In this episode, Jennifer Gray Thompson speaks with Tyler Freres about what it can mean to rebuild with wood after a megafire. Tyler shares the story of his family’s long-standing timber business in Oregon’s Santiam Canyon, how the Beachie Creek Fire affected both the community and their forestland, and why the recovery of burned timber matters for local economies, land restoration, and future resilience. The conversation also looks at mass timber and mass plywood panels, including how engineere

In this episode of How to Disaster, Jennifer Gray Thompson speaks with cartoonist and author Brian Fies about A Fire Story, his graphic memoir about losing his home in the 2017 Tubbs Fire. Brian shares how the book began in the first days after the fire, when he was still trying to understand what had happened while also documenting it with the eyes of a storyteller. Their conversation moves through the realities of disaster recovery: walking through a destroyed neighborhood, navigating insuranc

A home can be rebuilt after wildfire and still be hard to keep if insurance becomes unaffordable or unavailable. Jennifer Gray Thompson talks with Jen Goodlin of Rebuild Paradise Foundation and Valerie Brown, an insurance and disaster recovery expert, about the long, complicated work of helping people get all the way home. Together, they look at one of the biggest barriers in recovery: insurance, including why prepared homes are not always recognized by insurers and how communities can create pr

Cecelia Girr is Director of Cultural Strategy at Backslash, the cultural intelligence unit of Omnicom Advertising, and the author of Ready Is the New Well, a landmark report for the Global Wellness Institute on preparedness as a cultural movement. Kim Marshall is the host of LA Rising: Stories of Healing, Help, and Hope, a podcast born from the LA fires. In this special double-hosted episode, Cecelia joins Jennifer Gray Thompson and Kim Marshall to talk about what the data actually shows: why ex

Jennifer Gray Thompson speaks with Eaton Fire survivor, journalist, and PostFire co-founder iO Wright about what happens when a person loses their home and is suddenly forced to navigate a recovery system that is confusing, fragmented, and often hard to access. iO shares how he and his partner, Patty, turned their own experience of loss into PostFire, a revolutionary survivor-centered platform designed to offer clear, fact-checked, trauma-informed guidance for people rebuilding after fire. Their

Joel Pollak is a journalist, opinion editor at the California Post , and a Palisades Fire survivor, devoted husband and father of four whose home survived the fire but was badly smoke-damaged, and with four children, he and his wife had to fight the insurance company. They are still not home. In this episode, Joel joins Jennifer Gray Thompson to talk about what it actually means to have a standing smoke damaged home, why it is in many ways harder to navigate than a total loss, and what the past