The Brief

In a single month, 2025 is the second most destructive fire year in California history, with more than 16,000 homes and other structures damaged or destroyed by two fires in the Los Angeles area. Most of those structures were in neighborhoods where the boundaries between human development and natural landscapes blur — the area fire officials and researchers call the wildland-urban interface, or WUI (woo-ee).

When a wildfire approaches one of these areas, the results can be hazardous as a fire can transition from consuming trees, shrubs and plants to devouring homes and other structures often constructed in ways that are vulnerable to burning. And it’s also where California has been building homes for decades — nearly 45% of homes built between 1990 and 2020 are located in places with lots of vegetation ready to fuel a fire.

A CalMatters analysis has found that as of 2020, nearly 14 million Californians, or one in three, lived in the sprawling 7-million-acre zone that makes up the wildland-urban interface. And this isn’t just a problem for Californians living in rural parts of the state: All 58 counties in California have such areas, along with many across the country. The interface grows by about 2 million acres a year nationwide, according to the U.S. Fire Administration.

Sarah McCaffrey, a social scientist who worked for the U.S. Forest Service for decades, put it another way: Structural fires and wildland fires — and the interface is where the two come together.

Just because a development is located within the wildland-urban interface doesn’t mean a fire will occur there, but there may be deadly and destructive consequences if one does. While under 3% of the statewide interface has been affected by wildfire in the last decade, thousands of homes in the zone have been destroyed, according to a CalMatters analysis.

Since 2018, Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency, has inspected all of the buildings within 100 meters of a fire perimeter and assessed the level of damage. The most destructive fires in California history have largely damaged or destroyed homes within the wildland-urban interface, including the two largest fires in Los Angeles County this year — the Palisades and Eaton fires, which demolished entire neighborhoods and killed 28 people as of Jan. 24.

The Eaton Fire killed at least 17 people and destroyed more than 9,400 structures, roughly 9,200 of which were within the interface as is much of Altadena, where the San Gabriel Valley rises to meet the San Gabriel Mountains. The map below shows inspections of buildings conducted by Cal Fire following the Eaton Fire along with the wildland-urban interface, illustrating just how destructive a major conflagration can be for suburban areas.

The other major fire in L.A., the Palisades Fire, apparently raced down the Santa Monica Mountains toward Pacific Palisades, which is nearly entirely within the interface. The hurricane-force winds stoked and spread the flames and destroyed at least 6,800 structures while nearly 4,100 were undamaged.

The deadliest and most destructive fire in California history, the Camp Fire, destroyed the town of Paradise in Butte County in 2018 as the massive blaze burned both the natural and built environment. The fire damaged or destroyed nearly 20,000 structures and killed 85 people.

Having a home in the wildland-urban interface doesn’t guarantee that it’s going to burn down if a wildfire engulfs the neighborhood. Many factors contribute to that possibility, such as the year when the home was built, nearby fuel management practices that aim to reduce nearby flammable objects, weather and, yes, luck.

Despite all this, some experts say the wildland-urban interface isn’t the only, or perhaps even the best, way to measure fire hazard or risk because it wasn’t designed for that. It can collapse nuance to narrowly focus our attention.

“There’s nothing about fire risk in the WUI [wildland-urban interface] map,” said McCaffrey. “There are some papers that show that roughly a third of houses lost in fires are not in the WUI right? But we target all our attention to the WUI.”

An example of how the boundary between the wild and urban landscape doesn’t necessarily translate to high fire risk is the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Sonoma County. The Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa was nearly leveled even though it’s not technically in the wildland-urban interface, just next to it. The fire destroyed more than 5,000 structures and killed 22 people.

“There’s actually a legal or technical forestry definition of the wildland-urban interface, and it has to do with the number of structures per acre and the amount of vegetation,” said Judson Boomhower, an assistant professor in the economics department of UC San Diego. “I think sometimes it’s more useful to talk about building in high wildfire hazard places.”

The ways to reduce the risk of fire spreading from house to house depend on the nuances of each neighborhood, particularly how densely packed the buildings are.

“If houses are, you know, 80 or 100 feet apart, then all our focus on defensible space and zone zero and all that stuff probably makes a lot more sense,” said McCaffrey. “Because then, you know, it’s a good chance my house could survive if I’ve done all this, even if my neighbor’s house catches on fire.”

On the other hand, some of the homes in Pacific Palisades look so close together that even ensuring that there is nothing flammable within five feet might not have prevented the spread of the fire, said McCaffrey. A law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September 2021 required the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection and the State Fire Marshal to make suggestions for creating an ember-resistant zone within five feet of a structure in a high fire severity zone.

State intervention has helped to reduce destruction in these more wildfire-prone areas. Research from 2021 concluded that California homes built after 2008 were nearly half as likely to be destroyed compared with those built in 1990 if a wildfire burned through the neighborhood, largely because of improved building code regulations.

California faces a chronic housing shortage and megafires boosted by climate change, but with millions of residents already living in the wildland-urban interface, state policymakers will face questions of how to protect people and where to rebuild after disaster strikes.

The L.A. City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to make permanent a city pilot program that diverts police away from some mental health crisis calls.

