The January 2025 Southern California wildfires burned from January 7, 2025 to January 31, 2025, impacting people in San Diego and Los Angeles Counties. Two specific fires, Palisades and Eaton, killed at least 28 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures. More than 150,000 individuals evacuated after the first week alone, and millions of individuals lost power due to fire damage and public safety power shutoffs. The Palisades and Eaton fires alone caused the most material damage by an extreme weather event in US history, suggesting that the human health impacts will be significant and persistent.

 

In response to the 2025 Southern California wildfires, the Public Health Extreme Events Research network (PHEER) mobilized to serve as a coordinating platform for the public health disaster research community of practice. The PHEER network had two main objectives:

1. Develop an environmental exposure web map that is freely available to the research, practice, and policy communities. The map is designed to illustrate the location and type of environmental assessments conducted by public and academic research teams and to curate the data collected by researchers where possible.

2. Partner with the NHERI Natural Hazards Reconnaissance (RAPID) Facility to collect perishable data on the wildfires using a hyperspectral sensor.  These data were collected March 2025 by a drone-mounted camera flying at approximately 150 feet above 24 sampled census blocks, representing about 1,000 households as well as institutional settings and public spaces. RAPID collected data using the Headwall VNIR-SWIR sensor, and the spatial resolution of each pixel is 2-3 centimeters.

 

PHEER will fund one Rapid Research Grant, totaling $5,000 in costs, to conduct analyses of environmental  exposures using the hyperspectral data. 

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Read more and apply here.

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