Home » For people whose homes survived L.A. burn zones, a painful road ahead – Jobsmaa.com

For people whose homes survived L.A. burn zones, a painful road ahead – Jobsmaa.com

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At first glance, Jessica Allen is one of the luckiest. Most of the houses on his street in Pacific Palisades came through the fire intact, while everything around their “little bubble” burned to the ground.

She's as relieved that her home was saved as anyone, but she grieves for her friends who lost everything. And she is deeply conflicted about what comes next.

Late last week, an insurance adjuster had already visited his home and told him not to sign a long-term lease to live anywhere else; She and her family could return home in three to six months, he said.

Considering the state of the neighborhood, the news left Alan gasping in disbelief. “It's an absolute disaster,” he said. “My best friend's house is gone; Her husband's car melted down in the driveway. Even if she can somehow make the air inside her house safer, she thinks she needs a “Hazmat suit” just to walk outside.

“When they start excavating the community, more toxins and more ash will be released,” Allen said, speaking quickly and through a flood of “mixed emotions” as he contemplated a bleak future.

This is the dilemma faced by all the so-called LA County fire survivors It looks like a battlefield. Most want everything they had back: their friends, their children's schools, the stores where people know their names. But they worry about what will happen as months of ash and rubble stretch into years of red tape and reconstruction.

Drone images show miles of charred wreckage along the ocean's surface.

Drone footage of the aftermath of the Palisades fire in Malibu.

(Brian van der Broek/Los Angeles Times)

It's hard to imagine what that would be like, or if it's even worth it.

Dora Millikin doesn't have to imagine. She and her husband own the so-called Lahaina's Wonder House On Maui, a red-roofed craftsman on the ocean is one of the few structures left after a few years. Wind driven fire It tore through the historic city in August 2023, burning everything in its path and killing more than 100 people.

Millikin said watching the L.A. fires on TV from Hawaii was intensely “triggering,” sending her back to the days immediately following her city's destruction. She remembered its smell and the constant stinging sensation in her eyes. She remembers standing in her house two weeks after the fire and “couldn't see anything as far as the eye could see,” she said. “It was nothing but gray and silence.”

A year and a half later, the clean-up around her house has been completed, but almost nothing has been rebuilt. Of the more than 1,500 damaged and destroyed properties, only 168 have been given permission to begin reconstruction. Maui rescues Website. Only three structures have been fully restored.

It took almost six months for her home to have electricity and running water again.

“Maui County is overburdened. There are too few people to handle so many requests,” Millikin said.

And then there are constant fights about how to proceed. Because her home is on the water, she is in a “special management area” with more restrictions. There is debate about how much, or not, to restore the property given concerns about climate change and sea level rise.

It drags things out and turns seemingly simple decisions into lengthy negotiations. “It was hard to please every group and every individual,” Millikin said with a sigh.

The second phase of recovery — when things are cleaned up and the neighborhood becomes one giant, noisy building site — is still somewhere down the road.

Instead, gray gravel has been dumped on the ground where homes and businesses stood to quell the hazardous dust. Nestled between the lush West Maui Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, the once charming and thriving tourist paradise looks like an abandoned parking lot in recent drone footage.

Millikin expects things to move quickly in urban Los Angeles, but warns that it will seem like forever to people trying to make a living through it. They should be prepared for all the normal human emotions, “stages of grief,” he said. Denial, shock and anger come in waves.

Does she have any advice for new “survivors” in LA?

“I want people to feel good about themselves. It sounds kind of weird, but, you know, let yourself be a little slack,” Millikin said. “If you need help, definitely reach for it.”

A woman in black sweats stands on a breezy beach near an upscale white hotel.

Alexandra Clark and her family have evacuated their Pacific Palisades home and are staying at a hotel in Santa Monica. Their house survived while their neighbors burned down.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Alexandra Clark, who has lived most of her life about a mile from her Palisades Highlands home, has been reaching out for help since the day the fire tore through her street. It burned two of the neighboring houses to their foundations, but hers suffered little damage.

In an interview last week, Clark sounded strong and confident that the community he wants will stay together. Seventy percent of people in her “survivors” group chat felt the same way, she said.

A day later, outside the Santa Monica hotel where she stayed with her husband, four children and pets, she wasn't sure.

Threats of wildfires had already forced her family to evacuate, so they had a plan and carefully packed the car: cell phones, computers, jewelry, children's clothes and children's books, and her parents' cherished letters.

They made it to the safety of a friend's house in Westwood, cuddled and fed inside, while someone outside broke into the car and stole everything they had packed for safety.

“I'm glad I offered such a carefully curated collection for them to take,” Clarke said with a weary smile.

One of the computers had a tracking device, so before long it looked right in an Inglewood laundry room. The stolen credit card activity revealed 10 Chanel bags, three Valentino bags and a pair of socks (uniquely) – an epic online shopping spree in progress.

Amidst all the other crises, Clark called the Los Angeles Police Department to try and do something about it, to no avail.

“They've got a lot going on and they've done an amazing job, but … still,” he said.

As he spoke, on the coastal path near the Santa Monica Pier, Clark, 43, was as fit and efficient as any of the runners and cyclists. But the list of logistical hurdles she had to navigate again after our interview was daunting.

She and her husband tried to extend their hotel stay because finding a rental was impossible. Landlords began asking for two-year leases, and despite warnings from state officials against price hikes, “everything was four times what it was two weeks ago.”

Then the question arose whether the house would be livable when repaired. The damage from the outside didn't look too bad, but did the smoke contaminate the interior? And how long before they have electricity and water?

She smiled, tight-lipped, for the camera, but the fatigue was evident in her eyes. That's when the doubt came.

“For upright people, there are no schools, no market,” he said of the place where he had spent his entire life. “Not really a city anymore.”

For Clark and the thousands of others in his shoes, the waves of exhaustion and hopelessness will continue for a very long time. But there will be high points.

On Tuesday, she texted triumphantly: “They arrested him!”

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