LA is Burning: Here We Go Again — Nicole Sallak Anderson

My son the day we first visited our home after the 2020 CZU Lightning Fire

I’ll admit it’s taken me a bit to write this essay. I’ve been putting it off, finding excuses. The fires in LA started over a week ago, and while it’s not happening in my backyard, it definitely has taken me back to that night in August of 2020 when it most certainly was in my backyard.

Wildfire survivors are a community, a club, so to speak. When your home burns and you lose everything in the span of an evening, you know on some level what the people of Altadena and the Pacific Palisades are feeling. It’s not a great club to belong to. Not something to which anyone requests membership. While many of those who lost everything are reeling right now in LA, their journey has only just begun. At first, there are days, maybe weeks, of alternating between the nervous need to simply laugh, almost giddy at the enormity of your loss, and then sob because you miss your cat, or your dad’s Vietnam uniform and you wonder why you failed to save anything of importance.

You have to struggle to find housing while in this case 80,000 others are trying to do the same thing in one of the worst housing markets possible. As of this writing, more than 12,000 structures have burned, however many of those still standing will be unlivable for months, maybe over a year. Partial loss is what that tragedy is called, and if your house is the only one standing, it has most likely suffered tremendous smoke damage as well as infrastructure. You won’t have power, water, sanitation until the city can get to it. You’ll have to meet with the insurance adjuster and their assigned sanitation/smoke experts to go over every item in the house. For several of my friends in Bonny Doon, the process involved throwing every single fabric item out (furniture, beds, bedding, clothes, linens, carpets, etc.), tearing down the walls to the studs and ripping up the floors, then remodeling the entire interior. Then refurnishing, etc. They were out of their homes for over 18 months.

But rebuilding from scratch is worse because most of these folks are not fully insured. Their county is riddled with rules and regulations. There aren’t enough contractors to do this work and because they’ve also lost critical city infrastructure, they’ll be competing for those resources. I imagine Paradise, California, is the best comparison and they’re far from rebuilt. 18,000 structures lost in 2018. Currently, only about 2,000 have been rebuilt, and only 3,200 permits issued, because most people can’t afford to rebuild at current California rates—about $1000/sf.

There are many things being said about this fire, but I’ll focus merely on the PTSD that many of us in the “California wildfire total loss club” are experiencing. Every fire brings it up in various ways, but worse if you have friends or family affected. In our case, we didn’t rebuild a home on our land for many reasons (I chronicle the first year after the event in my memoir Wildfire: Losing Everything, Gaining the World) but instead we put tiny homes on wheels on the land and live there at most 4 months out of the year. The rest of the time we now live in Chicago, far from the fires, safe from 99% of eco-disaster options (even tornadoes have a hard time forming in the city proper, so really it’s just blizzards). My younger son just graduated from college and moved in with us. His plan had been to try and find work here or on the east coast where his girlfriend is from. He had no interest in returning to California.

This is the son that was with me the night we evacuated. The one who left so much behind. The one who stood under ash and flaming leaves as he fled his childhood home. The one who went up there the next day, crossing police lines with his father, to find his home nothing but ash. The one pictured in the photo at the top of this essay. He’d never said much about that night, at least not with me, until this fire.

You see, the industry he and his girlfriend hope to break into is in LA and she recently got a dream job right in Santa Monica. Moved in on January 1. Started her work on January 6. The next day, the town was on fire. She could see the hills burning from her window at work. My son is still here with me in Chicago; we’re moving him to LA at the end of February. As we watched the Eaton fire start as well as another in Hollywood Hills, we saw she was surrounded. Of course, being a girl from Maryland, she was scared. Her parents were scared. Those who haven’t lived it have no idea what’s going on. Yet in some ways, it was worse for my son, because he knows what it means to evacuate and flee from the flames, and his girlfriend was alone, having to figure this out while he was far away.

Needless to say, his PTSD triggered, he was in a bad state. Fortunately, I’ve processed much of my own grief and terror from that night and have been able to hold the space for him, as well as her. In the end, she didn’t have to evacuate and instead is experiencing this fire peripherally. It’s good timing that she actually moved there BEFORE the fires, otherwise she’d have had a hard time finding an apartment. Housing is going to be very bad there for at least five years. Owning a home has just gone from difficult to impossible. I wish they weren’t going to launch their lives in such a place but so be it. So much about life isn’t under our control, and wildfire is a great teacher of this fact of human existence.

If your loved one has recently lost their home in this disaster, whatever you do, try not to say, “at least you’re alive.” It’s not much consolation when in this surreal situation. Instead ask, “what do you need?” If you’re nearby, shelter them, feed them, and help them find a place to live more permanently. Amazon and DoorDash gift certificates are really nice as well. I especially appreciated the DoorDash ones because it reminded me to eat and yet I could do so without effort. My mind was quite scattered in that first few weeks and the act of making a meal was too much most days.

If you’ve lost everything, I’m so, so, so sorry. Don’t be hard on yourself because you’re not going to feel much like yourself for a while. Take a lot of salt baths. Allow others to care for you, especially if you have young children because you have to be their rock, so accept help when offered. The grief never ends, but it does stop being constant. You’ll hear the term, “being made whole” by the planning department, remember that each family’s path to wholeness is different, there is no one size fits all solution. Pray. Don’t make any big plans. Mostly, find a group of other total loss survivors that you can meet with. A dear friend started a women’s group for us just after the fire, she also lost everything, and we met every Sunday at the beach for the first several months. We cried. We shared our confusions about insurance, the planning department, and our pain. It made all the difference. Please find those people. Bond with them because no one else will understand what you’re going through and in a few months, when the fires are out, the rest of LA will forget about you, or at least it will feel that way as the city moves on with its life while you’re still waiting for FEMA to clean up your land.

For those of you whose houses are still standing in a sea of destruction and ash, you too have needs. You need much of the same as the total loss folks and it will take months, maybe over a year to get home, but you will get home. Trust in that, it’s what makes your situation just a little bit more bearable. You will get home. Your neighbors though, they may be gone forever. Only about 30% of us return after a fire. Santa Rosa had more “made whole,” Paradise less. In the fire in which I lost my home, not even 200 of the 900+ homes have been rebuilt. Be patient.

And while I hated to hear this in the aftermath of the fire, the land will recover. The ashen scene above is now a garden, yet it’s not the garden it once was. Before the fire, I lived in a magical, redwood forest. I now live in a high desert. It’s strange, my mind still isn’t quite sure where I am even on land in which I lived for 15 years. Yet it’s beautiful. It truly is.

I pray for everyone and hope that the light of God found in your hearts, your neighbors, and your community will shine brightly upon you.