On the night of October 8, 2017, a small fire ignited near the northern tip of Napa Valley. Hot, dry winds gusting up to 80 miles an hour drove the blaze southwest toward the city of Santa Rosa, where it hopped over Highway 101––six lanes wide at that point––into neighborhoods, including one called Coffey Park. Nearly everything in that subdivision, including 1,422 houses, burned completely.

Yet today, a casual visitor would not think the neighborhood was the site of a recent catastrophe, instead finding custom homes with tidy yards, clean sidewalks, and trees that have matured into juveniles. That’s because Coffey Park residents rebuilt and reoccupied 80 percent of the houses there within three years. The recovery wasn’t total. Five Coffey Park residents died in the fire. Some people decided to relocate. A few lots remain empty. But the community has endured, and in many ways is thriving, or so several residents told me after I knocked on their doors last month, looking for lessons that could be useful for people displaced by the recent Los Angeles–area fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

What do you know now, I asked dozens of residents, that you wish you had known when you lost your house? I also asked local officials for their reflections on how to rebuild.

Santa Rosa, with roughly 175,800 residents, is far smaller than Los Angeles (population 3.8 million), let alone L.A. County (population 9.7 million), with many attendant differences in how the local government runs. And the number of structures destroyed in the Palisades and Altadena fires combined is nearly three times what Santa Rosa lost in 2017. But like Pacific Palisades and Altadena, Santa Rosa lost whole neighborhoods that no one expected to be consumed by wildfire, including Coffey Park.

[M. Nolan Gray: How well-intentioned policies fueled L.A.’s fires]

Santa Rosa officials emphasized to me that, in their experience, recovery requires local government to be flexible. But perhaps the most important transferable lesson that I gathered on my visit there, one touted by both residents and officials, is that neighbors can hasten their area’s recovery if they organize. Banding together helped Coffey Park residents in conflicts and negotiations with federal, state, and local officials. And it didn’t just yield more political power. It helped neighbors benefit from one another’s strengths, compensate for their own weaknesses, and create a stronger sense of community than before.

At 9:45 p.m. on the night the fire started, Von Radke was upstairs in the two-story house in Coffey Park where he and his wife had lived for more than 25 years. He’d undergone hip-replacement surgery two weeks prior and was turning in early. He recalls the wind blowing mightily as he drifted off to sleep. Hours later, he woke up and smelled smoke, but, groggy from painkillers, he at first dismissed it. Eventually he woke his wife, Jan, and hobbled downstairs. When he looked out a window, he saw embers in the air and 40-foot-tall Italian cypress trees bending 45 degrees in the wind.

It was past time to flee. But just backing out of the driveway took five minutes. The whole neighborhood was trying to evacuate. Traffic stopped for 20 minutes or more. Von saw people trying to fight fires with garden hoses, and more and more houses aflame. He and Jan might need to flee on foot, he thought, knowing how hopeless that would be in his condition. “For the first time in my life, I thought I was going to die,” he recalled. Finally traffic started to move.

Like many others who saw the fire up close, Radke went on to suffer “a significant amount of PTSD,” he told me. When we spoke in the front yard of his rebuilt home, a small two-story house surrounded by a well-tended garden, he focused on the psychological needs of the survivors. In the months after the fire, while they were still scattered in various hotel rooms and rentals, some of his neighbors began convening to talk through their escape experiences, their struggles, and how to rebuild. The best-known gathering came to be called Wine Wednesdays; it still occasionally takes place. To work through his own experience, Radke said he found a therapist who donated his services to fire survivors.

“It’s psychologically challenging to let people help you––to go to the local school and pick through donations of hand-me-down clothing to get you through those first weeks––but it’s important to learn a bit of humility,” Radke said, “because people want to help and you need help.”

Once the fire was out, Coffey Park residents were eager to return to their properties, and confused and frustrated by not knowing when they would be allowed in. Jeff Okrepkie, who’d lived in the neighborhood for five years, craved reliable information, and had more ways of getting it than most: As a commercial-insurance agent, he had colleagues who dealt with homeowner’s insurance and contacts with developers and contractors.

