Eaton Fire #14: Ash, Toxicity, and the Illusion of Safety

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

I’m an independent journalist with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work telling the story of the Eaton Fire and its aftermath, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

Nobody knows who first coined the term “safety is an illusion,” though there are a number of internet memes attributing it to various people. It’s also one of those things that people don’t actually want to believe is true. We want to be safe, and we do everything we can to put ourselves and our families into situations that maximize safety. If safety is an illusion, then we’re wasting our effort and should be prepared for the worst thing to happen at any time.

Obviously, losing your home in a fast-moving wildfire featuring embers blown like missiles at 90 miles per hour is pretty good proof that safety is an illusion. We believed our house was south enough of the fire danger line in Altadena to be safe – and that was pretty clearly an illusion.

But the illusion of safety extends well past the fire itself and into the cleanup and recovery.

Remember the first days of COVID lockdown, when nobody knew what was safe or not? We weren’t sure whether we had to wipe our groceries down, if masks were necessary or useful, and how transmittable the disease was. Nobody knew anything, and it was madness. Cleanup after the Eaton Fire is like that. We don’t know how safe the soil is, how breathable the air is, what remediation efforts will work and won’t work, and how much of the toxic crap in the air we can take in before it starts to be detrimental to our health.

And it’s madness.

Right now, there’s a remediation company working across the street from our temporary housing. A guy in a white hazmat suit is power washing the roof, trying to get what’s likely toxic ash from the fire off it. That’s great – except does that work? If it does make life in the house safer, was it not safe before? What actually happens to the particles of ash that are sprayed off the roof? Do they go on someone else’s roof?

In the early days of cleanup, the LA County Public Health department issued “a Public Health Advisory for individuals residing within 250 yards of a burned structure or parcel within or near the Palisades and Eaton burn areas.”

Residents in these areas may face an increased risk of exposure to hazardous substances from ash, soot, and fire debris before the completion of Phase 1 (hazardous materials removal) and Phase 2 (fire debris removal). Exposure to these materials may lead to physical health symptoms (American Chemical Society, EST Air, 2025, 2, 13-23) and may pose long-term health impacts.

Okay, that’s great. Except why 250 yards? Why not 200 or 300? According to the Altadena Town Council, “The 250-yard perimeter determined for the Eaton Fire was initially based on prior wildfire contamination studies and CalFire mapping, which factored in historical data and the likely settling of fire ash and toxins.” The Eaton Fire had a much smaller footprint than major wildfires like the Camp Fire of 2018, and destroyed fewer structures than that blaze – but Eaton burned one tenth of the acreage, but half of the number of homes. This means the land burned by the Eaton Fire was much more densely packed, not to mention the ash from the burned homes was thrown for miles in every direction by the high winds.

So the 250 yard perimeter sounds a lot like an illusion of safety. A well-intentioned one, for sure. But guesswork. What are we supposed to actually do about this advisory, given that many of us are actively going to our properties, driving in the burn zones, or just live near them? Plenty of surviving homes in Altadena are near burned out structures, but not right next to them. Are they safe? Can they be remediated? There’s just no long-term data about what happens to people when they are regularly exposed to a mix of burned plastic, wood, copper, lead, PVC, lithium-ion batteries, insulation, etc.

As far as outside the burn zone, there’s already evidence from past fires that 250 yards isn’t enough to protect people from exposure to toxic debris, and that physical effects can still be felt far downwind, and that homes can act like sponges for this material, even after they’ve been cleaned. A study of homes after the Marshall Fire in Colorado in 2021 found that hazardous chemicals lingered in homes for weeks after the blaze, and lingered longer than expected.

And there’s some concern that the particles of toxic ash are so fine that they can’t effectively be filtered out by N95 masks. A particularly troubling New York Times article said researchers found that chemical contamination was fairly low outside the burn zone, but referred to residents in the burn zone coming home to a “toxic soup” of chemicals and compounds when they return. So that’s not great.

For folks rebuilding in the burn zone, safe debris removal is paramount, and the Army Corps is doing a good job so far of safely taking out burned debris, wrapping it in plastic, disposing of it, and wetting the ground down while the removal is happening. But is this a guarantee of safety? How can it be?

