025 when the mayor and the governor said, "We will rebuild as fast as possible.

We will rebuild without regard to environmental regulations.

We will clear the way so that you can get back to your homes."

That's an amazing incentive.

Why would you not then try to do what it is that they're allowing you to do?

Until you ask yourself, "If it just burned, what are the odds of it burning again?"

I would say the odds are really high.

-This is completely different than wood or stick frame, or also steel frame building.

Basically, they're 4-foot-long blocks, 12 inches high, 10 inches thick.

They're made of 85 to 87% expanded polystyrene and 13 to 15% cement.

They weigh 47 pounds each, so I can actually lift one.

Going forward, I think every developer should be building with this.

Every new community should be building with something that's not going to burn, whether it's this material or other concrete-based materials.

-This is a fire-resilient material that we're putting into all of our homes.

It's going to protect your home and create a 90-minute wall to protect your home from fire for 90 minutes.

-Versus?

-How does that compare to a--?

-Regular CDX plywood is about 30 minutes.

This protects your home up to 90 minutes from the fire getting in.

I don't believe fire or ember will last more than 90 minutes.

-Resilience to me is just really about the ability to withstand these shocks and stresses or be able to recover from them quickly.

Ideally, when you're talking about building materials, you have something that is built in a way that is either going to completely withstand some disaster like that-- When the fire, if you're using fireproof materials, that's ideal.

Or it's, again, something that you can rebuild quickly.

In terms of the community overall.

[music] -I completely understand why people are rebuilding with wood.

Most architects and contractors don't know how to build with alternative materials, so that's their go-to.

It actually makes me cringe when I see the wood frame construction.

Just because I've been trying to get this word out since the beginning of the year.

I just feel like I haven't had the chance to educate people and let them know that they can build with something that's not going to burn down next time.

-You can't say fireproof to anything.

No one can.

We say fire-resistant.

It does have a four-hour fire rating.

In extreme firestorms, it doesn't degrade, it won't blow up.

It won't burn, obviously.

If your roof were to burn, these walls will stay standing and can be rebuilt upon later, so you don't lose your own home.

-I don't think that there is one magic bullet where we should be prescribing specific building materials and designs across the board necessarily.

Again, within reason.

We should be giving guidance and offering people resources to help them make decisions.

Whether it's a fire or it's an earthquake or it's a flood, the reality is, especially with climate, we probably are going to be encountering more scenarios in the future with Los Angeles, where we are having to rebuild or rethink our community development and design.

-What if we incentivized not rebuilding, but not building?

Part of that could be I could come to a person whose home has been burned out and say, "Look, you could rebuild, but what if I offered to buy your property as a willing seller, not eminent domain, pay you at market rate?

Now you have an option."

-I think that we do need to bring that into the conversation about whether we should be rebuilding.

This is another reason why we should be continuing these conversations outside of the immediate urgency of an emergency or disaster, when people are really just fully focused on bringing their lives back to some level of normalcy.

We need to start bringing that conversation to the table of where exactly should we be building and developing, and are some of the places that we developed in the past still appropriate, given the way things are changing in the future.

-Since 2003, we've had 19 of the 20 largest fires in the state, 18 of the 20 most destructive, and 13 of the 20 most fatal.

That's data that is fully driven by climate change.

Why build back in the ways that we have?

Why allow those houses to be rebuilt two, three, four times after fires?

Which is a question about insurance, but also about our political lives.

Why replicate it?

Human beings are creating fire.

We bring fire into these landscapes, and then we are consumed by it.

[music]