With October holding both Fire Prevention Month and the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction , it seemed appropriate to think about for whom we articulate prevention and risk. Nearly two years after the Eaton Fire tore through Altadena, Lara Wood still thinks about how many tabs remain open. Each an indicator of a part of her life that remains unfinished.

There is construction. Insurance. A mortgage. Disaster assistance. Contractors. Temporary housing. Aging parents. The emotional aftermath of evacuation. And the responsibilities of ordinary life, which did not disappear when three homes belonging to members of one extended family were lost.

“I still don’t believe how much stuff there still is, like how many tabs are still open,” Wood described.

That may be one of the simplest ways to understand long-term disaster recovery.

The public version often has a beginning and an end. A fire destroys a home. A family rebuilds it. Recovery is complete.

Wood has learned otherwise.

“You lost a house. Now you’re getting a house. So even Stevens, it’s all good,” she said, describing how people outside a disaster can perceive rebuilding. “But it’s just so much more to it than that.”

Altadena now offers a test of what communities mean when they promise to “build back.” The question is no longer simply how many structures will return. It is whether the people who lived there before the fire can endure the financial, administrative and personal burdens long enough to return with them.

Recovery Extends Far Beyond The House

For Wood’s family, the fire collided with an existing caregiving transition.

Her in-laws, now in their 80s, had already begun experiencing cognitive decline. One reason the family had built an accessory dwelling unit was to remain nearby as they aged.

After the fire, Wood said, the decline became more pronounced. Repeated moves created another layer of disorientation.

“It’s not great for people with memory issues to move and move and move,” she said.

That burden is difficult to capture on a rebuilding dashboard.

A house can disappear in a matter of hours. Its loss can alter caregiving arrangements, employment, education, family relationships and health for years.

Wood works in architectural design and already understood how stressful building or renovating a home can be under ordinary circumstances.

This was not ordinary construction.

“It wasn’t like I really want to remodel this house,” she said. “It’s not something you’re financially prepared for, emotionally prepared for.”

Los Angeles County’s own review process increasingly recognizes that disaster response cannot be reduced to firefighting alone. The county commissioned a second independent after-action review specifically to examine recovery and repopulation, including how services were coordinated, how disaster recovery centers operated, how information reached the public and how public-health responsibilities were handled.

The first county review of alerts and evacuations found no single failure. Instead, it identified a collection of problems, including outdated policies, inconsistent practices and communications vulnerabilities.

Wood’s experience suggests that the coordination problem does not stop once a fire is extinguished.

Rebuilding Without Knowing Whether The Money Works

One of Wood’s most consequential decisions came early: whether rebuilding was financially possible at all.

“I never would have thought I would undertake rebuilding a house and not knowing if we had enough money to do so,” she said. “We’re missing $200,000. That sounds like you should stop.”

Her estimate was personal, but the underlying problem is widespread.

Catalyst California analyzed nearly 6,000 Altadena residential properties that sustained significant damage. As of December 2025, only 23 had completed rebuilding or repairs. Just 43% had at least applied for or received permits to begin construction.

Its analysis illustrates why. Catalyst estimated that rebuilding a destroyed 1,500-square-foot house could cost roughly $750,000 at $500 per square foot, while average Altadena home insurance coverage stood at about $607,000 in 2023. That hypothetical household would begin with a construction shortfall of more than $140,000 before accounting for temporary housing.

For Wood, simply abandoning the rebuilding process did not offer an easy alternative.

Her family looked for rentals. She described attending open houses as a large Black family and watching interactions change after landlords met them.

“People obviously do not want to rent to people who do not look just like them,” she said.

The experience reinforced why homeownership in Altadena had mattered in the first place.

“We don’t have to go through this whole rental hellscape over and over,” she recalled thinking. “This is where we live. That’s it.”

That history carries particular weight in Altadena.

Catalyst California describes the community, and especially West Altadena, as a historic haven for Black homeownership that grew in part because redlining excluded Black Californians from opportunities elsewhere. The neighborhood eventually became a broader center of homeownership for communities of color.

It was an epicenter of Black culture in Southern California, home to activists like Eldridge Cleaver and generations of middle class families like Woods’.

The Eaton Fire therefore did not simply destroy expensive Southern California real estate. It struck a community where property ownership has long represented both housing security and accumulated family wealth.

That makes the ability to return an economic and cultural question.

