Remembering Palisades, and Committing to What Comes Next

Ky Holland, July 7, 2026

This week marks one year since the Palisades fire in Los Angeles, California —a sobering reminder of how quickly wildfire can devastate lives, homes, and entire communities when it reaches the urban edge. Anniversaries like this matter. They are not about reliving loss, but about taking steps to prevent it from happening again in our own community.

For too long, we have treated catastrophic urban-perimeter wildfires as inevitable. History suggests otherwise. A century ago, cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, and London routinely lost large portions of their urban cores to fire. Through sustained investment in building codes, detection systems, professional response capacity, and coordinated planning, we largely eliminated that risk. We did not eliminate fire—but we eliminated the scale of devastation.

That same long-term goal should guide us today: ending catastrophic urban-perimeter wildfires, even as we continue to live with forest fires and isolated infrastructure losses. Recent tragedies—from Lahaina to Palisades—make clear that incremental steps are not enough.

My work in the legislature is grounded in this long view. Through HJR 15, I’ve sought to elevate wildfire resilience as a statewide priority, recognizing that protecting communities requires coordination across land management, infrastructure, utilities, and local governments. In the coming session, I’ll be introducing additional legislation focused on utility rights-of-way and wildfire mitigation planning—designed to support their critical work and clarify shared responsibilities in a changing risk environment.

These efforts are meant to complement, not replace, community-driven action. Anchorage’s recently updated Community Wildfire Protection Plan is an important step forward, reflecting years of local engagement, improved data, and a growing recognition that wildfire resilience is as much about planning and systems as it is about suppression. We can also look forward to new innovative approaches that engage the community and incorporate new technologies.

The AURA Scenario Project, led by Dr. Jen Schmidt at the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research, was an exploratory, 40-year horizon planning process involving multiple communities and climate drivers. I was fortunate to facilitate community planning meetings over 18 months and to help author the final community reports. The community-anchored approach—focused on key uncertainties, decisions, and adaptive management—proved to be a powerful lens for exploring wildfire and climate adaptation strategies. You’ll find the Anchorage and Fairbanks scenarios and Wildfire Fact Sheets here.

Remembering Palisades means committing to a future where such losses are no longer routine or accepted. It means learning from history, investing in people and infrastructure, and aligning policy, engineering, and community action around a shared objective: protecting lives, homes, and the places we care about—before the next fire tests us again.

I welcome continued dialogue and collaboration as we work toward that goal.