In early January, Governor Gavin Newsom said: “November, December, now January — there’s no fire season, it’s fire year. It’s year-round.”

Facing the uncertainties of droughts, wildfires, blackouts, poor air quality, mudslides and flooding, we canvassed the faculty of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering for possible solutions.

Here are 10 ideas to build a more resilient City of Angels.

 

1

“3D Printing Fireproof Homes”

 

Berok Khoshnevis

Louise L. Dunn Endowed Professor in Engineering and Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Astronautics, and Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

 

“Instead of new wooden buildings, the city should consider 3D printing new houses made of concrete. This would not only have greater resistance against fire, but increase the speed, safety and flexibility of reconstruction.

My company, Contour Crafting, has a small fleet of three 3D printing machines in our possession, and we can build about 20 more machines over the next year.

In practice, we could start with the three machines, and, as each newly built machine is released by our factory, we will add it to the fleet of working machines. By the end of the year, 20 to 25 machines would be working concurrently. Currently, 3D printing only builds the concrete shell of the building.

To get an idea about the construction speed, note that a 2,000-square-foot house shell may be printed in two days. Using any other method, the process would be significantly slower. Concrete is a noncombustible material; therefore, it never catches fire. It is also proven to have a high degree of resistance against fire created by combustible materials. Fire over long duration and extreme heat can still affect the structural integrity of concrete by causing spalling or other damages. In most applications, however, concrete can be characterized as virtually fireproof.

I think what will be most essential to help those who have lost their homes to wildfire is first a quick accessory dwelling unit (ADU), built according to specific size and design selected from a variety of options offered in a catalog of choices. Construction 3D printing is an ideal choice for responding to this emergency construction, which would rapidly provide shelter to the displaced homeowners. Once the owners are situated on their land, then a bigger building can be constructed by 3D printing or other methods of the owner’s choice.

As for the cost of 3D printing, the economy of scale would greatly help to reduce the cost of special 3D printable material, which is currently higher than ordinary concrete. Also, the current scarcity problem of technical operators of construction 3D printers will be alleviated if many such operators are trained for building many buildings. Currently, the number of buildings printed by 3D printing is too few for the workforce to consider getting training and entering the profession.”

 

2

“Using AI for Controlled, Preventive Burns”

 

 Yolanda Gil

Research Professor of Computer Science and Spatial Sciences and Principal Scientist at the USC Information Sciences Institute

 

“We have used AI for preventive fires in a five-year NSF-funded project led by UCSD.  A preventive fire is controlled by a fire manager and targets a site where vegetation has grown too much and has the potential to lead to a mega-fire. A lot more preventive fires are needed in order to prevent mega-fires, but they are expensive and hard to do at scale because there are very few fire managers who do this by hand and without using scientific fire models.

Our project focused on using AI to help fire managers decide how to plan the controlled fires. Once a site is identified as problematic, our research has been [focused] on selecting appropriate data and models for the area, then running simulations to help with decisions. The simulations help understand tradeoffs in the design of controlled fires, such as when to do the fire depending on wind and weather patterns, what percentage of vegetation to burn [since leaving some vegetation can help with rain and mudslides] and also what level of air quality is acceptable depending on burning faster or slower.

Lots of challenges here — for example, utility companies would be responsible for a lot of these preventive fires. But when they are not done, there is often no consequence, that is, no terrible wildfires, so their incentive is very limited.”

 

3

“Fighting Wildfires With Early Detection and Artillery”

 

Peter Beerel

Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

 

Mitul Luhar

Henry Salvatori Early Career Chair and Associate Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering

 

Barath Raghavan

Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering

 

“LA-96C was a Nike missile station located off Mulholland Drive. Now part of San Vicente Mountain Park and a popular hiking destination, in the 1950s it was part of a network of radar installations designed to detect incoming enemy bombers. It used millimeter wave communication to connect with a missile base located in the Sepulveda Basin that could launch missiles designed to destroy enemy bombers before they could drop their destructive payloads. We believe this combination of early detection and rapid response provides a road map for a radical approach to fight wildfires.

