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This California city lost thousands of homes to fire. Santa Rosa’s rebuilding has lessons for L.A.
SANTA ROSA, Calif. — The sky above their newly built homes was clear, and the ground beneath their feet reassuringly soggy from recent winter rains. But as residents in the Coffey Park neighborhood made their way to a community gathering on a recent evening — passing one yard after another devoid of trees or brush or anything readily flammable — many said they still have flashbacks to a night of smoke and flames and fear.
It’s been more than seven years since homes in this Santa Rosa neighborhood were incinerated by the Tubbs fire, which swept across Napa and Sonoma counties in a matter of hours before jumping six lanes of the 101 Freeway. The residents of Coffey Park — about 9,000 people — were roused from their beds in a panic and fled through flames and whipping embers. In some cases, people walked miles to safety, with singed pets struggling in their arms and only the clothes on their backs.
A scorched lawn statue stands amid the rubble of the Coffey Park neighborhood in Santa Rosa in October 2017.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Five neighborhood residents died in the fire, among 22 total in Sonoma County. At the time, it was the most destructive fire in California history — although that record would quickly be broken, and then broken again in the coming years.
Fire wasn’t supposed to do what it did that night. No one had predicted the flames would move so fast, or consume so much of this city of 175,000 and surrounding communities. No one could have predicted, either, that Santa Rosa would manage to build back so quickly, or that residents would say that, in some ways, their communities emerged stronger: safer from fire and more closely knit.
Just more than a week into Los Angeles’ ordeal by fire, the neighbors of Coffey Park were gathering in Tricia Woods’ rebuilt kitchen to raise funds to send to fire victims in L.A. They also wanted to send a message: You can’t imagine it now, but it is possible to recover from this.
Yes, the aftermath is hard: “I moved seven times in three years,” Diane Farris said of the uncertainty and dislocation.
And you never get over the trauma: “I still have a go bag packed,” Anita Rackerby confided, as her neighbors nodded in recognition.
But they knew from shared experience that communities can, indeed, rise from ashes.
Santa Rosa streamlined the process for rebuilding neighborhoods leveled in the 2017 Tubbs fire.
(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)
People in Santa Rosa are acutely aware that they are in the unenviable position of having hosted one of California’s first and most brutal megafires in this new age of unpredictable burns.
On the night of Oct. 8, 2017, the Tubbs fire ignited near the town of Calistoga. Within five hours, the blaze — spitting embers that helped it leapfrog in all directions — had traveled 12 miles, over the hills that separate Napa and Sonoma counties and down into Santa Rosa. Then, it did the unthinkable, jumping the freeway and burning through homes that were viewed as being at low risk for wildfire.
Santa Rosa has been in a state of recovery ever since. Along the way, some residents have become unofficial disaster consultants, jetting off to scenes of devastation around the country — to Paradise, which the Camp fire eviscerated in 2018; and Lahaina, the Maui community that burned to the ground in 2023 — to counsel people on how to pick up the pieces.
A grassy lot is all that remains of a home lost in the Tubbs fire.
(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)
Gabe Osburn, Santa Rosa’s planning director, said the L.A.-area fires were still raging when he got his first call from representatives of the city of Los Angeles. The question was simple: What do we do?
Osburn was Santa Rosa’s deputy director of city services in 2017. He found out his city was on fire the way most residents did: He woke to a blaring alarm.
His house, just outside Coffey Park, was filled with smoke, and it had a distinct smell that he recognized as wildfire. He glanced out his second-story window and saw a terrifying orange glow over his neighborhood. He and his wife grabbed what they could, which included their three cats, and fled to a relative’s house in southern Sonoma County.
Then, he reported to work.
It wasn’t long before the scope of the disaster became clear. Twenty-two people dead. And tens of thousands were homeless. With more than 3,000 homes burned within city limits — and more than 5,000 in the surrounding area — Santa Rosa had just lost 5% of its housing stock.
In a city that already had a housing crunch, this was a crisis. Where were all the people whose homes had burned going to live? And given that many of them were relatively wealthy, would their search for housing have the domino effect of pushing other renters out? What could or should government officials do about it?