We’re facing innumerable questions that nobody has an answer to, and where there might not be one for years. The Army Corps is removing six inches of topsoil underneath the foundations of burned homes, but is that a safe enough amount? We don’t know, and unfortunately, the Army Corps isn’t doing soil testing – because FEMA stopped authorizing post-fire soil testing after the Camp Fire, due to it being “tedious and inefficient.” The EPA isn’t doing it either, believing that removing six inches of topsoil is enough to abate any danger.

So is the land we want to build houses on safe? Is the soil where we want to grow trees safe? Will our bedrooms and playgrounds and schools be safe? What about the water pipes that survived the fires? Are the sewer pipes safe? Will the debris removal kick up more ash that lands in places that aren’t easily accessible? The answers are basically between probably and maybe.

To find an instructive example for how safe prolonged exposure to toxic dust and debris is in the immediate area outside a burn zone is or isn’t, I looked not at another wildfire, but at 9/11. The toll that the toxic slop of the destroyed World Trade Center took on first responders is horrific, but the attacks sent toxic ash and dust miles in every direction, covering Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn as well.

Even a year after the attack, there was limited data on what the exposure would do to the hundreds of thousands of people who lived and worked in those areas, many of whom were breathing at least trace amounts of compounds that had never even existed before they were created in the heat and intensity of the explosions. After a few years, more New Yorkers who lived and worked in the area near the WTC were coming forward with signs of respiratory illness – to the point where Congress finally authorized a compensation fund for health effects due to the attacks, though it took years of political wrangling and pointless arguing.

As of 2024, there are about 124,000 people registered for the WTC Health Program, but only about a third are residents of Lower Manhattan or the surrounding area. The rest are first responders, volunteers who went to the site, or workers from the immediate area around the WTC complex. About 400,000 people likely were exposed to the toxic aftermath of the collapses, and many did suffer from headaches, congestion, COPD, and long-term illnesses. But how much of that is directly from the debris, and how much of it is from just living in New York City? What would have happened anyway? Nobody really knows. And cancer can take decades to develop, meaning we likely still don’t know the full toll of the ash and dust of 9/11.

Certainly, the Eaton Fire didn’t arrive with the sudden violence of the Towers collapsing – there weren’t tens of thousands of workers covered in toxic debris and jet fuel residue. But the large scale dispersal of debris is a decent enough analogue, particularly in a situation when there are so many unknowns at work. So while we fret over the choices we make as we rebuild homes, we should also know that what we’re getting into doesn’t have a lot of precedent in American history, and many of the questions we have won’t be answered for years, if they’re ever answered in our lifetimes.

So yeah, safety is an illusion. Which doesn’t mean we can’t make safer choices and do the best we can to ensure positive outcomes. We can do as much abatement and cleanup as possible, pay out of pocket for testing, hold public officials and agencies accountable, keep vulnerable children away from burn zones as much as possible, and err on the side of caution.

We have to live our lives, and many of us want to rebuild our homes and communities. Nothing is risk-free, and the tradeoff is worth it. But it is a tradeoff – and at some point, that trade might be called in.

Eaton Fire #13: Seeing is Believing

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

I’m an independent journalist with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work telling the story of the Eaton Fire and its aftermath, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

The gapers are easy to spot in the burn zone.

They drive slowly, meandering their way through the blocks of burned out homes having no particular goal or destination in mind. They often slow down even more when they see people sifting through their rubble, or crews doing work. Sometimes they point. Their mouths hang open. You can tell they’re saying some variation on how awful and shocking it is. And when you notice them, rather than give the wave that a resident would give, they turn away and speed up, in some vain hope that you won’t have noticed their gawking at your misery.

It’s easy to look at the people rambling around Altadena and getting a firsthand look at the carnage and see disaster tourists. Certainly, it’s understandable to get pissed off at the folks clogging up traffic and annoying locals so they can tell themselves they understand what’s happened. But as someone who has been noticeably gawked at outside my burned down house, I choose to look at outsiders seeing the burn zone for themselves as doing the right thing in the wrong way. People should see it. They should drive up and look at what’s happened, because that’s truly the only way to internalize it if you haven’t gone through it.

The burn zone as it existed once the fires were out won’t be around much longer. We’re well into Phase Two debris removal, with the Army Corps of Engineers having cleared dozens of lots in around Altadena. The immediately familiar traces of burned homes – chimneys still standing, staircases going nowhere, half-destroyed walls – are being taken away. Even on my street, plots of land are being cleared. The ACoE hopes to be done with debris removal by the end of 2025, but for most property owners, it should happen much sooner.

