Kelley McIntosh is the kind of person who gives her friends fire extinguishers as housewarming gifts. In other words, my kind of person: as a climate journalist who’s spent eight years reporting on adaptations critical to life in our burning, storming, fevered world, I’ve been known to gift-wrap prepper items, too. Loved ones have sighed and nodded as they opened solar lanterns, flashlights and emergency radios none of us quite understand how to “crank”.
Shockingly for two hypervigilants, neither Kelley nor I had ever actually pulled the pin and shot a fire extinguisher until the day we met last September in Los Angeles.
We’d both signed up for community emergency response team (Cert) training, a federally administered, locally organized program that has, for decades, taught disaster preparedness and response skills to volunteer civilians for free. More than 20 of my neighbors and I enrolled for three day-long sessions. Would it be geeky or depressing to immerse ourselves in worst-case scenarios, three beautiful LA Saturdays in a row? Perhaps. But our desire for some sense of agency or usefulness as more climate-intensified disasters hit took precedence. Why not at least try to avoid being caught pants down when the next “unprecedented” event slammed in?
That was all just four months ago. After our training, Santa Monica’s chief resilience officer thanked us for a willingness to “ease the burden on our community during disasters”.
Too soon, we’d find out if we could.
***
For Kelley, fire was the disaster that unnerved her most. She had grown up in rural Pennsylvania, where tall barns would light up in a flash and take out the homes around them. When she moved to LA more than two decades ago to work in entertainment marketing, the caution came with her.
“Fire is just something you lose control of so fast,” she told me. “I’ve always been a little crazy about it.”
Cert trainings happen in all 50 states and on tribal lands, but they’re only offered when local leaders have enough funding to run a class. Most of us spent months on Santa Monica’s waitlist before our local office of emergency management finally announced a 2024 class.
That first Saturday, we gathered in an air-conditioned classroom at the city’s fire-training facility. The resilience officer, Lindsay Barker Call, and two local fire marshals talked us through hazards particular to our daily stomping grounds. My impression was that earthquakes topped the list. Wildfires and smoke inundation were of course mentioned, because California, but walkable Santa Monica felt somehow insulated from the fire-prone canyon country around us. Still, since earthquakes sometimes set off urban fires, we learned basic protocol – how to pry open doors with crowbars, shut off a leaking gas valve (at Cert graduation, we’d each be given our own wrench for this), or command the power of a home extinguisher to vanquish a spot fire.
I remember cheering for Kelley that afternoon as a firefighter in full gear set flame to a pan of diesel fuel on the lot. It was a hot day. Kelley was wearing loose joggers and a short-sleeve T-shirt, her ponytail tucked under a baseball cap. The fire was instantly as tall as she was, and a thick column of smoke rose even higher. I watched Kelley aim the extinguisher at her worst fear and put her whole body into killing it in under 10 seconds.
It felt empowering to practice, to understand “go bags” and what to do before first responders got to you, from blood staunching to “psychologically stabilizing survivors”.
We trained hard. After three weeks, we took a group photo, exchanged phone numbers and promised to look after our neighbors. We felt as ready as civilians could be without going full bunker.
***
On Tuesday, 7 January, smoke was visible in Santa Monica well before lunchtime. I’d just left a doctor’s appointment and joined the office staff out on the sidewalk as they pointed, wondering what the hell was happening just north of us. A monster plume of churning black smoke looked like it was only blocks away.
I don’t have words yet for the wind-whipped hours that followed. I remember sending a quick video to the family group chat. I know I careened home, pulled my file marked “Documents” and set out a solar battery pack, hoping it would charge in the smoke-veiled sun. I remember strategizing with my neighbors, and the moment we saw flames.
As prepared as I’d tried to be, I evacuated that night with my phone and battery pack but no cord to connect them. True disaster had messed with my brain, shredding my focus on anything smaller than moving our bodies away, fast.
A couple of miles south-east of my block, Kelley readied her go bags just as we’d been trained, one for her and one for her 90lb German shepherd/great dane mix, Bucky. She’d already texted her neighbor Linda Mansolillo, an air force reservist with a subspecialty in disaster response (and quite likely the most qualified human ever to graduate from a Santa Monica Cert training). They activated a messaging chain Mansolillo had organized during summer block parties and began assessing who needed help.