What we need, he thought, is a forum where residents can gather to ask questions and get accurate answers from knowledgeable sources. He called a friend at a nearby junior college who agreed to donate use of its auditorium, and spread the word about a community meeting. Officials from the city, builders, and insurance experts were all on hand. “I thought I had done my good deed,” he told me. “Then people started asking me, ‘When is the next meeting?’”

[Read: What the fires revealed about Los Angeles culture]

With Sonoma County Supervisor James Gore, Okrepkie organized a bigger town hall, drawing hundreds of attendees to an arts center. At that gathering, Coffey Park residents divided themselves into five groups based on their addresses, and each group nominated a captain to represent them. Weekly meetings followed, and soon Okrepkie founded Coffey Strong, a nonprofit to help residents get back into their homes as quickly and easily as possible. “Organizing in that way helped us continue to share information, but more importantly, it legitimized us in the eyes of government agencies,” he said. “If they were contacted by Coffey Strong, it wasn’t one person calling; it was one person who represented thousands.”

The group began to solve problems no one had anticipated. When the neighborhood had been built, the developer had constructed walls around its edges that residents assumed belonged to the city but were in fact the responsibility of homeowners. Had residents known that earlier, they would have had the damaged walls hauled away during the free debris removal offered to them as part of disaster-relief efforts. Now they faced having to pay thousands of dollars for the walls’ removal, and still more to replace them piecemeal. Coffey Strong raised $500,000 for the project and persuaded contractors to donate labor.

After many of the initial hurdles to rebuilding had been cleared, the U.S. Postal Service told residents that instead of having mailboxes at their houses, as before, they’d now have centralized mailboxes, a proposal that many of them strongly rejected. “When your neighborhood burns down, it’s a total loss of control, and for a lot of people, rebuilding your home, which involves making a lot of choices, restores a sense of control,” Okrepkie said. “So when someone from the federal government comes and tells you, We’re doing this in a way that’s worse than what you had, and you have no control, it upsets people a lot.” Under pressure from Coffey Strong, as well as allies in the city, the Postal Service reversed course.

While Coffey Park residents were organizing, city staffers in Santa Rosa had to figure out how to support people affected by the fire citywide. Initially, the new demands were almost overwhelming: First responders were exhausted; municipal structures and infrastructure had been destroyed in the fire; city officials had to coordinate with Sonoma County, the state of California, FEMA, and more. Thousands of residents were displaced, all wanted information, and meanwhile, normal city business wore on.

Gabe Osburn was a municipal employee working in a role unrelated to fire recovery who lived in a house just beyond where the fire had reached. Feeling survivor’s remorse, he expressed interest to his boss in helping with the recovery. Osburn started attending community meetings for fire victims as a representative of the city and soon was assigned to advance fire recovery full-time on behalf of the planning department; he would be among the primary city employees working with residents to rebuild, and ultimately attended more than 300 meetings with fire victims, he told me. The goal, Osburn said, was not just to restore the 5 percent of the city’s housing stock that had been lost. “It was important for us to keep the fire victims here,” he said. “They were the fabric of our community.”

A metal heart at a park in the Coffey Park neighborhood commemorates the 2017 fire in Santa Rosa, California.

Early on, Osburn feared that the area’s small construction industry would be unable to supply enough contractors, laborers, and materials to rebuild affordably. As it turned out, free markets and assistance from flexible regulators was a powerful combination. Builders responded to the new demand for construction. And the city offered steep discounts on building permits, created a permitting center dedicated to fire recovery, and worked with surveyors to go through the areas most affected by the fire instead of requiring each resident to pay their own surveyor to clarify property lines. If residents wanted to change the footprint of their house, city planners worked with them. There were limits to what the city would allow, but multiple residents told me that the staff tried to get to yes, rather than insisting on strict adherence to the rules as they’d existed before the fire.