I’ve also seen firsthand how friends who have seen the disaster area finally understand what we’ve gone through. Seeing it with your own eyes changes your view of the fire. It becomes less something that happened to someone else and more something that could happen to anyone, even you. Maybe you’ve seen it on TV, or spoken to a friend who lost their home. But once you’ve actually been there and witness the scope of the devastation, your understanding of the disaster will change.

This is especially true for Angelenos who haven’t made their way north and east to see what’s left of Altadena. LA is a big city and most of it is just fine – meaning it’s easy to compartmentalize the fires as a disaster that happened in a different neighborhood, a different part of town. But while LA didn’t burn down, the town has been in a haze for months. Businesses have closed, work in the entertainment industry is crawling, and there is a huge diaspora of refugees from the fires moving into new areas that they don’t know, and where they don’t know anyone. The stereotype of LA is a bunch of neighborhoods with no center, where nobody talks to anyone else. But that hasn’t been our experience losing our home – the city has come out for us. It should take the final step and literally come out for us.

With cleanup progressing, the chances to see the burn zone as it was are disappearing. Altadena will look very different in just a few short months, and most of the worst of the damage will be gone. So I urge people either in LA who haven’t, or those who will be here soon, to come up to Altadena and see the burn zone while you can.

Do it respectfully, do it in a way that doesn’t disturb rebuilding or recovery, and doesn’t turn victims into museum exhibits. But if you can, see just a small part of what we’ve seen. Experience what we’ve gone through to the extent that you can. And I promise you will understand it in a way that you couldn’t have before.

(Note that this doesn’t apply to the Palisades, much of which is still restricted to residents who need access passes to get in.)

It’s not an easy sight. I’ve heard visiting burn areas, whether in forests or cities, described as traumatic, shocking, and even dystopian. Of course, maybe it shouldn’t be easy. Losing our home has been traumatic, shocking, and dystopian. The town looks like it was bombed from the air, there are still burned out cars and scattered ephemera from decades of living in these homes. It’s ugly and brutal, jarring and traumatic. But it’s our lives. These were our homes, our businesses, our streets. If we’re all in this together, then we should at least all know what we’re in.

So how do you do this? If you have a friend or a connection in Altadena, talk to them and see if they’ll escort you on a drive to their property and around their property. Not everyone will be comfortable with it, but it’s a good place to start. And if you aren’t directly connected to the area, I’d recommend at least coming up to drive the main streets in Altadena. Lake Avenue, Lincoln Avenue, and Altadena Drive are all major thoroughfares with both homes and businesses on them. Nobody would think twice about someone using them to get a sense of the scope of the devastation – and there’s only a certain amount of slowing down you can do.

I wouldn’t recommend just driving through more residential areas, since these are likely to be extremely busy with workers and clearing. If you do have someone to go visit or take you on a tour, drive the way you normally do. Don’t slow down and point, definitely don’t take pictures of houses of people you don’t know, and definitely definitely do not get out and just start talking to people. None of us want or need to be asked random questions by people from the rest of the city.

When you go, please make sure you support local businesses. Even shops and restaurants that survived and aren’t in the direct burn zone likely lost weeks of business. Some are only just now opening. So make sure you spend money, tip well, and don’t ask a bunch of prying questions.

There might be fellow fire survivors who disagree with this. It’s not unreasonable to think that anyone in Altadena who doesn’t need to be here is just someone clogging up the roads, and driving through a burn zone when you don’t need to is the worst type of feel-good tourism. I get it. But I also don’t want the fire to be swept into the distant past once the ruins are cleared and the new homes are going up. I want people to remember what we went through. And for the Eaton Fire, seeing isn’t just believing, it’s remembering.

Eaton Fire #12: Despicable Vulture Scumbags

Mike Rothschild2 Comments

I’m an independent journalist with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work telling the story of the Eaton Fire and its aftermath, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

One of the reasons I started writing about conspiracy theories and fringe beliefs was that they exploited people at their worst times in the most craven ways. While human beings have been defrauding other human beings since the dawn of commerce; it’s gotten much more pervasive in the internet era. We are deluged with phony email scams, dodgy investments, medical products that don’t work backed by science that also doesn’t work, phishing and hacking attempts, and more. Our email inboxes are full of them, our phones ring off the hook with them, and they even leave their stupid ads on our mailboxes and car windows.

