The Brief

 When thousands of homes were reduced to ash by the Eaton Fire, one of the few things left behind were the chimneys — and the kiln-fired tiles that adorned them.

“They were born of fire,” says Eric Garland, co-founder of Save The Tiles and long-time Altadena resident. The tiles were popular during Altadena’s architectural boom of the 1910s and ‘20s, “and were a defining characteristic of a handcrafted, unique home.”

But Phase 2 of the debris cleanup has begun in parts of the community, meaning the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will bulldoze burned lots down to 6 inches below topsoil.

“What will be lost is not only the very last of old Altadena, but for that homeowner, emotionally priceless artwork that surrounded the hearth,” Garland says.

“That's the countdown clock that we're racing.”

Save the tiles, save the town

I meet Eric Garland on a Saturday in a parking lot just outside the burn zone. We drive through the destroyed streets of Altadena toward a tile rescue site.

Mangled cars, a few stray planters, the occasional mailbox. And lots and lots of still-standing chimneys.

Garland tells me he and his family were out of town when fire tore through their neighborhood. His neighbors, minutes after watching their own homes burn, stamped out embers and dumped buckets of pool water onto other houses to establish a perimeter.

Garland’s home was the first they were able to save.

“Your first mission is to save your life,” Garland says. “Your next mission, save your home. And failing that, you've got to try to save what you can. You draw a line and say this is as far as the loss goes.”

Garland credits his daughter Lucy with the idea to rescue the tiles. As they walked along Holliston Street, through what remained of their neighborhood, he remembered her asking, “Is there nothing else that survived?”

Now  “we're hearing from so many homeowners that if you could save even one tile,” he says, “it would be the only thing I have left.”

Neighbors and Save the Tiles co-founders Eric Garland, left, and Stanley Zucker have cataloged more than 200 historic fireplaces in Altadena.

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‘All that’s left’

We arrive at a job site — the outline of a destroyed craftsman home on Palm Street. The once-lush courtyard of bougainvillea and lavender has given way to a blackened jumble of ash and stray nails.

It’s dead quiet, save for the occasional car and the steady beat of hammer and chisel.

Garland introduces me to his neighbor and Save the Tiles co-founder, Stanley Zucker. “My partner in tile,” he adds.

Stanley Zucker helps Mary Gandsey climb out of a burnt Altadena home on Palm Street.

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Zucker grabs empty cardboard boxes from the truck, and carefully hops over what was once a side wall into the interior of the home. “Watch out for up-turned nails,” he warns me, leading the way through the rubble to the chimney.

For a homeowner, he says, “all of their memories, everything on this lot that was important to them, is channeled into the tiles, because they’re all that’s left.”

Expertise required

The fireplace opening stands about four feet above the home’s burned foundation. A few planks of makeshift scaffolding allow access to the tiled facade.

Cliff Douglas and his daughter, Devon, take turns chiseling grout and taping off slabs of tile. “Team Douglas,” Garland calls them. “The third co-founders.”

The older Douglas specializes in masonry restoration — an important skill for a project that involves tiles prone to cracking and chimneys that could topple. Garland says Cliff has already had to ask some volunteers not to come back — they cracked too many tiles.

Cliff Douglas hands a taped-off Batchelder tile to his daughter, Devon Douglas.

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Pressing his ear to the fireplace, Douglas gently taps with the blunt end of the chisel, listening for hollow spots. Once he’s confident, he tapes off the large central tile and grabs his hammer.

"Ernest Batchelder. He’s the artist who made these tiles — in his backyard, originally, on Arroyo Boulevard and La Loma,” Douglas says. “Then they moved to downtown Los Angeles.”

Douglas believes these tiles were likely made shortly after the move, about a hundred years ago. The design is in line with Batchelder’s earlier work, but the stamp on the back says “Los Angeles.”

Similar individual tiles regularly sell for hundreds of dollars, and Batchelder’s work represents one of L.A’s biggest contributions to the American Arts and Crafts movement.

“ They're beautiful pieces of art,   and hopefully we can bring them back to life again,” Douglas says.

“Maybe a fireplace when they rebuild, or maybe a little memorial area.”

Devon Douglas, left, Cliff Douglas, and Mary Gandsey take a break from recovering fireplace tiles.

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Painstaking work

It can take several hours to recover tile from a single fireplace, and with more than 200 houses on the list, Team Douglas needed to expand. So Zucker connected them with an old friend, one of the best in the business.