Amid the charred rubble, residents were starting to ask themselves the same questions.
Brad Sherwood, center, with his wife, Brandy, and son Grant in front of their rebuilt home in Santa Rosa.
(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)
In Larkfield Estates, a neighborhood just north of the city limits, Brad Sherwood and his wife, Brandy, had long reassured their children that they had nothing to fear from wildfire. “I live on a valley floor,” he said of his thinking. “This is not the wild/urban interface” that is prone to burning. “They can stop it.”
He was wrong, as so many others have been in recent years when predicting what wildfires would do based on what they have done in the past.
Sherwood said he “will never forget looking up this canyon as I’m running from my house, seeing fire tornadoes ripping down” toward him. And yet, he added: “On Day 1, my wife and I said, we are rebuilding. This is our home.”
But first, they had to find a place to live. And of course, they were dealing with insurance, and the hundreds of things they had to account for in order to get paid.
And life didn’t stop. Both he and his wife had jobs, and they had to take care of their children, who had been through the ordeal of watching their home burn down.
Brad and Brandy Sherwood had a dining table made from a signature walnut tree on their property that was damaged in the Tubbs fire.
(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)
He and his wife decided they would “divide and conquer.” Brandy would take the “front-line approach,” taking the lead with the insurance company and, eventually, the builder who constructed their new home. Brad “would focus on community outreach.”
“I knew that if we weren’t working together as a community, we would not be successful as a whole,” he said.
In the weeks after the fire, he built a website that would serve as an information hub for Larkfield Estates, whose residents were now scattered across the county and beyond. The community began holding neighborhood meetings and inviting local officials. The area supervisor, James Gore, created a “block captain” program for burned-out neighborhoods, to simplify communication and allow neighbors to speak collectively.
The community developed a “needs assessment.” In addition to rebuilding homes, recovery would require debris removal, reconstruction of power, water and sewer systems and fixing streets.
They also needed to figure out how to efficiently rebuild. Should every family find its own contractor? Or should the city bring in home builders who could mass-produce homes, which would be cheaper and faster?
And along the way, Sherwood said, something remarkable happened: The neighbors, mostly friendly, but often distant, got to know one another better and began to trust and rely on each other.
Three miles south, in Coffey Park, a similar effort was unfolding. They called the group “Coffey Strong.” They had a website. They held meetings with elected leaders, home builders, city officials.
And then, eight months after the Tubbs fire, another blaze ignited in nearby Lake County. Smoke drifted to Santa Rosa, traumatizing many.
Woods, the woman who summoned folks to her rebuilt home last week as Los Angeles burned, was among those who felt shaken. But she decided to do something about it. She blasted out a message to her neighbors telling them she would be sitting in a camp chair next to the burned-out husk of her home. She would have wine. Everyone was welcome.
This October 2018 photo shows Coffey Park residents gathering for “Wine Wednesday” as the neighborhood was rebuilding from the Tubbs fire.
(Los Angeles Times)
A neighborhood tradition was born. They began to meet every Wednesday evening. At first the gatherings took place in the street, amid the rubble. Eventually, as neighbors slowly rebuilt, they gathered for housewarming parties.
“We didn’t have many friends in the neighborhood before this,” said Melissa Geissinger, who was seven months pregnant when her house burned down and endured the trauma of having her newborn baby go through open-heart surgery while the family was displaced.
By 2020, just three years after the fire, more than 80% of the neighborhood homes lost in the fire had been rebuilt and families had moved back in.
Osburn, Santa Rosa’s planning director, said the city played a key role in making that possible. “We made this commitment to the community that we would understand where they were getting stuck and implement creative solutions to remove the impediment,” he said.
That meant a range of actions, including coordinating with state, federal and county officials in the early days of recovery to help people get their feet under them, stripping back discretionary regulations and processing permits within days or hours instead of months.
The signs from the Tubbs fire are still visible in Santa Rosa for those who know how to read them.
In the Fountaingrove neighborhood, in the hills east of downtown, many replacement homes are still under construction. And some lots are still empty, the grass from winter rains wafting in the wind, along with the sharp echoes of hammers and nail guns.