It made me angry then, and it makes me furious now. In my position at the center of a disaster, I’m seeing all the ways Eaton Fire survivors are being robbed, ripped off, exploited, and defrauded. We are the targets of every scheme and scam under the sun, and it’s time to call out the people doing this for what they are: despicable vulture scumbags, to borrow a phrase from my friend and Skeptoid podcaster Brian Dunning used about people selling pseudoscientific hardware to ALS sufferers.

Going through all of the ways these scumbags are trying to screw fire victims would take far too long and involve too much depravity for any one post. But the scammers started as the fires were still burning, and continue to find new ways to hound and exploit people dealing with the biggest disaster most will ever face. They know we have insurance money and little bandwidth or energy. And they think we’re easy targets.

Almost right away, the shady contractors came out. Even though rebuilding hasn’t really started yet, unlicensed contractors are seemingly everywhere, offering cut-rate prices to do work that costs much more – and probably getting ready to skip town once they’ve been paid with hard-won insurance money. Likewise, private debris removal companies promise to do the job faster than the Army Corps of Engineers, but instead do it unsafely and with half-full trucks designed to bloat out costs. When looking at contractors or debris removal, vet, vet, and vet some more. Ask for license numbers, references, and other information that will prove their worth. If they won’t give it, they don’t have it.

We’ve seen it before – the massive amount of fraud related to COVID relief and PPP loans, the bribes and schemes that infected the recovery from past fires, people claiming properties were destroyed when they weren’t, and identity theft related to FEMA grants and other government payments. Friends of ours had to deal with this exact issue, trying to apply for FEMA grants only to find out that the previous owner of their house had already done it. It’s despicable, and you want to ask yourself “who does this,” except a lot of people do. Even the idea of fraud can delay responses and waste time – we’re waiting on a second home inspection with FEMA because we suspected the first contractor to call us was fake, except they weren’t. We think?

If you think ripping off the government is bad (and it is), what about ripping off people donating to fire victims? Fake GoFundMe pages, often set up to look identical to already existing GFM drives, proliferated in the days after the fire. Some people found fake versions of themselves on Instagram promoting pages that would never send them a dime. Phishing scams targeted other GoFundMe pages, nearly wiping out tens of thousands of dollars in donations with a single phone call. Imagine your exhaustion and grief days after losing everything – you can’t tell up from down, and have so many calls to make and people asking you for information that you can’t discern the good from the bad. It’s sick, but it’s also the way predators work – pick out the weakest and slowest gazelle in the herd and wait for it to fall behind.

The glut of people needing new homes and the insanely tight housing market in LA has also opened the door for rental scams, with fake listings popping up on websites offering low rents for seemingly nice places, only to not have been placed by the actual rental company, and trying to get you to send them a deposit and the first month’s rent on a house that they don’t manage. Likewise, rental companies and landlords are engaging in old-fashioned price gouging, massively and illegally jacking up rental prices on properties that desperate families have agreed to rent.

And it can happen to you really easily. We were looking for apartments and had a couple of texts with one such company, only to find out from the actual rental company that it was fake. Fortunately, we decided to go look at the property on our own and realized that the number we’d been texting wasn’t the number of the rental company. But it’s very possible we could have gotten scammed – because we’re exhausted and trying to do a million things at once.

Of course, if rental scams and phishing emails are too complicated for you, you can always just steal stuff. Looting exploded in the first days after the fires, with gangs of thieves descending on abandoned homes to pilfer whatever they could. The national guard and local police were deployed to stop it, but in the first few days, many residents who hadn’t gotten evacuation orders or couldn’t leave stayed in their homes specifically as a show of force against looting.

Once the burn area was locked down, looters found other ways to steal, and now that the area is open again, they’ve taking to rummaging around burned homes looking for copper wire or breaking into surviving garages. Our neighbor’s garage was looted, and even our property looks to have been hit, since I found downed electrical wire moved around and stripped bare, along with an abandoned pair of shitty work gloves. I don’t know if they got anything of value, but I hope whoever tried got tetanus.

With little of value left to take, and most surviving homes either boarded up or inaccessible, thieves are getting more brazen in their attempts to rip off fire survivors. Just in the last few days, news broke of yet another fraud that had been going since the beginning: fake tow truck companies towing cars left behind by fire victims, then demanding huge sums of cash to release them. Some companies are going so far as to file liens on cars they’ve towed.

Again, despicable vulture scumbags.

