Tag: army corps of engineers

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.

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 #9: Debris Removal for Dummies

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 subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

I’m not an engineer or homebuilder, but I know that the first thing you need to do to physically build a new house is clear away what’s on the land where you want to put the house. Clearing away empty desert or weeds on a vacant tract of suburban land is fairly easy. Clearing away the charred and toxic debris left behind by thousands of burned houses in a densely packed neighborhood is a bit different. And more time-consuming. And more expensive.

As the shock of thousands of Californians losing their homes starts to wear off, our thoughts turn to rebuilding. But we can’t even start the process of building new homes until we clear away the gloppy ash of our old ones. Debris removal has been one of the biggest drivers of conversation and confusion among fire victims, and I’m going to write a little bit about my current understanding of what is supposed to happen and when it supposedly will be done.

Partially, I want to give folks a window into the exacting level of detail and decision making that goes into clearing away the remains of a once-treasured home. And partially I just want to make sure that I understand it myself. Because once it’s done, it’s done. So bear with me.

Debris removal for the Eaton and Palisades Fires is divided into two phases. Phase One is fairly easy. The EPA, working under the auspices of FEMA, sends teams out to each property to find and remove any material that’s obviously toxic. So that’s lithium ion batteries from electric and hybrid cars, half-melted electronics, potentially toxic paint, propane, asbestos, solvents, cleaning fluid, pesticides, or hazardous chemicals. This is free, paid for by our tax dollars as one of those Things Government Just Does. And you can’t opt-out, because you don’t have the right to endanger your neighbors.

Once Phase One is completed on a cluster of properties, Phase Two begins. This is more complicated. The actual debris of the house has to be cleared. This includes the ash, any standing walls or structures, and any other remains. So those beautiful brick chimneys that represent the only surviving parts of hundreds of houses? The staircases that lead to nowhere? The half-destroyed walls that once held families and celebrations and milestones? The Army Corps of Engineers bulldozes them and takes them away.

But you have to opt-in by filling out a form called ROE – Right of Entry. And it’s free – except not really, because the Corps is contracting with LA County, and LA County will bill your insurance, which will likely just send you the money to pay for it until you hit the limit of what your insurance pays for. Naturally, each insurance company is a little different, and the form asks you multiple questions that don’t have easy answers. Should you have your foundation taken out? Some people say yes, others say no. I said yes, because I don’t especially want to build a new house on the quite likely warped foundation from the last one. But do I really know if that’s the right call? What about your trees? Your driveway? Do you get to be there for it? We’re all finding out in real time.

Once you’ve filled out the form, you wait for the county to prove you are the property owner – theoretically this prevents apartment dwellers whose units burned down from approving the removal of the entire building. Then you wait for the removal to be approved. Once that’s done, the Corps calls you within a few days of the removal, and on the designated day, they show up with their equipment, wet down the ash so it doesn’t blow away, and get rid of everything, down to six inches of topsoil. Just like that, your debris is a hole in the ground. Like it was never there at all. And you can watch it if you want.

If you opt out by not filling out an ROE, you have to hire licensed contractors and get the proper permits and approval from the county to do it yourself. This is a considerably more time-consuming process than just filling out a form, and if the debris removal isn’t done correctly, you have to pay to have it done again. It seems to me like just opting in and waiting for the Corps to call you. But maybe some folks don’t want “the government” to have “right of entry” on their “property.” I wouldn’t know, I like it when government does things my taxes pay for.

For the first few weeks, the process of debris removal was just whispered about, with much of the information conflicting. Was it LA County doing it? The state? The feds? The Army Corps of Engineers? People were hearing different things because it’s kind of all of those. It’s a big job. With the “who” and “how much” settled, the conversation shifted to “when will it be done?”

And again, it’s complicated. Phase One and Two will be running concurrently, with some parts of the burn area onto Phase Two while others are still on Phase One. Hundreds of crews will be working, and they’re going to try to work neighborhood by neighborhood, so they don’t have to drive all over the place. Each house likely will take somewhere between two and ten days, and the entire process will be done in about a year, with some outliers taking another few months. So if you get lucky, you could be in construction on a new house by the fall of 2025. But it will take as long as it takes to do it safely,

As convoluted as the process sounds, it’s really not very demanding. And I take some comfort in the fact that there’s a delineated process, the people doing this know how to do it, and they’ve done it before.

What’s less comforting is that while FEMA, the EPA, and the Army Corps of Engineers are gearing up for a MASSIVE debris removal and abatement project; the federal government is being gutted and “efficiencied” by President Trump, Elon Musk, and their army of weirdos.

Trump has already talked about eliminating FEMA, his pick to run the EPA wants to gut it, and the president continued his ludicrous beef with California by ordering the Corps to open two dams that are nowhere near LA to “give LA” the water it needs to fight the fires that are already out. So none of that is great for our debris removal prospects. To say nothing of the president’s threats to impose massive tariffs on Canadian lumber and mass deportations, which would all drive up the already absurd cost of building a new home in the Los Angeles area.

It’s impossible to tell whether Trump’s threats and Musk’s unhinged self-appointed jihad to cut government spending to ribbons will impact the cleanup and rebuilding in LA, but it’s hard to think it won’t. Will it be slowed down? Will resources and removal be auctioned off to the highest bidder? Will FEMA and the EPA be replaced by homeowners rolling up their sleeves and taking a big huff of toxic air?

Nobody here needs this right now. Nobody needs more uncertainty and doubt piled on top of the uncertainty and doubt we’re already feeling. Yes, there’s a process for debris removal, but none of us have gone through it before, and nobody has done it at this scale. So while we have answers to some of our questions, we have just as many questions left to answer. Until then, we’ll wait for our phone calls and hope the bulldozers come quickly and efficiently so we can start our new lives.

It’s not ideal, but it’s our life now.