Mary Gandsey is an expert restorer of wood whose resume includes the Gamble House and Castle Green. Today she’s training under Douglas so she can lead the recovery at other sites.

Gandsey says she came out of retirement because she loves these homes and has worked on many of them. “Now that they're all gone," she says, "I want to save some piece of what was here for the future.”

Boxes of recovered tiles will be cataloged and stored so that they can be returned to homeowners later.

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200 chimneys, 200 stories

As Douglas swaps his hammer and chisel for an angle grinder, Garland gets a call from another homeowner — she has signed the consent form that allows the team to enter her home. It’s a five-minute walk away.

On our way out of the gate, we run into Myungeun and Dan Strickland, who are back to visit the remnants of their home and check in on the neighborhood.

The Stricklands are an elderly couple who lived on Palm Street for more than 20 years. They lost everything: antique Korean furniture, historic family documents from Massachusetts and old family photographs.

But remarkably, her orchids are growing back, Strickland says, and she’s hoping her charred pomegranate tree survives too.

On our walk, we pass block after block of empty lots — extending our line of sight for miles in every direction.

The Eaton Fire burned through nearly 22 square miles, leveling entire neighborhoods of Altadena. But many fireplaces and chimneys survived.

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Elizabeth Richie meets us on the concrete steps of her home.

Richie was the first person Garland met after the fires. The intense heat had changed the tiles on her fireplace from “tans and browns to turquoise, with pinks and whites in it,” she says. “The original colors.”

The devastation had scoured clean a century’s worth of smoke, soot and everything else.

“This over here was the original rose garden that my friend’s grandmother had when she lived here,” Richie says. “And we had big grapevines over here.”

She pauses, and points beyond a few burned cars. “That was the back house, where Ozzie lived with his dogs,” she says.

“The police tried to get him out but he wouldn’t leave, he’d been here since he was 7 years old. At the very end, he just ran out of time.”

Oswald Altmetz, Richie’s long-time family friend, died along with his dogs that night. He was 75.

The magnitude of loss will always be with her, Richie says. But she’s finding ways to preserve what remains. She plans to use the aluminum slag from the burned cars in an art project, and a stone Buddha in the garden survived unscathed.

And she’s grateful to still have her fireplace tiles.

“ There's still beauty and hope here,” she adds.

A community determined to rebuild

Back on Palm Street, Gandsey and the Douglases are loading the truck with boxes of tile. Zucker is talking to a new recruit, a librarian who will help to track and catalog the growing tile archive.

Garland says it could be years before people are ready to reclaim their tiles — and the team is preparing to store them for as long as it takes. 

Homeowners Carie Lewis and Christophe Basset arrive, and tell Garland they plan to rebuild. They already have the blueprints for their original craftsman, the couple says.

“We're probably going to talk to Cliff to restore a fireplace in the new building. With the same tiles, of course,” says Basset.

Like Richie, they were surprised to see the surviving tiles become so much more vibrant and colorful. “So maybe it'll be a bit of new and a bit of really ancient coming back together,” Basset says.

“Which is what all of Altadena is going to be,” Zucker adds.

Save The Tiles is running a GoFundMe campaign, with proceeds going to the Altadena Historical Society.

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This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Rabbi Amy Bernstein says the wind-whipped fire in January 2025 that scorched much of the Pacific Palisades, destroying her home and damaging her synagogue, “blew everything open” for the community’s faith leaders.

“If our hearts must break, let them break open,” said the rabbi, who leads Kehillat Israel where 300 families out of 900 lost their homes. “This tragedy has really pushed us closer to one another. We’re working to change the things we need changed.”

Faith leaders both in the Pacific Palisades and in Altadena and Pasadena — devastated by the pair of fires that tore across Southern California — have relied on interfaith and community partnerships to rally congregants who are picking up the pieces 16 months later.

They’ve had to learn on the fly about insurance coverage and local land use regulations while still trying to keep their scattered flock together and raising money for basic needs. Pastors in Altadena have had to fight to protect the rights of Black people who decades ago found pathways to home ownership in that community despite redlining — but now risk losing their land to outside developers who sense an investment opportunity.

And throughout this span, faith leaders have had to cater to the emotional and spiritual needs of their communities and think about how they want to rebuild their sanctuaries that were lost or damaged in the fire. More than a dozen houses of worship burned to the ground or were damaged.

