10/ As America’s landfills grow and more flammable stuff enters the waste stream, several scientists told me they think the risk of fires and dangerously hot landfills is increasing.

Yet the waste industry has successfully pushed to roll back EPA rules designed to prevent fires

9/ Many residents say they feel gaslit when told they can’t trust their own senses. “The waste industry does not want to call it burning, even though it smells like burning,” one landfill neighbor in Virginia told me. “Even though you see smoke.”

8/ Since 2006, landfills in Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, Tennessee and beyond have undergone similarly noxious reactions, spurring debate about what exactly is driving them, what to call them and how to put them out

6/ Regulators suspect that a flameless fire, or smolder, is burning below the surface of Chiquita Canyon due to the operator letting too much oxygen into the landfill – a problem that is known to start fires, which goes against federal regulations

5/ Over the next three years, officials say, hot temperatures consumed about 90 acres of the landfill, which spewed out toxic gases including benzene and carbon monoxide. Residents of nearby Val Verde say they’re getting heart problems, nose bleeds, hand tremors and even cancer

4/ Chiquita Canyon Landfill is one of the country’s largest waste sites. In 2022, according to CalEPA, buried pockets of waste at the landfill started climbing to broiling temperatures well above safety standards

2/ I wondered what was happening in the final resting place for so much waste, landfills?

Turns out, a lot. Several have been overheating to 200F+ temperatures, leading to toxic gases, geysers of trash juice and sick neighbors who say they feel gaslit about what's going on

Besides reducing costs, this model offers potential benefits for surviving future fires, fire risk experts told me. Unlike with floods and hurricanes, in a fire the survival of one structure is often determined by the hardiness of its neighbor.

Lansdown is retracing Ain's original design and making it more fire-resistant. Using his plan as a baseline for rebuilding, several of his neighbors hope to save money by finding efficiencies in materials and labor costs, just as Ain tried to do 70 years ago.

After World War II, the city faced a dire housing shortage not unlike the one we see today. Ain's answer to aspiring homeowners wondering how they'd ever afford anything was simple but radical: build collectively.

That's now the tack the Lansdowns, Yus and other neighbors are taking.

That's because, before the fire, the Yus and the Lansdowns lived on a block of almost identical homes.

The tract of 28 homes, known as the Park Planned homes, was designed by the Modernist architect Gregory Ain in 1946. It has a unique place in LA's architectural history...

What Kim was talking about wasn't empty rhetoric. Already, one of her neighbors, Mark Lansdown, a retired architectural project manager, was drafting plans to rebuild his own family's home -- and Kim and Chien's home, and the homes of however many of their dozens of neighbors wanted in.

In the wake of major disasters, homeowners are largely left on their own to navigate the complicated roadmap to recovery -- if they can afford to rebuild. So when I happened to connect with Kim Yu on a reporting trip to LA in late January, I was immediately struck by her community-minded approach.