It's been six months since the Eaton Fire in Southern California destroyed nearly 10,000 structures — most of them homes, displacing tens of thousands of people.

David Brancaccio’s home in Altadena was among the homes lost. He’s been sharing parts of the rebuilding journey for teachable moments about how to move forward after disaster.

Today, we hear from one of his neighbors: Lucie Russo, development events manager at Southern California Public Radio, which runs LAist out of Pasadena. (We're work siblings. LAist and Marketplace have the same parent company, American Public Media.)

Russo recently spoke with Brancaccio to share more about her experiences in the months following the fire. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: There's a big poster that one of the local businesses put up in the parking lot. It's about probably eight feet tall, and it maps all the houses destroyed in our town. The immediate destruction zone is beyond anything many people have ever experienced, thank goodness. You must have had to find temporary shelter, and you have kids. Where are you?

Lucie Russo: We're actually in Northern California. The kind of best option that I could think of immediately after the fire was to come up to my parents' house where I grew up. So my kindergartener was able to slot right in to actually, the school that I went to when I was a kid, and we found a nearby preschool that had an opening for my preschooler.

Brancaccio: So you're gonna try to rebuild, he laughed nervously. It's not easy.

Lucie Russo: Yeah. You know, a lot of people have told me things that make me worry a little bit, and I'm choosing to ignore them. I have a lot of concern about what the neighborhood is going to look like when we get back. You know, we chose Altadena for a reason, and if it doesn't look like that anymore when we get back, then we might not want to live there. But in that scenario, we sell our newly rebuilt custom house, and, you know, decide where we want to live instead. But in the meantime, we can maximize insurance payouts and take advantage of the low mortgage rate that we got when we bought our house.

Brancaccio: Have you gotten anyone to draw up plans for a replacement house for you?

Lucie Russo: We have an architect. It was somebody that we had a preexisting relationship with. For a bunch of reasons, we're not going to actually rebuild like for like, as the term is. We're planning to rebuild a bigger house so that we can stay there indefinitely.

Brancaccio: I gotta say — and you can tell me about your experience — one of the biggest frustrations is, "Well, I want this kind of a roof because it's more fire-resistant." Nobody can tell me how much it would be per square foot to make the roof, or kind of anything else given upward pressure on labor, tariffs, stuff like that. Are you finding that?

Lucie Russo: Absolutely. There's so many unknowns, and when we try to calculate the different cost options, yeah, it's virtually impossible. I think a lot about also the impact of immigration and the ICE activity in Southern California on labor, and when it comes time to hire a crew, I have no idea what that's going to look like.

Brancaccio: Lucie Russo at Southern California Public Radio, the LAist folks. She's essentially a colleague and one of four people at that one public media outlet who lost their homes completely in what's called the Eaton Fire. As many as 20 others at LAist were displaced. In that Eaton Fire, 9,400 structures were destroyed — mostly homes. In the Palisades Fire to the west of us at the same time, 6,800 structures were destroyed. Lucie, thanks for taking the time.

Lucie Russo: Sure thing, David. I'm happy to help a neighbor.