Interfaith relationships have become stronger after the fires

This would have been difficult for faith leaders to handle but for the interfaith relationships that became closer and stronger after the fires, said the Rev. Grace Park, associate pastor at Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church, which burned down.

Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics, Jews and yogis have not just found common ground in human suffering and loss, but have learned how to lean on one another in a time of dire need, she said.

“It’s a sense of mutual affection and respect, learning from each other and leaning on one another,” Park said. “We’re sharing the joys and the deep valleys of what it means to lead through a time of tragedy.”

Brother Satyananda, a senior monk at the Self Realization Fellowship, lost his living quarters and belongings in the fire. Much of the campus, started by Paramahamsa Yogananda who brought ancient spiritual practices from India to the West, fortunately survived the fire.

Satyananda recalls one day when Bernstein picked up on his sadness and offered him “motherly compassion.”

“We share the same profession where we’re tuned to people in need,” he said. “Now, our relationship has changed because we’re tuning into each other. There’s a greater level of trust.”

Pastor BJ King, who leads LoveLand LifeCenter, worked with the late Rev. Cecil B. Murray to heal communities and build interfaith coalitions after the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

“Back then, there was a choice whether or not to get involved,” he said. “But with these fires, there is no choice. It has affected everybody.”

Pastors have had to acquire new skills

King’s congregation has switched to online services after their leased church building in Altadena suffered smoke damage. Twelve families lost their homes. In addition to helping meet people’s basic needs, King has created a program organizing gatherings to connect therapists with those in need of mental health.

“Many people didn’t even know they needed that,” he said.

One of the most powerful roles faith leaders have played after the fire is to “continue to talk with power, people in charge,” said Pastor Jonathan DeCuir, who leads Victory Bible Church in Pasadena. He and others in the region have continued to meet with local officials and even conferred with Gov. Gavin Newsom to keep things moving for their communities.

DeCuir chairs the board of a nonprofit called Legacy Land Project, which provides financial aid, legal support and guidance on building contractors, as well as medical care to those affected by the fires.

The disaster has brought a level of camaraderie that DeCuir says he has never seen among the region’s clergy.

“Denominational lines have been crossed,” he said. “Even if we have different theological stances or approaches to ministry, we are all now looking at how to care for our people and community. If we don’t come together, Altadena will never ever be the same. The people won’t be there anymore. That, to me, is terrifying.”

While a church is more than a building, physical churches do appear as “beacons of hope” in traumatized communities, said Pastor Mayra Macedo-Nolan, executive director of Clergy Community Coalition in Pasadena. Her group has lobbied for houses of worship to be prioritized on the same footing as businesses in the rebuilding plan.

“When people start seeing churches rebuilding in Altadena, they’re going to feel like it’s going to be OK because the churches are coming back,” she said.

Reimagining a purposeful future

Pastor Jonathan Lewis, fourth from right, holds a groundbreaking service at the site of the burned Fountain of Life Nazarene Church to mark the beginning of its rebuilding in Altadena, Calif., April 26, 2026.

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Members of the congregation join in prayer during the groundbreaking ceremony at the site of the burned Fountain of Life Nazarene Church, marking the beginning of its rebuilding, April 26, 2026, in Altadena, Calif.

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Pastor Jonathan Lewis poses for a photo with his congregation during a groundbreaking service at the site of the burned Fountain of Life Nazarene Church, marking the beginning of its rebuilding, April 26, 2026, in Altadena, Calif.

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On April 26, the Altadena Fountain of Life Church broke ground to build a new sanctuary after their house of worship, which had stood for over three decades, was destroyed in the fire. Pastor Jonathan Lewis, who ministers to about 75, hopes the church will be ready in time for Easter next year.

“It’ll be a Resurrection Sunday for our church, too,” he said.

Alexis Duncan, who grew up in Altadena attending that church, came to the groundbreaking with her 6-year-old daughter. She lost both her home and her church building.

“It means everything to me that they’re rebuilding because I want the church to be there for my daughter as she grows up,” she said. “This new beginning gives me and my family hope and the encouragement to come back.”

Some churches like Altadena Community Church, a United Church of Christ congregation, are pausing to rethink their future purpose. The Rev. Michael Lewis, who took over in February after the previous pastor retired, said the congregation is looking into several possibilities for the one-acre lot, including affordable housing.

“We know that a church is not intended to be a landlord and the pastor is no property manager,” he said. “But, we’re also thinking about who is able to return to Altadena? How will this rich, economically diverse community that was scattered by the fire come back?”

