New book warns Los Angeles wildfire failures threaten rebuilding effort

Fewer than a dozen homes had been fully rebuilt in Los Angeles County a year after the Palisades and Eaton fires, a pace that makes Jonathan Vigliotti’s new book feel less like a postmortem than a warning. Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn, and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild L.A. is scheduled for publication May 12 and examines how Southern California is trying to recover while preparing for the 2028 Olympic Games.

The fires erupted on Jan. 7, 2025, as severe drought, low humidity and powerful Santa Ana winds drove flames through Pacific Palisades, Altadena and surrounding communities. The Palisades Fire and Eaton Fire burned more than 57,000 acres, destroyed more than 18,000 structures, displaced more than 250,000 people at the height of the emergency and killed 31 people. The scale of the damage left entire neighborhoods confronting not only loss, but years of rebuilding in a region already stretched by housing costs and scarce resources.

One year later, the recovery still moved at a crawl. Construction had begun on only about 500 of the more than 16,000 structures lost, and the bottlenecks were familiar: permits, insurance disputes and rising construction costs. That gap between public promises and private reality has become the defining measure of the response, especially for families in Pacific Palisades and Altadena who are still waiting for their homes, schools and blocks to come back.

Vigliotti frames the disaster as a test of whether Los Angeles has absorbed the lessons of its own vulnerability. The book links the fires to failures in wildfire preparedness, emergency response and land-use decisions, then places that unfinished recovery against the pressure to deliver before the 2028 Olympics. The result is a stark question for city and county leaders: whether the region will harden its defenses and speed up rebuilding, or whether the next crisis will find the same weak points still exposed.