ENVIRONMENT

A year after historic fires scorched Los Angeles, survivors share lessons from the burn zone

Nearly 60 square miles burned and 100,000 people were displaced. Now many are holding on to what they found—in their homes and in themselves—after the flames had passed.

MARLA PEPPERS, RYAN SHOOP, AND RICK SHOOP Standi in the ruins from the LA Fires. — When **Marla Peppers** (here with son **Ryan Shoop** and husband Rick Shoop) saw flames on the ridge above her Altadena home, she recognized the threat before the rest of her family. “*Pack, pack, pack!*” she shouted. They saved their dog. They lost their cat, their home of almost 22 years, and nearly all their belongings. Today they’re among more than a dozen fire-displaced families living in an apartment complex and are awaiting construction on their new house, on the same lot as the destroyed one.

Photographs byGideon Mendel

Text byJames Ross Gardner

December 17, 2025

In the era of megadisasters, language fails us. We reach for an adjective—the worst storm, the deadliest flood, the largest wildfire—but even the superlatives come up short. What words, after all, can convey the scale and ferocity of the fires that devastated two very different Los Angeles communities one year ago? The lead-up to Southern California’s winter had been the driest on record. The Santa Ana winds were topping out at nearly 100 miles an hour. On the morning of January 7, those winds began fanning a brush fire on the bluffs above the affluent Pacific Palisades neighborhood, and within an hour, towering flames were consuming homes. That evening, 26 miles away, another wildfire started spreading from Eaton Canyon into the unincorporated community of Altadena, prompting frantic evacuations throughout the night.

Where words feel most inadequate is in articulating the loss—even for those grieving only homes and possessions and not loved ones. “It’s just stuff” buoys us only until we remember that among the ashes were the last existing photos of a parent long passed. “It can all be replaced” ignores the irretrievable sense of continuity that’s gone with the hand-me-down toys or the heirloom necklace. And how to express the loss of community? The Eaton fire alone destroyed more than 6,000 homes in Altadena, causing billions of dollars in damage. But those numbers don’t describe the desolation of a neighborhood, the rupture of bonds forged over decades or generations. (Photos show apocalyptic scenes as wildfires rage across Los Angeles.)

Photographer Gideon Mendel arrived in L.A. in mid-February, two weeks after the fires were fully contained. Demolition had barely begun; blackened husks of buildings lined the streets. Based in London, Mendel has spent years traveling to sites of climate-related disasters, photographing the victims of devastating floods and fires around the world. Over the course of five weeks in L.A., he captured 129 portraits, meeting the displaced in the charred remains of their houses, businesses, and places of worship. Some gave him objects from the ruins, to be photographed in the studio. And in both the Palisades, a zip code to Hollywood stars and moguls, and Altadena, a diverse middle-class community and an enclave for African Americans since the 1960s, Mendel captured an all-too-modern form of uneasy mourning—one he has encountered in flood-ravaged communities from Nigeria to Brazil to Pakistan and in fire-scorched towns from Australia to Canada to Greece. (What the images of Los Angeles's fires don’t show.)

“I think when you lose your house, there isn’t an obvious ritual,” Mendel says. No funeral, eulogy, or wake. His wish, then, is for his subjects, photographed among the ruins, to experience “a moment of closure, a moment of catharsis.” A ritual of coming to terms, hopefully, before weighing the decision to rebuild or to move on.

Salvaged from the ruins of Corpus Christi Church in Pacific Palisades, this frame once held a photo of the current archbishop of Los Angeles, José H. Gómez. Also found among the wreckage, largely unscathed, was the church’s tabernacle—the brass box containing the Eucharist. Corpus Christi’s pastor, Msgr. Liam Kidney, calls its recovery “a great sign of hope for us.”

After losing the English-style cottage she’d lived in for 26 years, Staci Mitchell, her husband, and their teenage son moved eight times. First they stayed in another son’s one-bedroom apartment, then in a series of hotels and Airbnbs, before finding a rental. Mitchell, whose family has lived in Altadena for four generations, is planning to rebuild where the original house stood. “I know that latitude and longitude,” she says. “I know that piece of Earth. I know where the sun rises.” She hopes others in the community, including other multigenerational Black families, will return to Altadena too.

Jeff Randle and Claire Smith were married in the backyard of the house that Randle’s father, Bob, bought in 1976. They took over the property after Bob died and were raising two teenage sons there when the Eaton fire burned down the home. Among the ashes was a ceramic egg-shaped jar fused to an antique saucer. Both had belonged to Smith’s grandmother, who built her home in the Pacific Palisades in the 1940s on a block that was destroyed the same day as Randle and Smith’s house.

Kevin Hockin and Rosanna Kvernmo were at Disneyland with daughter Judith when they learned the Eaton fire had reached Side Pie, the wood-fired pizza restaurant they’d opened in 2021. Blocks away, their home sustained so much smoke and heat damage, it will have to be rebuilt. They’re renting in northeast L.A., 12 miles away, while awaiting insurance settlements and their landlord’s decision whether to sell the empty lot where their business once stood. “It’s a giant waiting game,” Kvernmo says.

After the Palisades fire destroyed Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church, associate pastor Rev. Grace Park thought of her congregation as part of the “Palisades diaspora,” its members spread across the state and the country. Yet Pacific Palisades Presbyterian hasn’t missed a Sunday service, held at another church nearby. With the cost to rebuild as high as $20 million, church leaders are still unsure what the future holds. “The Palisades isn’t going to be back to what it was for another seven to 10 years,” Park says. “So what does it mean to plant a church where there’s nobody living?” When Gideon Mendel set out to photograph a Bible recovered from the church wreckage, it fell open to the Old Testament Book of Job.

On the night they spotted flames lapping the hills above Altadena, Barry Levine and Kimberly Hope had been married less than three months and had just purchased their ranch-style home. Within 15 minutes, they packed the car and fled, taking two changes of clothes and their cat, Sister. The next afternoon, as they rounded a corner, they saw their house obliterated, pockets of fire still glowing through the smoke. The couple chose to sell the lot and are in the process of finding a new “forever home.”

A version of this story appears in the January 2026 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Support for photographer Gideon Mendel’s work on this story was provided by the Center for Contemporary Documentation.