• The Palisades and Eaton fires have razed thousands of homes and burned tens of thousands of acres.
• Some buildings have survived, though, like the Getty Villa art museum in Pacific Palisades.
• The Villa is not your average home, but homeowners can learn from what Getty staff have been doing all year.

As the Palisades and Eaton fires burned through thousands of acres on Tuesday, razing nearly 2,000 homes, the iconic Getty Villa remained standing with minor damage. Meanwhile, homes and trees around it went up in flames.

"We deeply appreciate the tireless work and dedication of the Los Angeles Fire Department, Los Angeles County Fire Department, and other agencies," the museum said in a statement Wednesday morning.

The Getty Villa is part of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which includes the largest endowment of any museum in the world, estimated at more than $8 billion in 2023. It houses the trust's collection of Ancient Greek and Roman art.

Fire departments used "state-of-the-art air handling systems" to help protect the building, Katherine E. Fleming, the president and CEO of the Getty Trust, told USA Today.

Moreover, builders designed the galleries with double-walled construction, which also helped protect the precious art inside.

However, it wasn't just expensive architecture and state-of-the-art firefighting that helped. Getty staff have been consistently clearing brush from the surrounding area all year as part of its fire-mitigation efforts, the museum said.

That's a crucial lesson for homeowners in fire-risk areas.

Yard work to save your home

The Palisades fire has become the most destructive ever to hit Los Angeles, CNN reported, citing CalFire data.

The fire has been fueled by an explosion of grasses and brush that grew abundant over the past two winters, which were rainier than usual. But with drought conditions over the past few months, that brush dried out, becoming kindling for the fast-moving blazes.

To mitigate the risk of fire, cities, fire departments, and community members can clear dried grasslands around residential areas.

Individual homeowners can also protect their properties by clearing a 5-foot perimeter around their houses and removing flammable materials like ornamental plants, bark mulch, or deck furniture.

"This is an urban fire. We're burning urban fuels," said Pat Durland, a wildfire-mitigation specialist and instructor for the National Fire Protection Association with 30 years of federal wildfire management experience.

Keeping gutters and roofs clear can also prevent spot ignitions that can send entire structures up in flames.

"People believe that they're helpless," Durland told Business Insider in 2023. But that's not the case, he said. "Nine out of 10 times, this boils down to two words: yard work."

Homeowners can also install noncombustible, 1/8-inch mesh screening on any vents to a crawl space or attic to prevent embers from entering the home that way.

"You are where the rubber meets the road. The things you do on your house and around your house are going to make the difference," Durland said.

• Kenyan officials are investigating who owns a mysterious metallic object that fell from the sky.
• The giant ring fell from space, crash-landing into Mukuku Village in Kenya on Wednesday.
• No one was hurt, but space debris poses a serious threat to life on Earth and in space.

On Wednesday, Mukuku Village in Kenya got an unexpected visitor from space.

At about 3 p.m. local time, a large metallic ring weighing about 1,100 pounds and measuring 8 feet in diameter crash-landed in the village, the Kenya Space Agency said in a statement.

The agency said no one was injured, and that the space debris poses no immediate risk.

Maj. Alois Were, an officer with the Kenya Space Agency, told Citizen TV, a Kenyan news station, that the ring-like object is "possibly from a rocket separation stage."

However, it's unclear whose rocket the ring might belong to. Officials said they had collected pieces from the impact site for further analysis to determine its origins.

Were said that once they determine the owner, the space agency will use the "existing legal mechanisms under international law" to hold the person or organization accountable.

Space debris is usually designed to either burn up in Earth's atmosphere before reaching the ground or land in unpopulated areas, like the ocean. This doesn't always happen, though.

For example, in May 2024, a piece of SpaceX debris as large as a car hood crash-landed on a trail at a mountaintop resort just outside Asheville, North Carolina.

If it had landed on a person hiking the trail that day, it would have certainly killed them, Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and leading space debris expert, told Business Insider in July.

To date, no one has died from space debris raining from the skies. Perhaps the closest call was in March, when a two-pound piece of debris slightly smaller than a soda can fell from the International Space Station, crashing through a family's roof in Florida. The family is suing NASA over the incident.

Ever since humans started launching objects into space in the late 1950s, there has been a risk that some might fall back to Earth in an unexpected place. As humans launch more objects into space, however, that risk is growing.

Between 2008 and 2017, global space organizations launched an average of 82 orbital rockets a year. That number jumped to an average of about 130 launches a year between 2018 and 2022, according to the US International Trade Commission. In 2024, there were about 250 launches — a new record.

This poses risks on Earth and adds to a long-existing problem in space: space clutter and collisions. There's a lot of trash in space, from dead satellites and astronaut gloves to tiny bits no larger than a grape.

These millions of bits of debris are racing around our planet faster than a bullet. It's gotten so bad that about 1,000 warnings of possible impending collisions are issued daily to satellite operators, physicist Thomas Berger said in a press briefing at December's annual American Geophysical Union meeting.

Berger said a major collision could generate "an unstoppable chain reaction of further collisions, ultimately resulting in a completely filled-up space environment."

If that happens, it could make space unusable.