Eaton Fire #15: I Don’t Live Here Anymore

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!

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.

Everything is Just QAnon Now

Mike Rothschild2 Comments

I’m still rebuilding from the Eaton Fire and will be documenting that process, but I want to start wading back into the kind of writing I was doing before the fire. Please support this work through a subscription on Patreon, where you can give me the resources to keep diving into conspiracy theories and nonsense for as little as $5 per month. Thank you

One of the most unbelievable aspects of the QAnon conspiracy theory isn’t that military intelligence officials would leak clues to an upcoming purge of the deep state, but that they’d use imageboards like 8chan to do it. Leaks have happened in many different guises, often with great secrecy. But what highly-ranked intelligence officer would leak on a board full of racist memes and child sexual abuse material, for an audience of angry losers who don’t have the power to do anything about whatever the deep state is doing?

After the “Signalgate” fiasco, where the highest-ranking officials in US intelligence and diplomacy accidentally invited a journalist into their Signal chat room where they discussed classified plans to attack Houthi targets in Yemen, and then gloated about their outcome, I might need to rethink exactly how stupid and sloppy our military leaders can get.

It’s highly doubtful there will be any consequences from the Signal fiasco, and Republican officials are furiously spinning it as both fake and real but not that bad and actually the fault of various Democrats and deep state aligned staffers. The various excuses and justifications are becoming more ridiculous and incoherent by the hour, but that’s not the point. They’re not meant to be believable, only to use smoke and noise to obscure the real point: that rather than simply admit they made a mistake and move on, the Trump administration is trying to dazzle us with nonsensical deflections, conspiracy theories, and reversals.

I see it as one more way QAnon and its tenets are becoming the bedrock of conservative politics and policy-making. Not QAnon itself, but the psychological techniques it uses to keep its believers on the hook for ever-more grandiose promises, and to avoid thinking for themselves. In movements like QAnon, making excuses and coming up with vast conspiracies to explain things that should be obvious are how you keep people from walking away – and from any sort of self-examination.

So too in Signalgate are the constant deflections and angry accusations a way to keep Republicans from having to admit just how sloppy their leaders were, and how posting extremely sensitive information in a channel where one of the people shouldn’t have been there could have ended in disaster.

QAnon worked because it provided an excuse for why Trump wasn’t accomplishing what he’d promised he’d do in his first term. It was because the deep state and its Satanic leaders were working in secret against him. Q was a way to push back against them, to fight a secret war revealed in cryptic riddles that proved Trump was way ahead of them, defeating them at every turn, and would soon go public with a great purge of the dark forces trying to stop America.

Q made vast promises, then when those promises didn’t come true, Q always had an excuse for why the failure was actually necessary for greater success down the road. Q even had a way to justify the failures – that “disinformation was necessary” at times. Essentially, some of what Q said was knowingly false – but there had to be traps built in to snare the deep state and keep them off balance. If some Q acolytes believed the lies, it was just necessary collateral damage.

Anxious to keep their movement from being thought of as a cult, Q promoters would sarcastically claim that QAnon was “the only cult that teaches you to think for yourself.” Never mind how cultish that statement is, it’s not actually true. Q believers were told over and over that Trump and Q had everything under control, to “trust the plan,” that everything would turn out all right, and to simply blast away their doubts and questions by doing more research.

In trying to spin their dangerous failure as everything from an honest mistake that can easily be fixed to a coordinated hit job by the Democrats and their media mouthpieces to actually Signal’s fault; Republicans are asking us to trust the plan – and to trust that they have a plan. Maybe this wasn’t intentional, but it’s not an indication that Trump’s most senior appointees are incompetent and out of their depth. It actually means they’re doing their jobs well, and the fact that the attack went off without a hitch is proof that they’re in control. Just believe them, they’ve done nothing wrong, and it’s their critics that are doing it wrong by daring to criticize them. Maybe it was even a plot by journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to get classified information (which they totally didn’t have in the chat!!!) and use it against good patriots.

Leaking classified information and making all sorts of excuses about why their failures are actually successes? The details might vary, but that’s basically QAnon.

And it’s not even the only way the administration is essentially becoming the QAnon presidency. Their economic plan is entirely based on a little bit of short term pain that will be followed by long-term greatness. Trump’s entire MO in running for president was to make grandiose promises about all of the things he was going to immediately do to help the American people. Remember how grocery prices were going to plummet on day one? Or how he’d cut your electrical bill and gas prices in half? Or how he’d end the war in Ukraine the day after the election? Or how he’d eliminated taxes on tips and overtime as soon as he got in office?

Obviously, none of that has happened. In response, Trump officials have pushed their various deadlines and target dates further and further into the future. These things are still going to happen, it’s just going to take a little longer because of all the ways Democrats are obstructing him, or because the stock market actually has to go down before it skyrockets.

For most people, these absurd justifications and excuses are just proof they were never going to do any of this. But for believers, it’s all part of the plan. Things have to get bad before they get good – never mind all the times Trump has claimed Biden destroyed the country. This is just what needs to happen, and if you walk away now, you’ll miss out on the rewards. Again, this is exactly how QAnon works.

So we head for another day of Trump officials spinning, lashing out, making excuses, lying to the press, and pretending none of this matters, all to make sure their voters don’t realize just how badly they’ve screwed up. We have a plan, they’re screaming. Why don’t you trust it??

Given their reliance on prophetic conspiracy nonsense to keep their base in line, this is not a surprise.

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.