What 3D Scanning the Aftermath of the LA Fires Revealed | Nonny de la Peña | TED

Soundtrack for the apocalypse is silent. We felt the weight of that total absence of sound when we arrived in the devastated neighborhoods of Altadena and the Palisades after the January 2025 firestorm. Our small crew of two or three was usually alone for blocks and blocks. There was no sound of cars or children or people or pool pumps or electricity across the lines. Even the birds were gone. I'm best known for having pioneered something called immersive journalism, which uses emerging technologies to create new stories that represent our world the way it really is: fully dimensional and not flat. People then can experience stories with their whole body and not just with their eyes. Also, as a journalist, I feel that we have a moral responsibility to bear witness to injustice, to wonder, to the human condition.

With immersive journalism, I am merging those new technologies with that code of ethics. I'm also founding director for the Narrative and Emerging Media program at Arizona State University. So when the fires broke out, I mobilized my colleagues and my graduate students, and we went out to cover, using our Cronkite journalism news passes what firemen called “Nuketown.” When we got there, the fires were basically out, so there wasn't anything anyone could really do. But when we'd run into a fire crew, they would rush over, and we thought, "Wow, they're going to question our press passes." But no, they just wanted to help in any way that they could. And in our case, it was just water or granola bars. All of us were suffering from shock and sorrow as the sole witnesses for the devastation around us. It was grueling work. The air was toxic, it was incredibly hot.

We were wearing hazmat suits and heavy boots and double-filtered masks. We were using specialized equipment designed by Mike Caronna, who is a photojournalist and the former general manager for Reuters. We had 3D-printed special parts that ... clamped to the top, middle and bottom of a pole, so we could shoot in every direction all at once. Each one of those dots represents a shot that we took, and then [they] would be fused together using artificial intelligence. I also used my phone to make very painstaking captures. You have to use your camera like a paintbrush and get every bit, every angle, and at the same time, make sure that you're not stepping on upturned nails or broken glass or shards of metal. This is my graduate student, Ashley Buschhorn. She was trying to capture a cactus that had been really weirdly burned only on one side. I'd often look up and see my colleague Mary Mathieson, and she’d been taking the gear into these incredibly dangerous situations, determined to get the best scan possible.

We scanned fallen angels, buddhas, melted trash cans, Teslas [and] surf wagons. We filmed until the light was gone, every day. We even used our headlights to capture this car that was sliding down the mountain. We didn't know if it would be there the next day. More than once, I'd have to leave the crew working and go sit in the car by myself. These weren't just places on a map. I grew up in and around these neighborhoods, and often we were scanning the homes of friends of mine. They hadn't even been back yet, they didn't even know the status of their own places. Like the cello teacher. This is a home we brought my son to for years, every weekend. This is a home where I held the baby shower for my first child.

This is my sister's good friend's equipment. She taught horseback riding at Will Rogers Park, and when the fires broke out, she rushed over to go rescue the horses, and then her own home burned, and everything she owned was also destroyed. This was a particularly difficult moment because I was standing next to the wall that had collapsed over a bedroom, where I said goodbye to one of my best friends about a year earlier. She had died of cancer the next day. Her partner escaped with a small suitcase and a loaf of bread from their favorite bakery. The thumbnail was completely black, which is incredibly strange because none of my other thumbnails were like that on any of my scans. There was also some incredible stories. This was a house where my son spent most weekends during high school with a bunch of his buddies. One of his buddies had been there the night before the fire, and he left his car in front of the house and took an Uber home because they'd been out partying. They saw on Instagram an image which seemed to indicate his car was totally intact.

So I called him when we got there to describe what we were seeing, and it was extraordinary. Other than ashes on top, his car looked [to be] in perfect condition. He later got into the car and just drove it away. Then there was the Bank of America building, where a lot of people had their safe deposit boxes, and they were told they'd been destroyed. They'd lost family heirlooms and Holocaust papers. But it turns out, underneath all this crazy rubble -- everything was safe. And here we were, taking these images, and there was nobody there guarding it. Niantic, the company that makes Pokémon Go, learned about the work we were doing, and they used our material to try to help folks who'd been impacted by the fire. And as a journalist, that's what you want, right? You want your work to be used in a way that can make an impact, that can help others. I also had a third motivation about why I was doing the work I was doing.

I really understood personally the helplessness and just the feelings of loss, because a year and a half earlier, I'd had my own fire. This was my home studio where I'd lost everything personally and professionally from pretty much my entire life. During COVID, I had closed up my offices in Santa Monica and I'd brought everything here. I mean, no one was coming to work, so this is where I thought it would be safe. It turned out, my electric bicycle battery had exploded. I lost projects and equipment. I lost photos and video archives, diaries, family memories. I inhaled smoke. I burned my gums.

I damaged my lungs. And I now have what might be a permanent neuropathy in my esophagus. When I looked at the remains of what had been decades of my life, I just thought it was all gone. But a few strange things actually survived. This is a photo I took in college of one of my best friends. My husband of 27 years ago, he wrote me this love letter after our first date and it said, "I think I see a kindred spirit in you, and if you invite me, I'll cross the country in a heartbeat." Well, I invited him and he asked me to marry him on our second date. I also used my scans with my battle with the insurance company. Like, they didn't want to pay on this sofa because I didn’t have a receipt, and the receipt had been burned in the fire. My scans showed very clearly there was a sofa in there, and they had to pay on that. And it was one of the reasons why I was out there, scanning everybody's homes. I wanted them to be able to use what we had in any way that they could.

Another thing strangely survived the fire. In 2009, I was at an event at the University of Southern California, and Mark Hamill was at the adjacent table. Now, I grew up in LA, and normally I don't bug celebrities. I just let them go about their lives peacefully, right? But my son was six and I couldn't resist. I asked Mark Hamill to sign the program card. And that flammable, fragile piece of paper, it somehow survived a lithium-battery fire that was so hot that the fire folks said it had to burn its course. And there it was, like, it drifted right on top of the hellscape that used to be my entire life. And not only that, Mark Hamill wrote a message. "The force will be with you always. Your pal, Mark Hamill." I can't help but take that message literally. The force, it's within us all.

And it's not what we lose that defines us. It's who we love and how we take that love forward. I know personally, when you’re looking at what [are] the remains of what had been a vibrant life, you can't help but feel like everything is gone. But silence is not emptiness. It's a place to reflect and remember, to imagine the wild ways we can rebuild and to consider what really endures. And now, as we come to the one-year anniversary of the fires, I'm calling on everyone to feel the force, to think about that love within you and help support our friends, our neighbors, our communities. Together, we can rebuild Los Angeles, better and more resilient. Thank you. (Applause)