Finally, there are the scams that aren’t directly related to the fire but that still are deeply hurtful and triggering. Few Altadena residents go through a day without getting at least one spam call from someone “in the neighborhood doing repairs” who wants to look at their nonexistent roof or plumbing. It’s likely these are just spammers going through lists, since it’s a waste of time to try to get money to fix a burned down home. But it’s still a pain in the ass and a reminder of what’s been lost.

So much, of course, has been lost. But we don’t have to lose our money along with our homes. I’ve been writing about scams and frauds enough to know some ways to combat them – don’t answer any phone call you don’t recognize, don’t open any email from a stranger with an attachment, and vet everyone you’re potentially working with. Any contractor who won’t give you a license number or references to speak to should immediately be reported, and any federal agency demanding information they don’t need, making you pay for something that your tax dollars cover, or promising you the moon in giveaways is a rip-off. Don’t wire money to strangers, run away from anyone wanting to be paid in crypto or through payment apps, and if something that should be free costs money, avoid it.

And Altadena residents are working together to watch out for each other. Advocates are going through neighborhoods and ripping down unwanted signs from potential scammers. We’ve all gotten very cagey about answering unwanted and unknown calls. We’re working together to vet contractors and helping folks get to places like the disaster recovery centers. And we’re speaking out to the media when we get victimized or find out about new scams.

But we’re still so vulnerable and exhausted. And the scammer will always get through – what could anyone have done to stop looting on the day after the fire? Who has the time or energy to research every single email and call and offer they get? How was I supposed to keep them from stripping the copper wire in my backyard? It’s not like I can take it with me. The bastards know we’re vulnerable and have gone through so much, and they’re ready to pounce at the first sign of an easy target.

The fire may have gone out, but the danger persists. I urge us all, myself included, to stay vigilant, keep our radar on high alert, and when in doubt, block and ignore anything that seems fishy or fake. Tell your friends, go to the authorities, and go to the press. We can beat the vulture scumbags if we work together and let them know we’re on to their bullshit.

Eaton Fire #11: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Mike Rothschild3 Comments

I’m an independent journalist with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work telling the story of the Eaton Fire and its aftermath, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

We all want to believe that if a disaster struck, we’d know what to do both during and afterwards. And we want to believe we’d have the fortitude to stick to it, never waver, and present rock-solid certainty to those struggling with difficult decisions.

But life does not present itself with easy opportunities for “rock-solid certainty” and never wavering. Existence is not an ad for low-risk investment vehicles. Instead, it’s a series of decisions that need to be made with little information and even less certainty. We do the best we can with what we have, try to consider the variables and the unknowns, and then ultimately we roll the bowling ball and hope it knocks down enough pins.

The immediate danger of the Eaton Fire has passed. And the smoke smell and toxic ash seemed to have abated, at least if you’re not directly in the fire zone. But the hard decisions from the fire are only getting started. And they will have repercussions for fire survivors for decades to come.

The most important and far-reaching choice we have to make is to either rebuild a new home once our land is cleared, or sell the land and start over somewhere else. Both choices are fraught with variables, unknowns, hidden traps, opportunities, and risks. Each presents a vision for a certain life that will unfold over the next years and decades – and a different life not lived. Only one road can be taken, and the choice has to be made in deep uncertainty.

Many Altadena residents immediately declared they were rebuilding. For someone who has spent their entire life here, and maybe lived in the house one of their parents grew up in, the choice to stay is easy – even if rebuilding itself is not.

Likewise, some people will sell their land at the first chance they get. At least some plots of land in Altadena have already gone up for sale. The first land sale sparked a flurry of posts on local social media and text chains – a lot that was listed for $450,000 and went for well over that after getting dozens of offers. It was owned by an investor who wasn’t interested in trying to rebuild, and got out fast – likely leaving a lot of money on the table by not waiting for debris removal.

But it’s not that easy for most of us.

Each choice has legitimate merits. Staying and rebuilding means that you get a say in your house’s design and building. It means sticking with your community, revitalizing your town, being there for your neighbors. It means ensuring that charming neighborhoods and modest streets aren’t taken over by glass boxes and nightmare condos. And it means that when this is all over, you’ll have stuck it out and seen the process through to the end. You’ll own a new home in one of the most coveted locales in America.