Walking around Coffey Park, I met some of the beneficiaries of that government flexibility. Julio Alvarez told me that he and his wife had been underinsured. A discount on permits enabled them to rebuild. And the ability to change their floor plan from two stories to one has helped the couple as they get older.

Rod Julianus was at first determined to rebuild his house exactly as it was. Then he thought better of it: The house had been filled with furniture that his late grandfather had made in a factory in Holland and given to his parents upon their marriage. He realized that if he rebuilt the same house with the same floor plan, he would spend the rest of his life looking at the spots where that furniture had been. Switching floor plans made his psychological recovery easier. He advises anyone planning to rebuild to consider if changes might help them, too.

Will Los Angeles be as good a municipal partner to its fire-affected residents as Santa Rosa was? L.A. officials have already started waiving some building requirements, and the city certainly has more resources than Santa Rosa. But I’ve heard horror stories from both homeowners and businesses about the city’s endlessly complex rules, so I fear that, because its bureaucracy is so big and difficult to navigate, it could fail the fire victims. (Pacific Palisades is part of the city of Los Angeles, while Altadena is an unincorporated community in L.A. County and will be subject to county building rules and agencies.)

[Nancy Walecki: The place where I grew up is gone]

Can residents of Altadena and Pacific Palisades improve their recovery by organizing themselves? There, I am more hopeful. Like any neighborhood, even a suburban one where the homes are mostly of similar size and value, Coffey Park is filled with people of all sorts. Knocking on its doors, I encountered friendly invitations to come inside and gruff suspicions that I was soliciting. I met professionals with contacts in industries as varied as home construction and therapy, canny people you’d want negotiating a lawsuit on your behalf, and warmhearted sorts you’d want commiserating with you after the loss of a wedding ring or a pet. As individuals, everyone in the neighborhood lacked something important that recovery required. Collectively, they had the qualities and connections they needed.

Santa Rosans have gotten used to sharing their knowledge with other communities that suffer from fires. Some of the advice they relayed to me was practical and time-sensitive. Remember to cancel your cable bill or home alarm system or land line so you don’t continue to be charged. Walk your lot with a metal detector before the rubble is hauled off. And start looking for and vetting contractors now––everyone who rebuilds will need one. When you find one, have a lawyer look at the contract. Before submitting a list of lost objects to your insurer, walk through a home-goods store to jog your memory of forgotten items. Residents also recommended resources including After the Fire, an organization that helps communities recover from wildfires, and United Policyholders, a nonprofit that helps insurance consumers.

Jeff Okrepkie now sits on the city council, and Gabe Osburn is the head of planning; both have shared what they’ve learned with officials and residents of Los Angeles, Maui (the site of the 2023 Lahaina fire), and beyond. As for Coffey Strong, the nonprofit is now inactive, having succeeded in its core mission: getting residents home. The group’s website remains online as a resource. Among its attestations: “Nobody can or should shoulder all of this alone.”

The image that really got me on social media this week was a faded photo of a man and woman, standing on what looks like the front steps of their home. It’s a candid shot—both are focusing their attention on an infant cradled in the mother’s arm. It is likely one of the first photos of a new family, and the caption broke my heart: “This photo was blown into our yard during the Eaton Canyon fire. Anyone from Pasadena/Altadena recognize these people?”

The picture is perfectly intact, not singed or torn, yet it seems to represent an entire universe of loss. Staring at the photo, a piece of family history scattered by the same winds that fuel the Los Angeles fires, you can just begin to see the contours of what is gone. The kind of grief that cannot be inventoried in an insurance claim.