In Larkfield Estates, Sherwood and his family have moved into their new home. The old walnut tree that used to shade his frontyard has been transformed into an elegant dining room table. Many of his neighbors, also returned, did the same thing with their trees.
In some ways, the neighborhood has more amenities than it did before. It finally got a sewer system so residents could move off septic; the county offered loans at a low interest rate to make it affordable. A new park, which the community is helping to raise funds for, is coming. And there is a new sidewalk on busy Mark West Springs Road so children can more safely walk to school.
But across the street from Sherwood’s gorgeous new house — white with dark trim and cheerful flowers in the frontyard — is still an empty lot, a forlorn swimming pool surrounded by chain-link fencing the only reminder of what used to be. A plastic chair that blew into the pool the night of the fire is still there; the water protected it from the flames, and no one has touched it since.
For now, this pool is all that remains of a property lost in the Tubbs fire.
(Paul Kuroda / For The Times)
In Coffey Park, there are still a few houses under construction, but the biggest reminder of fire is in the landscaping: very few big trees, and yard after yard ornamented with rocks and other materials that can’t burn.
At the wine gathering, one person after another said they hoped the people of Los Angeles could take hope from Coffey Park.
Until the fire, said Rackerby, “I lived here for 30 years, and I didn’t know the people across the street.” Now, she said, she feels like she knows everyone. In the months before the local park was refurbished, she opened up her yard as a play area for neighborhood children. She also helped her neighbors make mosaic artwork using scorched jewelry, dishes and other sifted wreckage from their homes — something to memorialize what they had lost.
Standing nearby was Geissinger, whose son is now a playful 7-year-old. She recently published a young adult novel, “Nothing Left But Dust,” that includes themes about a fire. Coming through the blaze, she said, gave her the courage to pursue her dream of being a writer.
Michelle Poggi, who seven years ago escaped with her husband on foot, walking three miles with their cat through smoke and burning embers, echoed that sense of what’s possible.
“This community really did take something horrible, and it’s kind of like we all found the silver linings where we could,” she said. Her neighbors nodded in agreement.
Welcome to the age of AI hacking, in which the right prompts make amateurs into master hackers.
A group of cybercriminals recently used off-the-shelf artificial intelligence chatbots to steal data on nearly 200 million taxpayers. The bots provided the code and ready-to-execute plans to bypass firewalls.
Although they were explicitly programmed to refuse to help hackers, the bots were duped into abetting the cybercrime.
According to a recent report from Israeli cybersecurity firm Gambit Security, hackers last month used Claude, the chatbot from Anthropic, to steal 150 gigabytes of data from Mexican government agencies.
Claude initially refused to cooperate with the hacking attempts and even denied requests to cover the hackers’ digital tracks, the experts who discovered the breach said. The group pummelled the bot with more than 1,000 prompts to bypass the safeguards and convince Claude they were allowed to test the system for vulnerabilities.
AI companies have been trying to create unbreakable chains on their AI models to restrain them from helping do things such as generating child sexual content or aiding in sourcing and creating weapons. They hire entire teams to try to break their own chatbots before someone else does.
But in this case, hackers continuously prompted Claude in creative ways and were able to “jailbreak” the chatbot to assist them. When they encountered problems with Claude, the hackers used OpenAI’s ChatGPT for data analysis and to learn which credentials were required to move through the system undetected.
The group used AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities, bypass defences, create backdoors and analyze data along the way to gain control of the systems before they stole 195 million identities from nine Mexican government systems, including tax records, vehicle registration as well as birth and property details.
AI “doesn’t sleep,” Curtis Simpson, chief executive of Gambit Security, said in a blog post. “It collapses the cost of sophistication to near zero.”
“No amount of prevention investment would have made this attack impossible,” he said.
Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment. It told Bloomberg that it had banned the accounts involved and disrupted their activity after an investigation.
OpenAI said it is aware of the attack campaign carried out using Anthropic’s models against the Mexican government agencies.
“We also identified other attempts by the adversary to use our models for activities that violate our usage policies; our models refused to comply with these attempts,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. “We have banned the accounts used by this adversary and value the outreach from Gambit Security.”
