One year into an uneven recovery, L.A.’s fire survivors mark a somber milestone

LOS ANGELES, Calif.– It’s a somber day across the Los Angeles basin, where one year ago wind-driven wildfires swept into neighborhoods and leveled entire communities in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, killed 31 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures.

For Kelly and Andrew King, who lost everything when their Altadena home burned in the Eaton Fire, the past year has been a roller coaster of emotions as they navigated the delays and uncertainties of recovery.

The couple decided to move forward with rebuilding their house and recently poured the concrete for a new garage, starting on construction despite not knowing whether it will be covered by their insurance pay-out.

“It keeps me up at night,” admits Andrew King. “Because I don’t know if I’ve made a financial decision that’s gonna ruin us, or are we just going to be optimistic and hope that it will work out?”

Some neighbors who can’t afford to rebuild, or don’t want the stress, have listed their lots for sale. Although the block is now clear of fire debris, about two-thirds of the lots are still empty one year later.

“It’s going to be uneven, that’s the thing,” said Kelly King, who finds hope in every new port-a-potty that pops up, foretelling the arrival of a construction crew.

“Some folks are very far along, some are within months of moving back in. And some haven’t even figured out what their insurance might cover,” she said.

Uneven recovery is all too familiar in this era of urban wildfires, and Los Angeles finds itself in a similar position to other places that have recently suffered massive blazes: Paradise, California in 2018, Boulder County, Colorado in 2021, and Lahaina on Maui in 2023. As in the aftermath of those deadly fires, rebuilding efforts in L.A. seem to ping-pong between in-progress and in-limbo, to the frustration of residents.

Right after the Eaton and Palisades Fires, county and city leaders promised a fast, efficient and safe recovery, but fewer than a thousand actual buildings are under construction one year later.

The scale of the fires, which burned across a patchwork of jurisdictions, complicated rebuilding efforts as survivors had to navigate different city and county agency regulations. Some survivors also say there’s been an inadequate response by a FEMA gutted by the Trump Administration’s funding and staffing cuts, and that they’re losing patience as the one-year mark is passing.

“Everyone is focusing on how long it is taking the county or the cities to turn around applications,” said L.A. County’s planning director Amy Bodek, who noted that the county streamlined permitting and waived many fees. Delays, she says, come less from government red tape than from insurance purgatory.

“If you’re waiting on an insurance payment to make the payment to your architect you’re not going to have a permit in review yet,” said Bodek.

Disaster recovery experts like Julia Stein say it doesn’t have to be this way. Stein leads a team at UCLA studying reforms for L.A. County’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Climate Action and Fire Safe Recovery.

The commission’s latest report called for the creation of a single government authority in charge of rebuilding, to be accountable when things go wrong, but Stein says it would also ensure recovery is fair and even. An effort to set that up stalled in the California legislature last year, but there’s a growing pressure to revive something like it.

“In Los Angeles what we’re seeing is that there’s just a real diffusion of the response,” Stein said. “When you’ve got a recovery that’s, you know, each property owner kinda going it alone and trying to figure out their own rebuild, you lose an opportunity to make the whole neighborhood safe.”

In the Pacific Palisades, activists like Maryam Zar are taking matters into their own hands, forming citizen groups like Palisades Community Coalition to give residents a greater say in the reconstruction of their neighborhoods.

“If we don’t strategize this recovery, what we’re going to end up having is only people who can afford to buy land and build a big house,” said Zar. “We need to rebuild and we need a plan to rebuild swiftly and quickly. But we also need to build back better and be more resilient next time a fire rolls through because we are essentially still in a high-fire severity zone, there will be another fire.”

It’s a concern echoed by Palisades Fire survivor Leo Madnick, whose elderly neighbor was one of the Palisades Fire’s 12 fatalities. Madnick lost his home of 35 years, and hopes to get his building permit within the next month.

“You know, now that the Palisades is basically starting over you can look up and down the street and if ever there was a time to change the infrastructure and build for like the next 100 years, now’s the time,” he said.

But getting at a typical tension during fire recoveries, Madnick views with frustration at the newly erected temporary power lines lining his street toward the ocean. You need power back quickly to rebuild and buying the lines underground where they’re not flammable takes time.

“They want to build first and infrastructure later and it should be infrastructure first and build later,” he says.

Madnick hoped the one year anniversary will renew pressure on local leaders to create a cohesive recovery plan. Otherwise, he worried, survivors could just be setting themselves up for another disaster.