00:00Is one of the wealthiest communities in the country being rebuilt only to burn down again when the next wildfire
00:06comes knocking?
00:07A growing number of building experts fear not enough is being done to prevent that from happening here in the
00:13Pacific Palisades.
00:14Nearly 1,000 homes are under construction here.
00:18After the costliest wildfire in history destroyed nearly 7,000 structures in the area in January 2025.
00:25Most of them are being rebuilt with traditional wood framing.
00:28And a fraction in steel and concrete.
00:32Materials that don't catch fire and are now roughly on par in cost.
00:36And wood is probably the worst technology decision ever in the history of man.
00:41Are you saying that this house would survive another Palisades fire?
00:46Yes. It's happened before and it will happen again.
00:49Sometimes when I drive through the Palisades and I look at these wood houses, I see them differently.
00:55I no longer see them as just a structure for a house, but I see them as fuel for fire.
01:02I think that if you look at a lot of the rhetoric around the rebuild, it's been about the speed
01:07of the rebuild.
01:07But I think that we have to balance that with the long-term view to ask,
01:11are we doing enough to make sure that this doesn't happen again?
01:14To be clear, risk advisory leaders say you can still build a fire-resilient home with wood framing,
01:20as long as you do everything right on the outside.
01:23I think as we move into this kind of new world where there's less reliance on large institutions
01:30for our own protection, the homeowner should be wanting to own that protection themselves.
01:36And I think building in a new way is certainly one way to do that.
01:40I'm not only building my house above code, but I'm also building it with a material that I know won't
01:45burn.
01:45And that's just the thing that seems to make sense to do,
01:47especially if the cost to do so is basically exactly the same.