Instances of generative AI-assisted hacking are on the rise, and the threat of cyberattacks from bots acting on their own is no longer science fiction. With AI doing their bidding, novices can cause damage in moments, while experienced hackers can launch many more sophisticated attacks with much less effort.
Earlier this year, Amazon discovered that a low-skilled hacker used commercially available AI to breach 600 firewalls. Another took control of thousands of DJI robot vacuums with help from Claude, and was able to access live video feed, audio and floor plans of strangers.
“The kinds of things we’re seeing today are only the early signs of the kinds of things that AIs will be able to do in a few years,” said Nikola Jurkovic, an expert working on reducing risks from advanced AI. “So we need to urgently prepare.”
Late last year, Anthropic warned that society has reached an “inflection point” in AI use in cybersecurity after disrupting what the company said was a Chinese state-sponsored espionage campaign that used Claude to infiltrate 30 global targets, including financial institutions and government agencies.
Generative AI also has been used to extort companies, create realistic online profiles by North Korean operatives to secure jobs in U.S. Fortune 500 companies, run romance scams and operate a network of Russian propaganda accounts.
Over the last few years, AI models have gone from being able to manage tasks lasting only a few seconds to today’s AI agents working autonomously for many hours. AI’s capability to complete long tasks is doubling every seven months.
“We just don’t actually know what is the upper limit of AI’s capability, because no one’s made benchmarks that are difficult enough so the AI can’t do them,” said Jurkovic, who works at METR, a nonprofit that measures AI system capabilities to cause catastrophic harm to society.
So far, the most common use of AI for hacking has been social engineering. Large language models are used to write convincing emails to dupe people out of their money, causing an eight-fold increase in complaints from older Americans as they lost $4.9 billion in online fraud in 2025.
“The messages used to elicit a click from the target can now be generated on a per-user basis more efficiently and with fewer tell-tale signs of phishing,” such as grammatical and spelling errors, said Cliff Neuman, an associate professor of computer science at USC.
AI companies have been responding using AI to detect attacks, audit code and patch vulnerabilities.
“Ultimately, the big imbalance stems from the need of the good-actors to be secure all the time, and of the bad-actors to be right only once,” Neuman said.
The stakes around AI are rising as it infiltrates every aspect of the economy. Many are concerned that there is insufficient understanding of how to ensure it cannot be misused by bad actors or nudged to go rogue.
Even those at the top of the industry have warned users about the potential misuse of AI.
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has long advocated that the AI systems being built are unpredictable and difficult to control. These AIs have shown behaviors as varied as deception and blackmail, to scheming and cheating by hacking software.
Still, major AI companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google — signed contracts with the U.S. government to use their AIs in military operations.
This last week, the Pentagon directed federal agencies to phase out Claude after the company refused to back down on its demand that it wouldn’t allow its AI to be used for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
“The AI systems of today are nowhere near reliable enough to make fully autonomous weapons,” Amodei told CBS News.
The iPic dine-in movie theater chain has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and intends to pursue a sale of its assets, citing the difficult post-pandemic theatrical market.
The Boca Raton, Fla.-based company has 13 locations across the U.S., including in Pasadena and Westwood, according to a Feb. 25 filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of Florida, West Palm Beach division.
As part of the bankruptcy process, the Pasadena and Westwood theaters will be permanently closed, according to WARN Act notices filed with the state of California’s Employment Development Department.
The company came to its conclusion after “exploring a range of possible alternatives,” iPic Chief Executive Patrick Quinn said in a statement.
“We are committed to continuing our business operations with minimal impact throughout the process and will endeavor to serve our customers with the high standard of care they have come to expect from us,” he said.
The company will keep its current management to maintain day-to-day operations while it goes through the bankruptcy process, iPic said in the statement. The last day of employment for workers in its Pasadena and Westwood locations is April 28, according to a state WARN Act notice. The chain has 1,300 full- and part-time employees, with 193 workers in California.
The theatrical business, including the exhibition industry, still has not recovered from the pandemic’s effect on consumer behavior. Last year, overall box office revenue in the U.S. and Canada totaled about $8.8 billion, up just 1.6% compared with 2024. Even more troubling is that industry revenue in 2025 was down 22.1% compared with pre-pandemic 2019’s totals.