Leaving, of course, means being in a house sooner. And given the absurd expense of building and the cost of real estate in the Los Angeles area, it probably entails a bigger house on more land. It means getting out of whatever temporary arrangement you’ve cobbled together. You might not be able to fight the glass boxes and nightmare condos anyway, and if you leave, you don’t have to try. And it might mean walking away with a big pile of cash to go with your new house, depending on your insurance payout and land sale price.

Each choice begs considering the other one. Rebuilding will be a time-consuming and expensive process, one that might not be done for two to three years. Hiring an architect is expensive, and with a limited supply of qualified architects and designers, they’ll be able to charge top dollar for their services. Building a house from the ground up based on a bespoke design is hugely money-intensive, particularly in Los Angeles. It will be even more outrageous given the demand for materials and crews that 15,000 homes will require, between Altadena and the Palisades. The numbers I’m hearing are outrageous – anywhere between $600 and $1,000 per square foot. All told, if Trump’s tariffs jack up prices on materials, demand sends labor costs skyrocketing, and permitting drags on, you could be looking at about $1.5 million to built a “modest” 1,500 square foot house. There’s a reason why most folks I’ve talked to feel everyone in either fire zone is underinsured. We probably are.

And yet…the choice to take the money and run is fraught as well. For one, it feels like a betrayal of the community we love so much and the neighbors we’ve gotten to know so well. There are few guarantees of finding something you want in the place you want to go, unless you’re simply willing to roll the dice and move anywhere you can find a house – which is a choice nobody with kids is likely to make. People who have started over somewhere else will always be those people who left town when things got rough. And they will be outsiders and strangers in a new place. They will probably have to tell the story of their loss to every person they meet in their new town. And once you leave the L.A. real estate market, getting back in is almost impossible.

The timing is also crucial, and intricate. Selling your land for top dollar means waiting for it to be cleared. But that could take the better part of 2025, and real estate prices will only go up. Housing supply, at least in the L.A. area, isn’t going up to compensate – meaning staying in the LA area will be that much harder. If you wait to make the decision to finally not sell and start building, you might miss out on hiring an architect and getting the permitting going. The longer you wait, the longer it will take. Likewise, you don’t want to rush in and hire the first people you meet with – this is a recipe for regret and scammery.

If you dither on your choice, it might be too late to make the choice you want to go with. But how can anyone help but wait, given the variables and unknowns ahead? What if you start building and can’t afford it? What if you sell and hate where you moved to?

All the choices are right and wrong.

Many people intent on rebuilding are trying to even the odds a little, banding together with neighbors to form collectives to ensure design and construction consistency, and to lower costs. Some architects are proposing the old school catalog model, where you pick a home design from a menu of designs and try to drive down costs through mass production. Fraudulent contractors and shady developers are being named and shamed on Altadena social media. And meetings, webinars, and town halls are a constant in town, as we all share info and buck each other up for the road ahead.

We are taking part in a lot of these efforts, and as of now, rebuilding is our intention. But wavering is part of the process too, and we spend a lot of time wavering. How could we not, given the time and expense involved? Who wants to wait years to build a house to live in? Who wants to spend this much time and money on something they could just buy somewhere else? And the risk of another fire will always be top of mind, meaning there’s the distinct possibility a new house will never feel entirely safe.

I won’t shame anyone for selling and moving somewhere they can start over. Okay, I might shame someone who sells to an obviously ill-intended developer. But honestly, people have to do what’s right for them. The community and neighborhoods matter, but ultimately, nobody is going to have your best interests in mind more than you.

And yet, staying seems right. Why leave if you don’t want to?

Hopefully, we all make the right choices with the right information at the right time. Because we only get one chance to get it right, and there are no re-dos either way. No pressure, right?

Eaton Fire #10: Some New Normals

Mike Rothschild

I’m an independent journalist with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work telling the story of the Eaton Fire and its aftermath, please consider a paid subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

It’s almost starting to become normal.

A month and a few days have passed since the Eaton Fire burned down our house, destroyed our possessions, and gutted our entire neighborhood. And time is doing the thing that time does – putting distance between us and a traumatic event, and making the past recede further into the…you know, past.

Life as a fire refugee is just becoming “life.” For those of us who lost our homes, things are settling into something that, while not anything close to what life was like in the before times, is also quite not the frenetic chaos of the first few weeks.