And then you scroll. A satellite photo of a charred, leveled neighborhood is sandwiched next to some career news. On Instagram, I see a GoFundMe for a woman who is nine months pregnant and just lost her house; it’s followed immediately by someone else’s ebullient ski-vacation photos and a skin-care advertisement. I proceed through the “For You” feed on X and find Elon Musk replying to a video where Alex Jones claims the fires are part of a globalist plot to ruin the United States (“True,” he said), and blaming the fires on DEI initiatives; then a shitpost about Meta’s content-moderation changes (“On my way to comment ‘retard’ on every facebook post,” it reads, with 297,000 views). I scroll again: “Celebrities Reveal How They REALLY Feel About Kelly Clarkson,” another post teases. This is followed by a post about a new red-flag warning in L.A.: The fire is not relenting.

[Read: The unfightable fire]

To watch the destruction in Los Angeles through the prism of our fractured social-media ecosystem is to feel acutely disoriented. The country is burning; your friends are going on vacation; next week Donald Trump will be president; the government is setting the fires to stage a “land grab”; a new cannabis-infused drink will help you “crush” Dry January. Mutual-aid posts stand alongside those from climate denialists and doomers. Stay online long enough and it’s easy to get a sense that the world is simultaneously ending and somehow indifferent to that fact. It all feels ridiculous. A viral post suggests that “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” You scroll some more and learn that the author of that post wrote the line while on the toilet (though the author has since deleted the confession).

Call it doomscrolling, gawking, bearing witness, or whatever you want, but there is an irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information. This is coupled with the bone-deep realization that the experience of staring at our devices while others suffer rarely provides the solidarity one might hope. Amanda Hess captured this distinctly modern feeling in a 2023 article about watching footage of dead Gazan children on Instagram: “I am not a survivor or a responder. I’m a witness, or a voyeur. The distress I am feeling is shame.”

For those on the ground, these networks mean something different. These people do not need to bear witness: They need specific information about their circumstances, and they need help. But the chaos of our social platforms and the splintered nature of a hollowed-out media industry extend the disorientation to them as well. “This time, I’m a civilian,” Matt Pearce, a Los Angeles–based journalist, wrote last week. “And this time, the user experience of getting information about a disaster unfolding around me was dogshit.” Anna Merlan, a reporter for Mother Jones, chronicled the experience of sifting through countless conspiracy theories and false-flag posts while watching the fires encroach on her home and packing her car to evacuate.

As I read these dispatches and watch helplessly from afar, the phrase time on site bangs around in my head. This is the metric that social-media companies optimize for, and it means what it sounds like: the amount of time that people spend on these apps. In recent years, there has been much handwringing over how much time users are spending on site; Tech-industry veterans such as Tristan Harris have made lucrative second careers warning of the addictive, exploitative nature of tech platforms and their algorithms. Harris’s crusade began in 2016, when he suggested a healthier metric of “time well spent,” which sought to reverse the “digital attention crisis.” This became its own kind of metric, adopted by Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 as Facebook’s north star for user satisfaction. Since then, the phrase has fallen out of favor. Harris rebranded his effort away from time well spent to a focus on “humane” technology.

But the worries persist. Parents obsess over the vague metric of “screen time,” while researchers write best-selling books and debate what, exactly, phones and social media are doing to kids and how to prove it. American politicians are so worried about time on site—especially when its by-product, metadata, is being collected by foreign governments—that the United States may very well ban TikTok, an app used by roughly one-third of the country’s adults. (In protest, many users have simply started spending time on another Chinese site, Xiaohongshu.) Many people suspect that time on site can’t be good for us, yet time on site also is how many of us learn about the world, form communities, and entertain ourselves. The experience of logging on and consuming information through the algorithmic morass of our feeds has never felt more dispiriting, commoditized, chaotic, and unhelpful than it does right now.

[Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens]

It is useful, then, to juxtapose this information ecosystem—one that’s largely governed by culture-warring tech executives and populated by attention seekers—with a true technological public good. Last week, I downloaded Watch Duty, a free app that provides evacuation notices, up-to-date fire maps, and information such as wind direction and air-quality alerts. The app, which was founded in 2021 after fires ravaged Sonoma County, California, has become a crucial piece of information infrastructure for L.A. residents and first responders. It is run by a nonprofit as a public service, with volunteer reporters and full-time staff who help vet information. Millions have downloaded the app just this month.