IPic noted those trends in its bankruptcy filing, describing the changes in consumer behavior as “lasting” and blaming the rise of streaming for “fundamentally” altering the movie theater business.
“These industry shifts have directly reduced box office revenues and related ancillary revenues, including food and beverage sales,” the company stated in its bankruptcy filing.
IPic also attributed its decision to rising rents and labor costs.
The company estimated it owed about $141,000 in taxes and about $2.7 million in total unsecured claims. The company’s assets were valued at about $155.3 million, the majority of which coming from theater equipment and furniture. Its liabilities totaled $113.9 million.
The chain had previously filed for bankruptcy protection in 2019.
In an expansion of its business of processing pharmaceuticals in Earth’s orbit, Varda Space Industries is renting a large El Segundo plant where toy manufacturer Mattel used to design Hot Wheels and Barbie dolls.
The plant in El Segundo’s aerospace corridor will be an extension of Varda Space Industries’ headquarters in a much smaller building on nearby Aviation Boulevard.
Varda will occupy a 205,443-square-foot industrial and office campus at 2031 E. Mariposa Ave., which will give it additional capacity to manufacture spacecraft at scale, the company said.
Originally built in the 1940s as an aircraft facility, the complex has a history as part of aerospace and defense industries that have long shaped the South Bay and is near a host of major defense and space contractors. It is also close to Los Angeles Air Force Base, headquarters to the Space Systems Command.
Workers test AstroForge’s Odin asteroid probe, which was lost in space after launch this year.
(Varda Space Industries)
Varda is one of a new generation of aerospace startups that have flourished in Southern California and the South Bay over the last several years, particularly in El Segundo, often with ties to SpaceX.
Elon Musk’s company, founded in 2002 in El Segundo, has revolutionized the industry with reusable rockets that have radically lowered the cost of lifting payloads into space. Though it has moved its headquarters to Texas, SpaceX retains large-scale operations in Hawthorne.
Varda co-founder and Chief Executive Will Bruey is a former SpaceX avionics engineer, and the company’s spacecraft are launched on SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rockets from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County.
Varda makes automated labs that look like cylindrical desktop speakers, which it sends into orbit in capsules and satellite platforms it also builds. There, in microgravity, the miniature labs grow molecular crystals that are purer than those produced in Earth’s gravity for use in pharmaceuticals.
It has contracts with drug companies and also the military, which tests technology at hypersonic speeds as the capsules return to Earth.
Its fifth capsule was launched in November and returned to Earth in late January; its next mission is set in the coming weeks. Varda has more than 10 missions scheduled on Falcon 9s through 2028.
For the last several decades, the Mariposa Avenue property served as the research and development center for Mattel Toys. El Segundo has also long been a center for the toy industry as companies like to set up shop in the shadow of Mattel.
The Mattel facility “has always been an exceptional property with a legacy tied to aerospace innovation, and leasing to Varda Space Industries feels like a natural continuation of that story,” said Michael Woods, a partner at GPI Cos., which owns the property.
“We are proud to support a company that is genuinely pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, and are excited to watch Varda grow and thrive here in El Segundo,” Woods said.
As one of the country’s most active hubs of aerospace and defense innovation, El Segundo has seen its industrial property vacancy fall to 3.4% on demand from space companies, government contractors and technology startups, real estate brokerage CBRE said.
Successful startups often have to leave the neighborhood when they want to expand, real estate broker Bob Haley of CBRE said. The 9-acre Mattel facility was big enough to keep Varda in the city.
Last year, Varda subleased about 55,000 square feet of lab space from alternative protein company Beyond Meat at 888 Douglas St. in El Segundo, which it started moving into in June.
Varda will get the keys to its new building in December and spend four to eight months building production and assembly facilities as it ramps up operations. By the end of next year, it expects to have constructed 10 more spacecraft.
In the future, Varda could consolidate offices there, given its size. Currently, though, the plan is to retain all properties, creating a campus of three buildings within a mile of one another that are served by the company’s transportation services, Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Barr said.
“We already have Varda-branded shuttles running up and down Aviation Boulevard,” he said.
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