Robert Lempert, a RAND researcher who lost his home in a January wildfire, is translating survivor insight and neighborhood ideas into computer simulations to help rebuild Pacific Palisades for wildfire resilience. Residents proposed measures including fire-resistant construction, neighborhood cisterns, sensor-linked automated hoses, emergency lanes and trained volunteer brigades. Lempert's approach is to code these proposals and stress-test them against extreme scenarios to find robust, cost-effective strategies. He cites 19th-century urban reforms as a model for collective action against a new, landscape-driven fire threat.
Can Simulations Rebuild a Pacific Palisades That Never Burns?
Robert Lempert, a researcher at RAND, at his property that burned down in the Palisades fire in January.
In a former dry cleaner on Sunset Boulevard, Robert Lempert stood with his hands clasped behind his back as neighbors — temporarily freed from the paperwork, permits and bills of recovery — came together to imagine a fire-resilient Pacific Palisades in 2035.
Lempert, a longtime RAND researcher, has spent decades developing computer-simulation methods to help communities, companies and governments navigate problems with deep uncertainty — from improving early-warning systems for Alaskan landslides to modeling how climate change intensifies disasters and what international strategies the United Nations might pursue.
This January that abstract work hit home: a wildfire swept through his neighborhood and destroyed his house.
As he and his wife work through the trauma of losing their home, Lempert is channeling survivor insight into models that could guide the Palisades’ rebuilding so the community becomes a global example of wildfire resilience. He warns that rebuilding without confronting plausible disaster scenarios only makes them more likely.
“Otherwise, we won't end up with a functional community that anybody wants to — or can — live in,” Lempert said. “You can spin out all sorts of disaster scenarios for the Pacific Palisades of 2035. If leaders and residents don’t address them while rebuilding, you make them a hell of a lot more likely.”
A Method To Test Real-World Ideas
Lempert has returned to the RAND approach he helped develop: identify the problem, set clear goals, translate a broad set of proposed solutions into code, and stress-test them against a wide range of environmental scenarios — extreme winds, communication failures, blocked evacuation routes and more — to discover which strategies are robust under uncertainty.
At the heart of this effort is community input. Poster sheets filled with handwritten resident ideas now line the walls of the former dry cleaner, which serves as the headquarters for the grassroots Palisades Recovery Coalition. These "visioning charrettes" produced a range of proposals that Lempert hopes to turn into testable model inputs.
Lempert holds a photo of his home as it looked before it was destroyed by the Palisades fire.
Proposed Measures From Residents
Suggestions include:
- Rebuilding homes with fire-resistive materials such as concrete and steel and sealing exterior gaps to stop embers.
- Installing rain-capture cisterns at houses and linking them to a neighborhood sensor network and automated hoses that target fires in real time.
- Creating one or two modern fire stations that double as community shelters with filtered air, food and emergency supplies, sited on main arteries such as Palisades Drive.
- Designating an emergency lane on Palisades Drive to prevent evacuation bottlenecks.
- Running annual neighborhood evacuation drills and training volunteer brigades to fight spot fires and assist vulnerable residents.
Risk In Context
Lempert rejects the idea that mass relocation from fire-prone areas is a realistic solution for most people. According to climate-risk modeler First Street, of more than 12 million California buildings it analyzes, 40% have at least a 5% chance of experiencing a wildfire within 30 years; in the Palisades, First Street estimates about 82% of nearly 10,000 structures meet that risk threshold. Many lower-fire-risk locations face other hazards — floods, earthquakes, landslides, drought — so learning to live with and manage risk is part of modern settlement.
From City Fires To Wildland-Urban Blazes
Lempert points to historical precedent: in the 19th century, American cities repeatedly burned — Portland (Maine) in 1866, Chicago in 1871 and Boston in 1872 — until people demanded change. The solutions were systematic: professional fire departments, noncombustible construction, and improved water infrastructure. Those reforms largely ended urban conflagrations from within.
“Cities shouldn't burn down,” Lempert said with a laugh. “So let's just design them so they don't.” Now, he argues, the threat is different — fires coming from the surrounding landscape rather than ignitions inside dense downtowns — and that may require another wave of collective, practical reforms.
For Lempert and many neighbors, the immediate task is practical and emotional: gather community ideas, convert them into models that reveal strengths and weaknesses, and use those results to make rebuilding decisions that reduce future loss of life and property without untenable costs.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
