MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It's an old debate in the world of disaster recovery, and it has been reopened by last month's deadly wildfires in Los Angeles. The question is - should rebuilding be encouraged in places that are known to be at high risk for more disasters? NPR's Kirk Siegler reports on how LA is trying to recover and strike a balance.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: You got [inaudible] in the area?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yeah. Yeah.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: In a grocery store parking lot in Altadena recently, a long line snaked behind a food truck with donated clothes and free lunches. Shirley Dosier happened to be driving by and gratefully pulled over.
SHIRLEY DOSIER: Yeah (laughter). And they're all over the place, which is nice, 'cause people are just completely lost - nothing, you know?
SIEGLER: Dosier, who's retired, now also has nothing. The house she's owned in Altadena since the '70s burned down. She's trying to stay positive, she says, taking it day by day.
DOSIER: Like I say, I'm 79. It's going to take five or six years before you get back up there to make it look right. So I'm just thinking, you know, maybe I take the money and run or - don't know.
SIEGLER: Whether to take the insurance money and run is something a lot of folks are considering across this vast, expensive city. If recent deadly wildfires in the west are any indication, it will be years before Altadena is rebuilt. The scale of devastation is huge.
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SIEGLER: This utility crew in front of me is just finishing putting up a replacement pole, and all around me is just destruction.
Beneath these poles, burnt cars and the eerie skeletons of home foundations. After disasters, the first move is to get the power back on so cleanup and rebuilding can start. But what if it just burns again? Diana Lieb got her family out in time, but they lost everything. She hadn't been back yet.
DIANA LIEB: I haven't had the opportunity. And also, I just - I don't think I'm that ready yet.
SIEGLER: The house she and her husband bought nine years ago burned down. So did their daughters' school.
LIEB: It's not the kind of neighborhood where you would think, oh, this is so rural that, you know, of course, there was a fire here. You know, like, I've been hearing a lot of victim-blaming like that.
SIEGLER: Victim-blaming by commentators and social media feeds, mostly from outside the city, asking why California continues to sprawl into high-risk fire zones. Lieb bought in Altadena because it was one of the last affordable places in LA, and her home was built in 1929.
LIEB: You wouldn't imagine that our entire little mountain town would just be incinerated.
SIEGLER: Before the fires, LA County was already moving to restrict development in dangerous places, including parts of Altadena. But most of the neighborhoods that burned in the Eaton fire were not even in state-designated high-risk zones. Now there's pressure on planners to throw out all the severity maps and start over.
AMY BODEK: This is a catastrophe that no one expected or anticipated.
SIEGLER: Amy Bodek is head of planning for LA County.
BODEK: In this case, the answer is we are committed to rebuilding Altadena.
SIEGLER: She says the county will make it as easy as possible for fire survivors to rebuild, but there are caveats.
BODEK: Anyone whose property burned down absolutely has the right to rebuild. If they happen to own properties in the hillside, they can rebuild what they had, but not more than that.
SIEGLER: This is the tension local leaders face after big fires, like the deadly ones on Maui or after the Camp Fire in Paradise, California. They don't want to just set people up for another disaster. But on the other hand, there's pressure to help people rebuild, and to make it affordable by cutting red tape or even exempting them from some of the tougher new safety codes. At UCLA, researcher Edith de Guzman urges caution.
EDITH DE GUZMAN: If the red tape that we're cutting also touches upon shortcuts that have to do with fire readiness and home hardening, then we will be doing these communities a great disservice.
SIEGLER: But LA planners told me there's only so much a government can do to shape rebuilding when, in the end, it comes down to individual people's decisions about their private property.
LIEB: There are a couple of bags of donations that we got that I still have to sift through. So...
SIEGLER: This is what Diana Lieb is wrestling with. She says she's grateful to be living in her parents' house here in West LA. They couldn't find anywhere to rent.
LIEB: We want to - the answer is yes, we want to rebuild. But the reality of it financially is not looking great.
SIEGLER: It's a lot. Can they get insurance? Do they even want to try to rebuild at the scene of so much trauma? After the 2018 Camp Fire, for instance, some decided it wasn't worth all the stress or the expense of rebuilding to safer wildfire codes. And five years later, only a third of Paradise had repopulated.
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SIEGLER: Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Los Angeles. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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