Whereas there are numerous efforts to use a network of cameras and watchtowers — some manned and others with semi-automated AI-assisted technology — their coverage is far from perfect, enabling wildfires to get out of control quickly. These systems need to be enhanced with more powerful, fixed-wing aerial drones that can tolerate high winds and stay aloft for hours; community-hosted cameras that are networked and enable cheap improved coverage; as well as new tethered, drone-in-the-box systems that can tolerate the high Santa Ana winds. These systems need to provide close to 100% coverage, so they detect wildfires as they emerge and provide a record of any arsonist responsible for their start.

Whereas early detection is within our reach, the time for firefighters to get to the location is often so large that the fire is already out of control, particularly in the rugged slopes of the Southern California foothills. One potential but radical solution is fire-retardant artillery. In particular, shells can be filled with retardant and directed at the fire with pinpoint accuracy using altitude-aware fuses that ensure effective airborne delivery of the retardant. Just like the Ajax missiles of the 1950s, these shells can be stationed miles away from the mountain in locations such as in the Sepulveda Basin. Another potential advantage of fire-retardant shells is that they could enable effective fire suppression in dangerous high-wind conditions that ground the aerial firefighting fleet.

Moreover, with AI-powered cameras that can track embers, these retardant delivery mechanisms can be used not only to attack wildfires as they emerge but also to target hot spots caused by embers that can travel miles from the edge of the fire.

There is no doubt that such ideas will trigger concerns regarding privacy and collateral damage and raise issues of cost. However, these concerns can be addressed with careful engineering. Coupled with the hardening of homes, large setbacks between houses, fire-resistant vegetative fire breaks, water piped along fire roads, and more aggressive brush clearance, such radical ideas deserve our attention as the current strategies have proven so dramatically to be insufficient.”

 

4

“Avoid Power Lines in Wildfire-Prone Lands. Generate Energy Where You Live.”

 

Kelly Sanders

Dr. Teh Fu Yen Early Career Chair and Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

 

“The key to any fire is a spark — and our power system has become a common source of recent ignitions, with power lines spanning long distances through wildfire-prone lands to bring electricity from power plants to population centers.

While it is easy to point fingers at who should be held responsible for malfunctioning infrastructure, the hard truth is that electricity ratepayers cannot afford to fund a fireproof electricity system. So the question becomes: How do we build a power system that minimizes fire risk while maximizing carbon-free energy generation that slows the threat of climate change?

The answer for California is in local solutions: generating electricity closer to where consumers live and using our existing electricity system more efficiently. Solar panels are a good start, but they must be paired with batteries and other distributed energy resources that can provide and/or store electricity at night. We also need to look at next-generation clean energy resources like offshore wind turbines, clean hydrogen generated with excess renewables, and advanced nuclear microreactors.

While some of these technologies are ready for implementation, others will need nudges to develop viable markets. However, we won’t solve this through local power generation alone. Every unit of electricity we don’t use is one that doesn’t need to flow through high fire-risk regions. We need to maximize energy efficiency measures, invest in high-density housing and microgrids to reduce the energy intensity of our lifestyles and be more resilient to disruption, develop financial incentives that encourage people to use electricity when it is abundant, and similarly, integrate technologies that can help optimize energy flows through our homes, buildings, distributed energy resources and batteries to match power system dynamics.

Then we can begin retiring the highest-risk portions of our power systems while strategically investing in state-of-the-art fire mitigation strategies for the parts of the transmission system that remain critical.”

 

5

“AI-Powered Buildings That Adapt to the Unknown”

 

Burçin Becerik-Gerber 

Dean’s Professor and Chair of the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

 

“I’m interested in how the buildings that we occupy right now impact our health and well-being. I’m not just talking about physical health, but also mental health. It’s a new and emerging field in civil and environmental engineering. We call this human-building interaction.

Imagine AI-powered buildings that can ‘sense’ and ‘adapt dynamically’ to changing conditions, both indoors and outdoors. For example, if the outdoor air quality metrics are poor, are there ways to trigger some of the building systems to improve the air quality? This dynamic response would involve adjusting indoor systems like ventilation and filtration based on outdoor environmental conditions — for example, during wildfires when air quality deteriorates.