The Financial System Can Become Another Recovery Obstacle

Wood’s rebuilding experience became more complicated after her family entered mortgage forbearance.

They understood that deferred payments would effectively extend the life of the mortgage. Payments resumed. Then notices suggested otherwise.

Later, after the family qualified for California mortgage assistance and contacted its mortgage servicer to determine how that assistance would be applied, Wood said the family was told foreclosure proceedings could begin within weeks.

“I called you,” she recalled thinking. “And when is the foreclosure going to happen? September 1st. So it’s August 20th.”

The problem was not merely the money. It was opacity.

Wood described repeated calls, uncertainty over who had authority to resolve the problem and difficulty obtaining direct contact information.

“These big companies are acting in such a way that is so opaque,” she said. “Am I talking to the right person? Doesn’t seem like I am.”

Eventually, her family reached people who helped clarify the process.

That required something easy to overlook in discussions of resilience: a network capable of locating expertise, finding the right language to use and continuing to push.

Meanwhile, construction was moving forward.

“We have our rough electrical in and plumbing,” Wood said. “So we’re this far ahead in the construction and still worried about, are we going to lose our house?”

The experience changed how she interpreted the pressure surrounding recovery.

“All of that stress, it feels so personal,” she said. “And then when you realize, no, it’s not personal at all.”

Who Has Enough Capacity To Stay?

The question becomes especially acute for older homeowners and people without extensive family support.

Wood looks at her in-laws and wonders how they would have navigated rebuilding alone.

“If it was us, we’d just be like, oh, we can’t do it. It’s just too much,” she said, imagining their response.

“If they didn’t have somebody that could kind of like underwrite them...how do you do it? You don’t.”

The underwriting Wood described is not only financial.

Going through the disaster recovery process is essentially a job. It requires emotional engagement. One has to have the time and capacity to make repeated telephone calls, track documents, appeal decisions, compare contractors, understand loan terms and meet deadlines.

One friend in her late 60s, Wood said, had been moving between Altadena and her sister’s home in San Francisco and questioning whether rebuilding was worth the effort.

“She was like, it just is too much work,” Wood recalled. “I’m just trying to figure out how to move on.”

For thousands of survivors, case managers have helped provide some of that missing capacity. However, that infrastructure remains precarious.

As of late September, the Eaton Fire Collaborative warned that Los Angeles wildfire disaster case management could end soon because FEMA had not released most of the approved funding. Pasadena Now reported that roughly 1,500 survivors could lose their existing case managers and that a broader provider database showed another 7,000 survivors waiting for one.

Case managers help survivors navigate insurance, FEMA, SBA programs, financing and rebuilding. Providers reported that those referrals had helped survivors obtain more than $100 million in direct assistance since the fires.

That is effectively the professional version of the family “underwriting” Wood described.

When neither exists, technically available assistance may remain practically inaccessible.

The Resilience Gap Has A Price

Abby Ross, founder and CEO of The Resiliency Company , approaches another portion of the problem from the capital side.

Her organization has focused on what it calls the “resiliency delta”: the financial difference between replacing a home to minimum code and rebuilding it to a more disaster-resilient standard.

The Resilient Delta Fund was developed initially around the Los Angeles rebuilding effort. The organization uses philanthropic grants and catalytic capital alongside loans from CDFIs, community banks and credit unions to help homeowners and builders finance homes to IBHS Wildfire Prepared standards.

“We don’t believe homeowners should have to sacrifice between an affordable rebuild and rebuilding for the long term,” Ross said.

The model matters because a household already facing a six-figure reconstruction gap may have little capacity to absorb another cost, even when that additional investment could reduce future damage or help preserve insurability.

The Resiliency Company says the Delta Fund can act as first-loss or catalytic capital for lenders. Homeowner and builder loans may take forms ranging from mortgages and HELOCs to unsecured loans, while grants can flow through community organizations.

That makes community development financial institutions particularly relevant.

Ross described working with lenders to turn resilience into something that can be incorporated into ordinary housing finance rather than an exceptional product available only to wealthier homeowners.

Her organization says it has developed lending standards tied to IBHS wildfire-resilience requirements and a grant playbook for community partners, with the goal of catalyzing substantially larger pools of private lending.

“Resiliency is a team sport,” Ross said.

Wood’s experience helps explain why.

A safer replacement house solves only part of the problem if the homeowner cannot finance construction, obtain insurance proceeds, keep a mortgage in good standing or withstand years of displacement.

