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It’s an overcast April day in Los Angeles, and I’m staring at the hole in the ground where my house used to be.

It burned down in the Eaton Fire of 2025, one of thousands of homes in Altadena that were destroyed by a fastmoving wildfire that overwhelmed everything around it and sent hundreds of thousands of people fleeing. It once was a house full of love, the accumulation of 40+ years of stuff, of memories. The first birthday parties for the kids. Watching the Dodgers win two World Series titles. Spending months isolated during lockdown having impromptu stuffie tea parties and making convoys with toy cars that are all gone. Holidays and parties and long nights when I felt like nothing was going to work out and great days when it all worked out.

Now it’s a hole in the ground.

If one wanted to be pedantic, it’s not really a hole, per se. It’s too wide and not deep enough – only six inches below the ground, just enough to take away the topsoil rendered toxic by the polluted slurry of ash and dust the fire left behind. It’s more of an indentation, really, roughly in the shape of a foundation where a house used to be. A depression, perhaps. Not a pit, though. Nor a trench. And really, not a hole.

If there’s a technical term is for what I’m staring at, I can’t immediately think of it. It’s hard to think or feel anything.

Mostly what I’m feeling is dizzy. There’s nothing to orient myself to, nothing that serves as a marker for where things start and end other than a few fenceposts. It feels like looking at a distant and blank horizon on the water, disconcerting and unsettling. Or maybe that’s the feeling you get when you’re looking at what used to be your house and now is just…nothing.

We lived here for seven and a half years, planning to spend far longer in it. Then came the Eaton Fire, and whatever we had planned and dreamed would have to be put on hold. That blaze, when paired with the Palisades Fire in Malibu, destroyed 18,000 single family homes and apartment buildings.

18,000 depressions in the ground, full of dirt that once held up homes. 18,000 families who are on a long road of recovery and rebuilding, who are asking themselves every day how this happened and what they do next.

The ground is rough and uneven. Half the driveway is gone, cut up to ensure access to the footers of the house. It’s all beaten up from the massive excavator that the Army Corps of Engineers’ contractors used to scoop up the remains of our lives and drop it into a dump truck.

Watching the excavator a few days earlier as the debris removal began was truly one of the more bizarre moments of life since the fire. It would pick up something that was once meaningful to us – our grill, the bathtub where we bathed the kids when they were little, the dishwasher I loaded the night of the fire – then move it to the center of the debris pile, then rear back and smash it flat, like Godzilla stepping on a tank. Then the flattened piece of debris is scooped up and dropped in a plastic-wrapped flatbed for eventual disposal somewhere far away.

Eventually, it’s all gone except the dirt.

Looking at the ground, hearing the endless convoy of trucks and excavators going up and down our once-quiet street, and seeing the other cleared plots of land, I’m thinking more than anything of what it took to get from where we were three-plus months ago to where we are now. From a burned out ruin to a plot of land, in a neighborhood once full of burned out ruins that will slowly become habitable again.

Certainly, the effort to remove all of this debris was massive, requiring a huge amount of both high-level coordination and work on the ground. Most of the workers we’d spoken to hadn’t had a day off since the beginning of February. Multiple agencies had to put together a plan for how to remove the contents of both Palisades and Altadena in a way that was both safe and didn’t drag on for years. The EPA had to inspect every lot for hazardous and toxic materials. Contractors had to be hired, systems had to be designed, pathways mapped out, dump sites figured out, procedures codified. You need a lot of guys, a lot of equipment, and a lot of material – and you don’t have a lot of time to do it. And someone had to figure out who was paying for it.

It took dozens, maybe hundreds of people working madly to just get to a point where there was a plan to take our debris pile and turn it into the depression in the ground I was looking at. The process still has some creaks to it – the “72 hour call” you get from the Corps to let you know your debris removal is imminent is actually a “couple of days or two weeks” call. Ours came late on a Friday, and we didn’t get an update for another week, when we were told the walkthrough of our property might happen the next day – and it actually happened late the day after that. But it did happen.

Before the debris could be removed, it took heroic efforts by first responders to put the fires out in the first place. A level of courage that most people – i.e., me – will never have or need to summon up. And it will take an equally massive effort by thousands of other builders working for other agencies and companies to ensure that this block of Altadena full of depressions in the ground doesn’t stay looking like this. As much as we’d like our old homes back, we’d also like new ones, thank you very much.

That doesn’t just happen. It takes designers and architects, contractors and subcontractors, specialists and inspectors, countless tons of wood and metal and whatever insulation is made out of. And it will not happen quickly, or cheaply.

Then there’s what happened before the fire itself. The sequence of events that played out not just on the day of the fire, but in the decades and centuries before it. Hundreds of years of a slowly changing climate that’s not slowly changing anymore. A hundred-year-old town built from wood and full of drying out greenery, where homes were passed down through the decades but rarely brought up to code. A megacity built in a desert and stuffed into the crevices between cliffs. A land of milk and honey where the ground shakes and the sky burns. A water system stretched beyond its limits and battered by a 100 year wind storm happening for the second year in a row. Officials out of their depth and early warning systems that didn’t work and electrical lines that should have been off but weren’t.

So many failures. So much accomplishment. No wonder I’m a little dizzy.

I stepped back from the driveway onto the back patio, or what’s left of it. The pavers are loose and cracked, so I quickly stepped back off. Trucks rolled by and I worried that my car was too far from the curb because of the sandbags. The horizon was too long, too unobstructed. After a few minutes at the depression in the ground, I walked back to the car, and drove back from my scraped-up old life to the work-in-progress of my new one.

How did this happen? I thought to myself. What do we do now?

It wasn’t the first time I’d asked myself this. And it wouldn’t be the last.