The church has been around since the 1940s. A haven for actors, poets and musicians, the former sanctuary also served as a vibrant performance space. Lewis said they hope to incorporate a performance stage into the new facility.

“It’ll look different from what we had before,” he said. “Once we figure out how to build community, we can decide what physical structures will help us support that community.”

As for Kehillat Israel, on May 15, members will carry their Torah scrolls back to their sanctuary, marking one of the first returns by a house of worship to the Palisades since the disaster.

Judaism has had “a long history of starting over,” Bernstein said.

“It’s encoded in our cultural approach to the world, that there are things that can always be taken away from you,” she said. “But what you become can never get taken away.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday that he has requested a yearlong extension of FEMA funding for L.A. fire survivors. Without the extension, the money will run out July 9.

Now the decision on FEMA support lies with the federal government.

The funds have allowed many survivors to afford temporary housing and other daily needs. Most have yet to return home — 2 in 3 survivors who were living in Altadena or Pacific Palisades at the time of the fires are still displaced, according to the latest survey of more than 2,100 survivors by the nonprofit Department of Angels. Nearly 40% of respondents reported they will either soon run out of temporary housing insurance coverage or have already.

The situation is particularly dire for low-income households: Nearly 80% of respondents making $50,000 or less said they didn’t think they could afford housing for three months once coverage ended.

“The data is clear: This recovery is not over,” said Angela Giacchetti of the Department of Angels at a news conference organized by the Eaton Fire Collaborative in Altadena on Thursday. “If you are a survivor, you know this in your bones. For many families, it has barely begun. People have just begun to stabilize. We need federal support that reflects the scale of this disaster and systems that survivors can actually navigate and access over time.”

FEMA assistance isn’t reaching most survivors

The FEMA Individuals and Households Program can provide funding for survivors of disasters to pay for temporary housing, repair their homes, and respond to other challenges that insurance may not cover. It can also help cover costs if a survivor has no insurance.

Gil Barel has been relying on FEMA funds to pay rent on a small back house for herself and her son for the last year. She said they still haven’t been able to return to their rent-controlled Pasadena apartment because of smoke damage, though she still has to pay the rent for it.

Gil Barel is paying rent on a smoke-damaged apartment in Pasadena while FEMA funds have helped her cut the cost of temporary housing.

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Barel doesn’t know what they’ll do if the FEMA funding runs out.

“ I'm really stressed out,” she said. “I think I'm just kind of trying to put that thought aside and hope for the best.”

But in the 15 months since the fires, most survivors have not accessed FEMA funding. About 60% have received no FEMA assistance beyond the initial $770 payments dispersed in the immediate aftermath of the fires, according to the Department of Angels survey.

Many have faced denials, according to disaster case manager workers with Catholic Charities of L.A. and lawyers with Legal Aid Foundation of L.A.

That’s the situation for Gayle Nicholls-Ali and her husband, Rasheed, who lost their Altadena home of 15 years in the Eaton Fire. They’ve relied on their insurance to pay for a rental in Montrose, but that’s rapidly running out. And because they have that insurance, FEMA has denied further support.

Gayle Nicholls-Ali and her husband, Rasheed, lost their home in the Eaton Fire. They plan to rebuild, but the cost is a major hurdle.

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“A lot of our ALE [Additional Living Expenses insurance] is going to run out before we even are able to get into a house,” Nicholls-Ali said.

Without FEMA or insurance support, they’ll have to find a way to pay rent on top of a mortgage. They also face a big gap in the cost of their rebuild versus how much their insurance covers. Nicholls-Ali said without the help of FEMA and other sources of funding, recovering feels further out of reach.

Funds for long-term recovery still in limbo

FEMA funding extensions have been routine in past disasters, including the 2023 wildfires in Hawaii and after devastating flooding in North Carolina in 2024.

But the agency has faced significant cuts during the second Trump administration, and there are indications that disaster aid is becoming increasingly political. For example, President Donald Trump has approved aid for just 23% of requests from states with a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators, compared to 89% for states that with Republican governors and senators, according to an analysis by Politico.

The state has also not received more than $33 billion for long-term recovery, which can help pay for infrastructure upgrades and repairs, as well as help rebuild schools, parks and homes. That money was requested by state and local leaders shortly after the January 2025 fires and hasn’t been appropriated by Congress.