Also, buildings might use sensors in the water faucets to detect contamination after wildfires, or smart systems [could] kick in and clean the air or clean the water when environmental hazards emerge.

I’m also imagining protective layers that lay on buildings to protect them, such as automated systems that shield buildings from fires or other environmental hazards. Think of the suits firefighters are wearing — can we have suits for our buildings to protect them? While still speculative, such systems could potentially save lives and reduce damage during disasters.”

 

6

“Rethink Before We Rebuild”

 

Lucio Soibelman

Fred Champion Estate Chair in Engineering Professor 

 

“We should see this as an opportunity to rethink our urban environments before we rush to rebuild everything the same way that it was before the fires.

First, we need to make sure that the hills near the burned areas are stable. It is expected that those mountains, now with burned vegetation cover, won’t be stable during future rains. The consequence will be the expected landslides that will affect the same neighborhoods that were destroyed by the fires. It would be a disaster to rebuild just to have the new houses destroyed again by landslides.

We have to rethink the interface of neighborhoods with wild areas. In the last 20 years, we built too many houses in those areas, increasing the danger of fire disasters. We are not prepared or equipped to deal with the increased danger of this interaction. I think that it’s time to stop new construction in those areas.

When we rebuild the burned neighborhoods, we will need to rethink the way that we design and build our landscapes. There is a need to make sure that we select better plants with different burning characteristics. Palms burn much faster than oak trees. We need to select vegetation that doesn’t burn as fast as the ones that we have today. We need to keep vegetation a good distance from our homes, with paved areas separating our garden from the house. We must be more careful with fire bridges like wooden fences, gates or trash near homes.

We will need new building codes to take this into consideration. From the landscape to the selection of building materials, we need to design houses with no combustible sidings or with building materials like CMU [precast, rectangular concrete] blocks or concrete walls. I think that concrete 3D printing could be a solution that will be evaluated for building more fireproof houses. Same goes for roofs: We need to avoid materials like asphalt shingles — which can be manufactured to resist fire, but even those are combustible. A better solution would be to use metallic roofs. All openings will need to be upgraded, from fireproof doors to high-quality multiple-pane windows.

But research is needed to understand the real cost benefit of designing new fireproof houses and retrofitting old ones to resist fires. Even with all these upgrades, there is no guarantee that a house will not burn. Many times, houses and businesses burn from the inside out. If you have any small openings like vents, ambers flying on strong Santa Ana winds will find a way into the house, and thousands of combustible materials can ignite a fire from the inside out. There is a need to build houses that have all openings covered with special meshes that would disallow even the smallest embers.

But even if we have a very fireproof house, it will probably burn if all the houses around it are burning, making the temperature so high that some indoor materials could combust naturally! So, improving resilience to fire is a community task, not just an individual one. If you have a house with fireproof materials, but your neighbor abandons his car with a tank full of gas on his driveway next to your home — when his house burns and his car explodes, the fireproofing of your house will probably not be enough.

Another lesson learned is to rethink the transportation network serving these communities. During the fire, we could see that the escape routes were not designed for the demand needed during an emergency. Many people had to abandon their cars when they were trying to escape the fires because they got stuck in traffic. Several areas of the city that are prone to fire, like the Hollywood Hills, have very narrow streets that are extremely dangerous to be used as escape routes during fast fires.”

 

7

“Bananas to the Rescue!”

 

Barath Raghavan

Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering

 

“One innovative approach to wildfire resilience is integrating food production with fire mitigation strategies. For example, planting fire-resistant crops like banana trees can act as natural firebreaks.

Their high water content and low flammability make them effective at slowing or even stopping fires spreading into high-risk neighborhoods near the wildland-urban interface. Beyond fire prevention, this could offer added economic and environmental benefits like boosting local food production, community involvement and sustainable land use practices.

Another promising avenue we’ve been exploring is the use of artificial intelligence and automated crowdsourcing for wildfire detection and response. In a recent study, we found that a network of low-cost mobile phones mounted on properties in high fire-threat areas could help identify fires up to 3,000 feet away and successfully map wilderness blazes within 180 feet of their origin.