Altadena Is Still A Long Way From “Recovered”

The numbers reinforce that point.

Catalyst California found that more than half of both owner-occupied and renter-occupied significantly damaged properties had not applied for or received reconstruction permits by the end of 2025. West Altadena suffered particularly severe housing losses, including significantly higher rates of damage to both single-family and multifamily housing.

The organization’s rebuilding tracker is explicitly designed to answer a question similar to the one Wood’s experience raises: who has the means to return and who does not?

Recovery also comes with new hazards. Catalyst cites county testing that identified lead contamination as a continuing concern even after debris removal, including in properties that did not burn.

Residents rebuilding are simultaneously confronting changed fire-hazard designations and resilience requirements. Catalyst found that only 23% of significantly damaged homes were within areas designated as very-high fire-hazard severity zones, underscoring how imperfectly prior risk maps captured what ultimately burned.

In other words, survivors are being asked to learn from a disaster while some of the systems that defined risk before the disaster are learning at the same time.

Survivors Should Not Have To Become Disaster Experts

When Wood described what a better recovery system would look like, she began with three enormous expenses: rent, the existing mortgage and rebuilding.

Then came everything else.

Organizations including the Red Cross and Sense of Home provided meaningful early help, she said. Accessing assistance often depended on knowing that a resource existed.

“You have to be in the right line,” Wood said. “You have to be on the right list for that. And you don’t know what you don’t know.”

Her family repeatedly applied for FEMA assistance. Insurance payments, meanwhile, sometimes had to move through the mortgage company before they could be used for reconstruction.

“The money is there, but I can’t have it,” she said of one stage of the process.

She described visiting a centralized assistance location in Altadena, a model intended to reduce some of that fragmentation.

While Wood waited in line, another survivor asked where to obtain a particular service. She was told it was two doors away.

“She was like, I cannot do one more step to get these resources that are right there,” Wood said.

The episode reframes what access means after disaster.

A benefit does not become accessible merely because an eligible survivor can theoretically apply for it. Access also depends on whether a traumatized and displaced person has the cognitive, emotional, and practical capacity required to navigate the process.

“There was a lot of executive functioning that just isn’t happening anymore,” Wood said, referring to the psychological toll that recovering takes on one’s ability to perform rudimentary tasks.

Twenty months after the fire, the uncertainty surrounding disaster case management suggests that this problem is not confined to the chaotic first weeks of recovery.

Recovery Has To Measure Who Comes Home

Altadena eventually will contain more completed houses. Permits will be issued. Walls will go up. Families will return.

Those metrics matter. They cannot tell the entire story.

Altadena’s history makes the distinction particularly consequential. If long-standing homeowners lack the financing, family capacity, legal assistance or institutional support to withstand the recovery process, the neighborhood can be physically reconstructed while the community that existed before the fire slowly disappears.

Ross’s work poses the financial version of the question: how can capital make resilient reconstruction possible rather than merely desirable?

Wood’s story poses the human version: how much must a survivor know, manage, and endure simply to remain?

Where Los Angeles Wildfire Survivors Can Still Find Help

For survivors still navigating recovery, the experience of Wood and thousands of other households suggests that an earlier denial or unsuccessful application should not automatically be treated as the end of the process.

Disaster case managers can help households navigate FEMA, SBA programs, insurance, housing, financing and rebuilding, although the immediate future of federally supported Los Angeles case management remains uncertain as the funding deadline was originally set for September 30th, but appears to be extended through next year in some cases .

Los Angeles County continues to maintain recovery resources and is now gathering survivor feedback specifically to improve recovery and repopulation systems. The county says the independent review includes people who evacuated, lost property, used shelters, accessed debris-removal or recovery services or have access and functional needs.

Homeowners rebuilding in wildfire-prone areas can also review the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety’s Wildfire Prepared standards and ask builders, insurers and lenders whether available financing or assistance can support construction above minimum code. The Resilient Delta Fund is one emerging model designed specifically around that financing gap.

Survivors should retain copies of FEMA and SBA applications, denial and appeal notices, mortgage correspondence, insurance documents and rebuilding invoices. Important documents and photographs of property and possessions should also be backed up somewhere separate from the home, including secure cloud storage when available.

Most importantly, survivors should not assume that difficulty navigating these systems represents personal failure.

Wood’s experience, regional rebuilding data and Los Angeles County’s own reviews point to a concept in development - that recovery itself remains a system under construction.