Weather & Science

‘No Safe Place’: LA Climate Scientists Lose Homes in Fires

The Los Angeles wildfires mark the second disaster in the past year to hit a major center of climate research, putting scientists inside the dangers they study.

A worker sifts through the remains of a home destroyed by the Eaton fire in Altadena, California, on Jan. 22.

Photographer: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg

Climate scientists are acutely aware of the devastation that a warming world can wreak on communities. But when disaster shows up at their doorstep, it hits in a completely different way.

“This event, for me, has destroyed any boundary between my work as a climate scientist and the rest of my life, my family, my friends,” Benjamin Hamlington, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, wrote in a LinkedIn post after his home in Altadena burned in the Los Angeles fires.