An international team of disease detectives is now racing to connect with the more than two dozen passengers who disembarked the MV Honius cruise ship on the Atlantic island of St. Helena before the hantavirus outbreak was identified.

These individuals have flown across the world, including to the United States.

The risk of further spread of this virus is low since it requires close and prolonged contact with an infected individual — and those infected seem to transmit the virus for only a brief period of time. But public health officials want to make sure the outbreak is contained.

Here's how authorities are using the practice of contact tracing to contain the outbreak and keep the hantavirus from spreading.

Contact tracing 101

The concept of modern contact tracing dates to the 1930s and was part of an effort to stop the spread of syphilis. It involves locating the close contacts of anyone who may have been infected. "By identifying people who are at risk of infection," says Preeti Malani, an infectious disease physician at the University of Michigan, "you try to get ahead when people don't have symptoms yet with the goal of preventing the infection from continuing to propagate."

This is a well-tested approach for containing an infectious disease. "It's the oldest tool in the epidemiologic toolbox," explains Malani. "We thought about this a lot early in the pandemic with COVID. But we also do contact tracing for sexually transmitted infections, for things like meningitis and even measles."

Malani likens contact tracing to monitoring ripples in a pond, "trying to prevent those outer rings from propagating by isolating individuals and by identifying individuals who might be at risk of infection."

The idea that "there's a time period where people don't have symptoms but could be harboring the virus, that's what contact tracing helps identify," says Malani.

It starts by pinpointing someone with an infection or suspected infection of the disease in question — in this case, hantavirus. Epidemiologists then look to see with whom they've recently had close contact since these individuals are more likely to have been infected.

This hunt for those with the greatest probability of infection is important. "Otherwise, it becomes an impossible web to contain because everyone is connected to everyone," says Boghuma Titanji, an infectious diseases doctor at Emory University. "So you have to stratify by high, intermediate and low-risk contacts."

The next step involves public health agencies ordering precautions for those who are infected or who may be infected but aren't showing symptoms yet. Such measures may include quarantine, so that an individual doesn't come into contact with even more people — who may then become infected.

One challenge that hantavirus presents is that its incubation period can last up to several weeks. In other words, "people take a long time to become symptomatic after they've been exposed," says Titanji. "Some of these primary contacts would have to be monitoring themselves for symptoms for up to 45 days to be at the tail end of that very long incubation period."

Aboard and ashore

The work isn't high-tech but it is painstaking, requiring officials to reconstruct the many interactions someone may have had over days or weeks.

Onboard the cruise ship, "you might have an individual who is a source of an infection," says Titanji, laying out a hypothetical example. "And then they were sitting at a dinner table with one individual who then goes back to their cabin and shares a bed with their partner who has a conversation with someone else on the deck."

Once someone disembarks the ship, the number of potential interactions can grow quite quickly. This is why officials were concerned when a KLM flight attendant fell ill after being aboard a flight with one of the infected cruise ship passengers. Fortunately, the flight attendant ultimately tested negative for hantavirus.

Titanji is heartened by what she's seen playing out so far. "It seems like the international collaborative effort has been really robust and the mechanisms for containment are in place and underway," she says.

Public health officials argue that contact tracing is a powerful approach that will reduce further spread. "We can break this chain of transmission," said Abdi Mahmoud, the director of the World Health Organization's health emergency alert and response efforts, at a press conference on Thursday.

He has good reason to be confident. Contact tracing was vital during the fight against COVID-19 and helped end the Ebola crisis in Liberia, containing the epidemic there more than a decade ago. Some of the contact tracing even involved hours-long hikes through the jungle to a remote village.

Authorities are hoping for similar success with this hantavirus outbreak.
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The sky above Los Angeles State Historic Park in Chinatown will be dotted with color Saturday with the annual Kite Festival.

The festival had its beginnings as a joyful protest in 2021, back when a proposal for a Dodger Stadium gondola included cutting through the airspace above the park. Organizers say last year’s Kite Festival drew a crowd of about 7,000.

“The Kite Festival, [for] some people, it’s their favorite day in Los Angeles,” said Sue Bell Yank, executive director of Clockshop, the nonprofit arts org that runs the festival. “It’s the time when they really feel connected to their city. More so than any other time.”

This year’s programming includes a kite-making station where you can build your own flying art for a donation of $5, along with art workshops and the unveiling of a large floating, inflatable sculpture by Guatemalan kite artist Francisco Ramos.