By combining ecological solutions like fire-resistant crops and new technology like AI, I believe we can tackle wildfire risks on several fronts. Strengthening community resilience by engaging residents as active participants in wildfire detection and employing innovative land management practices are crucial in making Los Angeles more sustainable and resilient in the face of future wildfire threats.”

 

8

“Bad Air, Better Clarity”

 

Jiachen Zhang

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Spatial Sciences

 

“Following the recent wildfires, I’ve received numerous inquiries about air quality concerns. While there are many online resources and reports available, gathering and interpreting this information can be overwhelming.

Much of the current guidance remains qualitative rather than quantitative. For instance, while we know that emissions from burning structures tend to be more toxic than those from forest fires, quantifying these risks requires detailed chemical analyses, measurements and public health studies. Additionally, the Air Quality Index [AQI] doesn’t capture the complete picture — it may overlook certain pollutants, such as volatile organic compounds [VOCs] or the varying toxicity of different particulate matter [PM] species. As a result, even when AQI levels appear acceptable, potential health risks may still exist.

To mitigate wildfire-related air quality issues, the simplest immediate actions include using an air purifier with a HEPA filter and activated carbon and wearing masks when outdoors.

However, uncertainties remain about when the air is genuinely safe to breathe. For example, wind can resuspend particles from burned structures, prolonging exposure risks. This highlights the need for more comprehensive air-quality measurements, quantitative chemical analyses, and epidemiological studies to better inform public health guidelines during and after wildfires. As someone who lives close to the Eaton fires, I would also like to invite researchers to conduct air quality sampling in my backyard to support these efforts. I think we need interdisciplinary efforts to address wildfire risk.”

 

9

“The Hills Are Alive … With Autonomous Sensors and Drones”

 

Mahta Moghaddam

Ming Hsieh Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

 

“What could have helped both the Palisades and the Eaton fire responses, and importantly, what will help to address similar circumstances [or situations] in the future, is if autonomous systems were in place.

Such systems would have (1) vigilantly observed [based on the risk factors that we knew existed]: high winds, dryness, hillside geometry, etc., (2) immediately detected the first ignition, (3) immediately thereafter generated autonomous decisions on what to do based on various algorithms [including machine learning and AI schemes], and (4) immediately thereafter launched autonomous drones to put out the first small fires.

We need to create autonomous systems, with humans in the loop for sanity checks, but also that perform with beyond-human speed or transcend human speed. There are many technologies that need to be developed for all of the above steps. We need to develop observational technologies that are easy and scalable to deploy and can “wake up” on applicable cues. We need to develop closed-loop reliable autonomous decision-making schemes. And we need to develop resilient drone/UAV technologies that can fly in harsh conditions. The latter may not be all that we need, but I think they will be extremely helpful in controlling wildfires at early stages and before things get out of hand.”

 

10

“Public Health Strategies to Stop Catastrophic Fire”

 

Randolph Hall

Dean’s Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Director of Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Threats and Emergencies (CREATE)

 

“Wildfires can behave like diseases that are transmitted from person to person, such as COVID-19.

When we protect ourselves against the hazard, we also lower the odds of passing the threat on to our susceptible neighbors. But what should we do? Many structures in Los Angeles were built in ways that expose flammable materials to flying embers, thus elevating their risk of catching fire. We know from decades of public health research that we can reduce and even eradicate disease by increasing rates of vaccination in populations. Likewise, we can be safer if we incentivize ‘vaccination’ of structures against flying embers in vulnerable locations — meaning we should subsidize retrofitting so that structures are less likely to burn and spread fire.

Wildfires, like transmissible diseases, also spread at exponentially increasing rates over time, meaning it is hugely important to stop or contain a fire soon after it is ignited, at its origin. To do so, we need research and innovations in technology that can quickly put out fires in remote locations. This will require surveillance systems to rapidly and accurately detect small fires, as well as robotic technology that can extinguish and contain fires where they start — overcoming challenging terrain, dispersion of hazards and extreme winds. Fires need to be stopped in the precious minutes before they become catastrophic.

History has shown that public health investment in vaccination and disease surveillance can save lives. We now need a public health strategy for wildfires — for stopping their spread and saving communities by ‘vaccinating’ structures against burning embers and rapidly detecting and extinguishing fires at their origin.”