As Los Angeles recovers from its devastating wildfires, environmental engineers, urban planners and natural disaster experts are casting forward with visions of what could come next for neighborhoods that have been reduced to ash and rubble.

After the devastation of the Los Angeles fires, officials are ready to rebuild. But defending against future fires requires thinking about more than buildings.

In the era when American cities regularly caught fire, the widespread destruction seeded what looks, in retrospect, like possibility.

At least 29 people are believed to be dead and more than a dozen others remain unaccounted for as multiple wildfires rage across Southern California.