Since launching in 2024, clinicians with the city’s Unarmed Model of Crisis Response have handled more than 17,000 calls for service, ranging from mental health crises to wellbeing checks. According to city reports, about 96% of those calls were resolved without police.

“We can’t keep deploying armed officers to handle mental health crisis calls because the outcome is Angelenos paying with loss of life and millions of their tax dollars for legal settlements,” Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who co-authored the motion to enshrine the program, said at Tuesday’s meeting.

According to Hernandez, in 2023, more than a third of LAPD shootings involved someone experiencing a mental health crisis.

Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson said the data from city reports was "incontrovertible and unassailable," showing the program’s success at diverting police and fire first responders away from mental health crisis situations.

Council members said the move to make the unarmed model permanent was also a matter of fiscal responsibility. According to a news release from the offices of Hernandez and Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, on average it costs the city roughly $85 per hour to dispatch LAPD officers, while a response from a UMCR team costs roughly $35 per hour.

Last fall, progressive policy advocacy group LA Forward, convened a summit of local and state officials with the goal of making UMCR permanent and expanding it.

Godfrey Plata, deputy director of LA Forward, told LAist his group was “incredibly excited” to see the city make the pilot program permanent.

Plata said he sees enshrining the program as a first step in expanding the program citywide, which his group hopes to do by the 2028 Olympics.

How the program works

In 2024, the city partnered with three nonprofit organizations — Exodus Recovery, Alcott Center and Penny Lane Centers — to provide teams of trained clinicians in service areas spread across L.A. The teams are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week within the Police Department’s Devonshire, Wilshire, Southeast, West LA, Olympic and West Valley divisions.

Crisis response workers are trained in de-escalation techniques, mental health, substance use, conflict resolution and more, according to a report on the program from the Office of City Administrative Officer. The teams don’t have the authority to order psychiatric holds for people in crisis, but they can work with them to find help locally, and spend more time on follow up than law enforcement can.

In its first year, Los Angeles’s Unarmed Model of Crisis Response sent teams of unarmed clinicians to  more than 6,700 calls for service, ranging from mental health crises to wellbeing checks. Only about 4% were redirected to the LAPD. Average response times have been under 30 minutes.

Examples of these interactions include members of the teams taking food to a woman who was crying and hungry, working with a business owner to engage with someone sleeping in a parking lot and sitting with a family for nearly three hours to help resolve a conflict involving a relative.

What’s next

The motion approved Tuesday also directs city officials to form a working group made up of the LAPD, the L.A. Fire Department and other agencies to address inefficiencies in the dispatch system. The goal of the working group will be to centralize unarmed crisis response dispatch and improve response times.

On a Friday afternoon on a quiet suburban block in Lakewood, the only sign that something special is happening is a small handwritten chalkboard with a small Peruvian flag and an American flag placed nearby, listing the day's specials — Papa Rellena, Aji de Pollo, Lomo Saltado. This is Lomo Fuego, a fully licensed Peruvian restaurant operating out of a family home, and it's part of a quietly growing movement reshaping how Los Angeles defines a restaurant.

The only sign you'll find outside Lomo Fuego — a handwritten chalkboard on a quiet Lakewood lawn

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Since launching in January 2019, L.A. County's Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation (MEHKO) program has issued more than 200 permits, transforming residential kitchens into licensed restaurants.

Lomo Fuego's founder is Heidi Randolph, a Peruvian immigrant and former interior designer who left her career to be closer to home. With a new mortgage and no income, she found an unlikely business partner in her brother — a trained chef who had just arrived from Peru — and an idea: turn the backyard into a restaurant. Her husband, William Armando Rios, a truck driver, had his doubts, but Randolph pushed forward anyway.

Randolph wanted to do things right, so she called the city of Lakewood. They told her it was impossible. She kept researching anyway and eventually found MEHKO.

What Is MEHKO?

MEHKO — short for Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation — is a program administered by the L.A. County Department of Public Health that allows residents to run licensed food businesses from their primary residences. No commercial kitchen required, no landlord to answer to. Operators are capped at 30 meals a day and $100,000 in gross annual revenue — guardrails designed to keep the businesses appropriately scaled to a residential setting, but also the kind that make brick-and-mortar the natural next step for a thriving operation.

The permit process, she says, was surprisingly accessible.

Her total startup investment came in under $2,000 — a fraction of the $30,000 to $40,000 it typically costs to open even a modest commercial kitchen.

"My savings from my previous job helped me, and my husband supported me in everything — in the beginning, he was like, what are you doing? But he believed in me."

Luis, Fritz, and Heidi Randolph — the family behind Lomo Fuego in Lakewood.

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Finding their footing

Starting a restaurant is never easy, especially when it’s in your backyard.

Randolph said the early days were filled with uncertainty, when she'd find herself cooking only to have nobody come, leftovers piling up, credit cards creeping toward their limits, social media posts going largely unnoticed. She pushed through anyway.

Luis, Heidi Randolph's brother and head chef, along with their mother Fritz, preps for service in the Lomo Fuego kitchen

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"You just have to be patient — posting on Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, TikTok. Little by little, it started getting somewhere," she said.

