Tag: eaton fire

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 #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.

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.