Kelley was busy, but as scared as she’d ever been, too.
“We had no inkling of the devastation happening in the Palisades at that point,” she said. “But you could see flames on the hillside, and I was thinking, if that wind changed … ”
It was a sleepless night for Kelley, as it was for many of the 9.6 million of us in LA county. For those on the west side who’d spent the day watching or fleeing the Palisades fire, horror was magnified by early evening reports of the Eaton fire exploding in the east. These weren’t canyon wildfires. They were the most damaging urban firestorms in American history, and they’d keep coming, day after day, relentlessly sparking up with new names.
The second night of the disaster, Kelley was finally able to close her eyes.
“I knew that between Santa Monica’s systems and my neighbors, there was no danger I’d sleep through an evacuation order,” she said. “We didn’t feel safe from the fires exactly, but we felt like we had each other’s back.”
A couple of days later, after I returned to a blessedly standing apartment building and then left again when my chest constricted from toxic air and ash, I dialed Kelley’s number. We didn’t even say hello. She picked up immediately with: “You’ve been on my mind, too.”
***
Trained Cert volunteers in Malibu were mobilized recently at the Malibu pier to help fire officials prepare and protect residents returning after evacuations, but in Santa Monica, the emergency management team made the decision to keep us where we were, focused on our neighbors. Ever the trainer, Barker Call sent me a study published in 2024 finding that every $1 of investment in resilience and disaster preparedness reduces the damage and cleanup costs of a disaster by $6. Intrigued, I began reaching out to other disaster-recovery researchers.
“I’m a big fan of Cert,” said the University of Southern California civil engineering professor Costas Synolakis, who has studied responses to tsunamis and wildfires around the world. “I like the idea of self-organizing. You saw it in this fire. The fire department was clearly spread way too thin. In post-fire emergency response, you need trained volunteers who already know the neighborhood.”
We saw this happen in western North Carolina last autumn as well, after Hurricane Helene wiped out roads and infrastructure, leaving people cut off from first responders. Thousands of people were on their own for the hours, days and sometimes weeks it took for outside assistance to make it in, and thousands more lived without power or water longer than they ever had before. Emergency response systems at all levels are stretched thin by a quickening drumbeat of climate-intensified “events”, from killer heatwaves to floods, windstorms and wildfires. Over the entirety of the 1980s, the US experienced 33 billion-dollar disasters. In the last two years alone, we’ve endured more than 50.
“To adapt and mitigate for climate change … you need people,” Synolakis told me. “If you don’t train them, they’re going to get in trouble.”
I heard the same from Samantha Montano, an emergency management professor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy who once taught a Cert class to teenagers at a high school in rural North Dakota.
“They understood the material completely,” she said. “I think it’s a really smart and logical thing to do.”
But she talked about the limitations of the program, too, including the relatively few people who have even heard of Cert training, not to mention the lack of federal and local funding.
Cert is by no means the only way neighbors organize to protect each other after the unthinkable happens. Grassroots mutual aid and environmental justice groups have repeatedly stepped up when government agencies have failed. I do fear that the types of disasters we’re experiencing now will continue to outpace anyone’s adaptation efforts. But having lived through the last month in LA, I can tell you that local organizing helped me and my neighbors cope in ways that may never show up in budgets or studies.
One of the youngest trainees in my Cert cohort was Manny Apilado, a soulful and tattooed 31-year-old who works as a bartender and manager at a local beach club. Sunset Boulevard ends at the beach, and on that incomprehensible afternoon when people from the Palisades left their cars on Sunset Boulevard and ran for their lives, some of them ran into Manny.
“It was like after 9/11, like they were just out of a war,” he told me on the phone later. “The ashes, the dust on their faces. Some were wearing ski masks or goggles. Two people just fell to the floor.”
One man in his 70s fell into Manny’s arms.
We’d been taught a section in Cert about “what not to say” to someone in crisis. Things like: “At least you still have … ” or: “Everything will be OK.” Empathy in the moment always trumps talking a survivor out of their feelings.
Manny said he had stood there overwhelmed, wanting to provide refuge as he was realizing any foolproof zones of safety were gone.
“There were no words,” Manny told me. “All I could say was: ‘I’m here for you.’”
