The reality (or the more egregious situation now depending on how you look at it) is the developers who are able to take advantage of the situation a lot of people find themselves in, especially those in Altadena, less so in the Palisades.

Altadena had generational homeowners who inherited homes from parents and grandparents with paid off mortgages and for better or worse, did not insure them. So from that perspective, this will be an ongoing issue of gentrification/less affordable housing as owners who have no insurance pay out to rebuild have to sell, McMansions are built onto these lots and story as old as time. Lots of people from that area left or are still leaving CA as their affairs get wrapped up.

The ground/soil can’t *not* be a mess after every bottle of household cleaner, paint can and weed killer from garages, etc burned into the ground in all areas. I don’t know if we know what that means for now and future.

Are things getting better? If you believe the media, it's all still such a mess in the Palisades, at least. We have family in Pasadena, who had to evacuate. They are back now, but there is a sense that the smoke damage lingers and health conditions flare.

Answering this a month later but we had the cars packed up with what we wanted to save, barely slept with the fire alert app going off every 30min and we were two blocks from evac zone at one point. Thankfully LAFD did an amazing job of pushing it back where we are.

We have friends who lost everything either by fire or by their house being so close (across the street in some cases) that they had to give everything up and start over as you can’t get all of the toxic mess out of every belonging you have.

I’m glad you made it through OP. Agree that it seems like a lifetime ago in some ways but not in others.

So we were in the middle of Burbank, near the Eastern and 2 other fires last Jan. The smoke was thick in the air and we hopped in the car to drive north, first to Ventura and then onto Santa Barbara.

We were away from home for probably 2 weeks while things got under control.

This was 10 months ago but it feels like a lifetime has passed since.

Was anyone else here affected?