The turning point came from an unexpected source. Cook Alliance, a nonprofit that works alongside the county to support MEHKO operators, reached out and offered to connect Randolph with an influencer. The creator, from the account LA OC Eats, came out and shot a video.

Overnight, everything changed.

"It was a line of people outside — way outside," she said.

Neighbors, to Randolph's relief, couldn't have been more supportive.

Behind the scenes, it's a true family affair — Randolph's brother handles the bulk of the cooking while her mother, Fritz, who still works as a housekeeper at the VA on her days off, pitches in wherever she's needed. The family has since brought on additional kitchen and waitstaff to keep up with demand. It's exactly the kind of scene Randolph had always envisioned.

The Jungle, the Germans and Aji amarillo

To understand Lomo Fuego’s menu, you have to understand where Heidi Randolph comes from.

Randolph grew up in Oxapampa, a small town in Peru's high jungle — tucked into the Pasco region about five hours east of Lima, where the Andes begin their descent toward the Amazon — founded by German and Austrian immigrants in the mid-1800s. It helps explain why the menu at Lomo Fuego includes schnitzel and a plantain-based strudel alongside the lomo saltado.

Lomo Saltado Pobre at Lomo Fuego — the dish that started it all, served with rice, fries, fried plantains, and a fried egg.

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Peruvian cuisine has long absorbed outside influences — Chinese laborers brought the wok and soy sauce that make lomo saltado possible, and the stir-fried noodle dish Tallarín Saltado is essentially Peru's answer to lo mein, so deeply rooted in Chinese cooking it belongs to its own culinary tradition known as Chifa.

Being the ever-curious food writer that I am, I passed on many of the well-known dishes and went straight for the daily specials, landing on the Aji de Gallina — a stewed chicken dish built around ají amarillo, the foundational "soul" of Peruvian cuisine. Alongside garlic and red onion, it forms what many cooks consider the holy trinity of Peruvian cooking. The pepper itself is deceptively complex — fruity, vibrant, and slightly sweet, with tropical notes and a moderate heat that never overwhelms. In Randolph's version, it announces itself immediately through its creamy textures, highlighted by the savoriness of the stewed chicken with chunks of boiled potatoes and white rice.

Seco de Res con Frijoles at Lomo Fuego — tender beef braised in chicha de jora and cilantro, served with canario beans and white rice.

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I also tried the Seco de Res con Frijoles, which tells a different story — tender beef braised in chicha de jora, an ancient Andean corn beer once consumed ceremonially during Inca religious festivals. With a sauce built on cilantro and ají amarillo, it’s served over white rice and canario beans, a Peruvian staple prized for its creamy, buttery texture. It's a dish that wears its history openly, with Spanish, African, and Indigenous traditions folded into every bite.

Pull up a chair

One of the things I noticed about dining at Lomo Fuego was its intimacy — eating in someone's backyard has a way of softening people. I arrived right when they opened, and soon thereafter, families of all ages stopped by, along with coworkers grabbing lunch and a neighbor checking in on an upcoming catering order.

Aji de Gallina at Lomo Fuego — shredded chicken in a creamy aji amarillo sauce, topped with a hard boiled egg

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"Seeing the people excited when they have that first bite — that's what motivates me every day," she said.

Outgrowing the Backyard

Lomo Fuego has grown beyond what Randolph ever imagined when she was cooking in a void in those early days. She's now pursuing a loan and scouting locations for a brick-and-mortar restaurant — the natural next step for a MEHKO kitchen that has outgrown its backyard. But she's clear about what she's taking with her.

"I hope in the future people can say, this still tastes like food from home."

Federal agents searched Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters and the San Pedro home of Superintendent Alberto Carvalho Wednesday morning, the Department of Justice confirmed.

The reason for the searches is unknown. A DOJ spokesperson said the agency has a court-authorized warrant, but declined to provide additional details. The FBI told our media partner CBS LA that the the underlying affidavit remained under court-ordered seal.

LAUSD published a statement online saying the district was aware of "law enforcement activity" at its headquarters and the superintendent's home.

"The District is cooperating with the investigation and we do not have further information at this time," the district said.

Neighbors told LAist they first noticed officers at Carvalho's home around 6 a.m. One of them, John, said an officer told him to stay in his home. LAist agreed not to publish his last name out of fear of reprisal.

At LAUSD's downtown headquarters, multiple district staff members told LAist they were unaware of the raids until they saw the media gathered outside.

Carvalho has been superintendent of LAUSD since 2022, and the board renewed his contract in 2025.

It remained unclear early Wednesday afternoon what the cause of the investigation was, or if it is in any way related to previous issues between the district and the Trump administration.

Carvalho and the district’s elected board have expressed unanimous support for immigrant students, staff and families since President Donald Trump was elected to a second term. The superintendent has also spoken openly about his own journey as a former undocumented immigrant.

The district's first major conflict with the administration began in February 2025, when agents from the Department of Homeland Security attempted to enter multiple LAUSD schools, but were rebuffed.

The DOJ also recently petitioned to join a lawsuit alleging the district discriminates against white students.