Over 900 Structures Burned in Washington's Most Destructive Fire Season on Record

Source: Washington State Department of Natural Resources

Plus, a permit count won't tell you if a neighborhood returned home

Welcome back to This Week in Disasters! This newsletter combines expert perspectives with a weekly roundup of upcoming threats, recent natural disasters, and available survivor assistance. If you’re a Risk, Insurance, Employee Assistance, NGO or Emergency Management professional (or you’re just really curious about disasters in the United States!) you’re in the right place.

Major Disasters of the Last Week

Forecasted Risks for Next Week

Critical to extremely critical fire weather returns to the Northwest and northern Great Basin this weekend. The Storm Prediction Center has flagged its highest fire weather risk levels, and NWS offices have issued Particularly Dangerous Situation Red Flag Warnings, the first ever used in the Pacific Northwest.

Dry thunderstorms threaten new ignitions across northern New Mexico, southern Colorado, and east of the Cascades. Lightning without meaningful rain would add starts to a fire system already running more than 21,000 personnel nationally.

Source: Washington State Department of Natural Resources

Disasters in the Headlines

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FEMA flood maps cause 'misunderstanding' among some homeowners, leaving millions without insurance, experts say

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Grist

AI for Disasters + Emergencies: A Way Forward

AIDE

PRO PERSPECTIVE

Judge the Recovery by Who Comes Home

Bill Gould, public health professional, social worker, USC professor, and longtime Altadena resident, has spent his career on the giving end of help. He chose the field after losing his arm as a child and remembering the people who carried him through that experience. On January 8, 2025, the Eaton Fire burned the home he had lived in since 1988 and put him, for the first time in decades, on the receiving end.

The fire destroyed more than 9,400 structures, roughly 6,000 of them Altadena homes. It took 99 percent of his family's belongings, including his prosthetics. What it could not take, he argues, is the community itself. "While buildings can burn, community is much harder to destroy." Eighteen months into his own recovery, Gould has turned that conviction into a policy agenda built on a single question: can recovery be designed to protect what was and what can be enhanced?

What the receiving end teaches

Gould measures what the fire took against a family history built on surviving worse. He is William B. Gould V. His great-great-grandfather escaped slavery in Wilmington, North Carolina, fought for the Union, and kept a Civil War diary for three years, one of only three surviving diaries written by a formerly enslaved person. That diary is safe at the Massachusetts Historical Society. A second family diary burned in the Altadena house before Gould could copy it.

"I didn't write a Civil War diary," he says. "But I've had my own battles in life, including this latest chapter." Eighteen months of insurance, permits, and contractors, navigated while advocating for neighbors in the same fight, showed him what recovery measurement gets wrong. Los Angeles County counts permits issued. "The bigger measure is how many families return home."

REACT: a framework written by a survivor, not for one

Families home is the measure. REACT is Gould's plan for reaching it. A friend pushed him to coin the acronym so the ideas would stick: five commitments, each aimed at a specific advocacy action keeping families away.

Resource materials collectively. Cost keeps families from rebuilding. Tariffs, war in the Gulf, and inflation pushed construction prices up, and post-disaster rates spiked further. Gould proposes bulk purchasing of building materials at fixed rates, staged on Altadena's vacant burned lots, so thousands of families rebuilding at once stop bidding against each other.

Empower local leadership. Confusion keeps families stuck. Community groups should guide residents through insurance and permitting, the way block captain Annie Carrillo, who lost her own home, still organizes Gould's street.

Acquire and protect land. Displacement keeps families out permanently. Community land trusts are Gould's answer, and the pillar he has pushed furthest.

Cultivate economic renewal. Families return to neighborhoods with jobs and open storefronts. Gould wants grants and low-interest loans aimed at small, locally owned businesses.

Transfer funds directly. Money raised for survivors should reach survivors. Benefit concerts have come and gone while residents still ask where the proceeds went.

The pillar with the most at stake

Land is where the framework meets its hardest math. A California Community Foundation survey of fire survivors found a median gap of $500,000 between what insurance pays and what rebuilding costs. His own family is about $1 million short. When a family cannot close that gap, the lot sells, and it sells to whoever can build the most on it. Developers bought the houses above and below Gould's property. Elsewhere in Altadena, builders are putting ten homes on parcels that held one.

Land trusts attack that mechanism directly. Gould recently met with the San Gabriel Valley Community Land Trust to explore how the model could work locally: the trust invests in a property so the family can stay, preserving affordability for seniors and working families without replacing private ownership. "You want neighbors to enjoy that rebirth," he says. The rebuild will happen either way. This pillar decides who it happens for.

One recovery fight, not fifty

Cost, confusion, and displacement are not unique to Altadena. Gould took the framework's logic to Washington, D.C. alongside survivors of the Texas floods, North Carolina's hurricane, and the St. Louis tornado. The effort runs nationally through Organizing Resilience and locally through LA Voice, which organizes through churches. Different disasters, identical obstacles: insurance battles, opaque government programs, emotional exhaustion, and the fear of losing their communities. His position is that disaster declarations and FEMA allocations should follow need, not electoral maps. "Disaster should be one of those issues that's cross-cutting."

Five years from now, Gould pictures children playing in rebuilt neighborhoods, longtime residents back home, local businesses open, and Altadena serving as a national model for equitable recovery. A permit count will not tell him whether that happened. Only being home will. The buildings burned in a night and will rise again wherever the money reaches. Whether the community rises with them is a design decision, the decision REACT exists to force. Gould built a career on meeting people where they are. Now he is asking the recovery field to do the same. "Every family who returns helps preserve the soul of our community."

Active Federal Declared Disasters and Deadlines

There is usually a 60 day window to apply for help after a disaster is declared. The following disasters are actively taking applications from survivors for financial support. To apply, survivors can visit DisasterAssistance.gov or call the FEMA Helpline at 1-800‑621‑3362.

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