Watch Duty appears to be saving lives at a time when local-government services have been less than reliable, sending out incorrect evacuation notices to residents. It is a shining example of technology at its best and most useful, and so I was struck by something one of its co-founders, David Merritt, told to The Verge over the weekend: “We don’t want you to spend time in the app,” he said. “You get information and get out. We have the option of adding more photos, but we limit those to the ones that provide different views of a fire we have been tracking. We don’t want people doom scrolling.” This, he rightly argues, is “the antithesis of what a lot of tech does.”

The contrast between Watch Duty and broad swaths of the internet feels especially stark in the early days of 2025. The toxic incentives and environments of our other apps are as visible as ever, and the men behind these services—Musk and Zuckerberg especially—seem intent on making the experience of using them worse than ever. It’s all in service of engagement, of more time on site. Musk, who has transformed X into a superfund site of conspiracy theorizing, crypto ads, hateful posts, and low-rent memes, has been vehement that he wants his users to come to the platform and never leave. He has allegedly deprioritized hyperlinks that would take people away from the platform to other sites. (Musk did not deny that this is happening when confronted by Paul Graham, a Y Combinator co-founder.) He has his own name for the metric he wants X to optimize for: unregretted user seconds.

Zuckerberg recently announced his own version of the Muskian playbook, which seeks to turn his Meta platforms into a more lawless posting zone, including getting rid of fact-checkers and turning off its automated moderation systems on all content but “illegal and high-severity violations.” That system kept spam and disinformation content from flooding the platform. Make no mistake: This, too, is its own play for time on site. In an interview last month with the Financial Times, a Meta executive revealed that the company plans to experiment with introducing generative-AI-powered chatbots into its services, behaving like regular users. Connor Hayes, vice president of product for generative AI at Meta, says that this feature—which, I should add, nobody asked for—is a “priority” for the company over the next two years. This is supposed to align with another goal, which is to make its apps “more entertaining and engaging.”

This should feel more than disheartening for anyone who cares about or still believes in the promise of the internet and technology to broaden our worldview, increase resilience, and expose us to the version of humanity that is always worth helping and saving. Spending time on site has arguably never felt this bad; the forecast suggests that it will only get worse.

In recent days, I’ve been revisiting some of the work of the climate futurist Alex Steffen, who has a knack for putting language to our planetary crisis. The unprecedented disasters that appear now with more frequency are an example of discontinuity, where “past experience loses its value as a guide to decision-making about the future.” Steffen argues that we have no choice but to adapt to this reality and anticipate how we’ll survive it. He offers no panaceas or bromides. The climate crisis will come for each of us, but will affect us unevenly. We are not all in this together, he argues. But action is needed—specifically, proactive fixes that make our broken systems more effective and durable.

Clearly our information systems are in need of such work. They feel like they were built for a world we no longer inhabit. Most of them are run by billionaires who can afford to insulate themselves from reality, at least for now. I don’t see an end to the discontinuity or brokenness of our internet. But there are glimpses of resilience. Maybe platforms like Watch Duty offer a template. “I don’t want to sell this,” John Clarke Mills, the company’s CEO, told The Hollywood Reporter on Monday. He went further: “No one should own this. The fact that I have to do this with my team is not OK. Part of this is out of spite. I’m angry that I’m here having to do this, and the government hasn’t spent the money to do this themselves.” Mills’s anger is righteous, but it could also be instructive. Instead of building things that make us feel powerless, Mills is building tools that give people information that can be turned into agency.

There’s no tidy conclusion to any of this. There is loss, fear, anger, but also hope. Days later, I went to check back on the post that contained that photo of the man and woman with a child. I’d hoped that the internet would work its magic to reunite the photo with those who’d lost it. Throughout the replies are people trying to signal-boost the post. In one reply, a local news producer asks for permission to do a story about the photograph. Another person thinks they have a lead on the family. So far, there’s no happy ending. But there is hope.