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<\/p>\nIn what used to be a dry cleaner\u2019s on Sunset Boulevard, Robert Lempert listened, hands clasped behind his back, as his neighbors finally took a moment to step away from recovery\u2019s endless stream of paperwork, permits, bills and bureaucracy to, instead, envision a fire-resilient Pacific Palisades in 2035.<\/p>\n
As a researcher at RAND, Lempert has spent decades studying how communities, corporations and governments can use computer simulations to understand complex problems with huge uncertainties \u2014 from how an Alaska town can better warn its residents about landslides to how climate change is worsening disasters and what strategies the United Nations can support to address them.<\/p>\n
In January, one such complex problem ran straight through his neighborhood and burned down his house.<\/p>\n
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As Lempert and his wife process their own trauma forged by flames, Lempert has become fixated on capturing the flickers of insights from fellow survivors and, hopefully, eventually, transforming them into computer programs that could help the community rebuild the Palisades into a global leader in wildfire resilience.<\/p>\n
\u201cOtherwise, we won\u2019t end up with a functional community that anybody wants to \u2014 or can \u2014 live in,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can spin out all sorts of disaster scenarios\u201d for the Pacific Palisades of 2035. If the community fails to confront them in rebuilding, \u201cyou make them a hell of a lot more likely.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lempert doesn\u2019t see a mass exodus from high-fire-hazard areas as a viable solution. Out of the more than 12 million buildings the climate risk modeling company First Street<\/a> studies in California, 4 in 10 have at least a 5% chance of facing a wildfire in the next 30 years. (Out of the nearly 10,000 buildings First Street studies in the Palisades, 82% carry that level of risk.) And the areas without significant fire risk have their own environmental challenges: flooding, earthquakes, landslides, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts. Learning to live with these risks, consequently, is part of the practice of living in California \u2014 and really, in most of the places humans have settled on Earth.<\/p>\n So, Lempert has taken to the modus operandi he helped develop at RAND:<\/p>\n Identify the problem. In this case, living in Pacific Palisades carries a nonzero risk you lose your house or life to fire.<\/p>\n Define the goals. Perhaps it is that, in the next fire, the Palisades doesn\u2019t lose any homes or lives (and, ideally, accomplishes this without spending billions).<\/p>\n Then, the real work: Code up a bunch of proposed solutions from all of the groups with wildly disparate views on how the system (i.e., Southern California wildfires) works.<\/p>\n Stress-test those solutions against a wide range of environmental conditions in the computer. Extreme winds, downed communication systems, closed evacuation routes \u2014 the list goes on.<\/p>\n Finally, sit back, and see what insights the computer spits out.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy enough to agree on the problem, goals and environmental factors. For the proposed solutions, Lempert set out to collect data.<\/p>\n