Certainly, whatever your experience is right now is individualized for you. Some people are still bouncing from living space to living space, others might be settled for a few months or a year, and everyone has a slightly different status to their various applications and insurance questions. But the high-wire adrenaline frenzy of the first days has subsided, and most of us are squarely in the places we’re going to be in for the foreseeable future.

The schools are open and kids are back in them, even if some aren’t in exactly the same ones. We’re sharpening our routines, shaving minutes off new routes, and finding shortcuts. The light in our new bedroom almost looks like the light in our old bedroom, and if you close your eyes it almost feels like home. The sore throat we still get after being in the fire zone too long doesn’t sting as much. Maybe we’re used to it, or maybe the smoke has actually cleared.

The constant rumble of ServPro trucks and utility vehicles and cranes is losing its novelty. The shock of going into the fire zone and seeing the burned out homes and businesses doesn’t hit quite as hard once you’ve been there a few times. We aren’t suddenly remembering as many lost items as we once were, and some of them are starting to be replaced. We’ve almost gotten used to using our current address as our address, as opposed to the address of the ash pile that used to be our forever home.

Even the ash piles themselves aren’t looking quite so forlorn. Power poles are starting to go up, damaged trees are getting cut back, and the EPA is starting to complete Phase One debris removal on a few properties. The work crews are busy, the trees are getting marked, and the ruins are looking a bit less ruined. The bulldozers aren’t warming up, but they’re probably in the same time zone, at least.

The feeling of despair and exhaustion and overwhelm that pervaded Pasadena even a few weeks ago seems to be lightening up. Over the weekend, the shopping areas and restaurants seemed utterly jammed, with people everywhere and little parking to be found. There wasn’t as much glum, and more people simply enjoying meals or shopping or whatever it is people not living in constant state of trauma enjoy.

And this is probably the time when this should be happening for most folks. If you didn’t lose your house, or at least lose access to your house, things have been normal for a while for you. You’ve moved back home (if you evacuated at all), and are going back to your life as it used to be and as it will continue to be. Your normal never really changed, except for a few days when you might be worried. You cleaned up the mess in the fridge, rebooked appointments you canceled, and are just doing your thing. Normal.

Of course, “normal” is just a word people throw around between crises. Fire survivors in LA are still spending virtually every waking moment navigating the overlapping mazes of insurance, rebuilding, mortgage forbearance, architecture and design, government assistance, debris removal, finding new living space, and dealing with financial and logistical hurdles. And we’re doing it while going back to work, sending our kids back to school, and trying to make long-term plans. We’re making the appointments we cancelled while on the run. We’re trying to figure out summer vacations. Disaster recovery has become something we do alongside our regular lives, as opposed to the focus of our existence the way it was in January. Giveaways of stuff are ending, GoFundMe pages are bringing in almost nothing, and you’ve probably told everyone you’re going to tell about the disaster at this point.

So yeah, normal. And also not normal at all.

Living in the overlap between the ordinary and the extraordinary is exhausting. Where do you balance it? How do you take time out of meetings and calls for your job to have meetings and calls with FEMA? How do you plan a business trip or a vacation knowing you might get the call from the Army Corps of Engineers that those bulldozers are finally here? How do you plan for the future when so much of that future depends on factors out of your control and deadlines that haven’t been set?

In some ways, the “going back to work and pretending everything is fine” phase of the Eaton Fire is harder than the early days. Back in mid-January, life was moment to moment. Nothing mattered except finding the next meal, making the next call, dealing with the next call. There was no future except ten minutes from now. The world was ending. It’s why people watch movies about the apocalypse, and not movies about the cleanup and rebuilding after the apocalypse. After the Walking Dead isn’t as alluring as The Walking Dead.

Now we have to live the lives we were living before the disaster, while also building what our lives will be afterwards. The zombies are gone, and someone needs to clean up the corpses and build some new towns. The expectations are different. The pace is slackened. The coffee not overflowing. So it’s normal.

But not really at all. And not for a long time to come.

One of the things I most enjoyed in Altadena was walking our dogs at night. The air was clear, the streets quiet and dark, and you could hear birds singing rather than horns honking. Sometimes you’d even hear the hooting of an owl. The other night I took the dogs out for one last pee, and sure enough, I heard an owl hooting. Maybe it was the same owl, displaced from its home the way we are from ours. Or maybe it’s a different owl. But hooting is hooting, and for just a brief moment on a cloudy night portending rain, things were a bit like they used to be.

So here’s to normal, whatever it looks like and whenever it comes.