The insurance commissioner’s job might sound like dry bureaucratic business, but it carries significant weight. The office oversees the California Department of Insurance, which regulates everything from homeowners and auto coverage to health, life and workers’ compensation policies. Part of the job is ensuring insurance stays available and affordable, while making sure companies actually follow through on what they promise policyholders.

That mission matters more than ever as wildfire risk climbs across California. Seven of the ten most destructive fires in state history have struck in just the last ten years. Add in the broader rise in the cost of living, and insurance premiums — which the department has final say over — have become a pressing concern for families statewide.

Unlike most states, where the position is appointed, California is among just 11 states that let voters pick their insurance commissioner directly. Current Commissioner Ricardo Lara, a Democrat and former state lawmaker, has held the post for eight years. His term ends in January, and two Democrats — state Sen. Ben Allen and former San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim — are now competing to succeed him.

Whoever wins will have to juggle competing interests: everyday consumers, insurance companies, advocacy groups and wildfire survivors all pulling in different directions.

“Your role is not to be friend or foe, except (be a friend) to the California consumer,” said Lucy Wang, who served as special counsel for the department under Lara before leaving last year to join a San Francisco law firm representing insurers.

CalMatters spoke with Wang, consumer advocates and a former commissioner to better understand what the office can — and can’t — do. Lara declined an interview request. A department spokesperson, Michael Soller, said in a statement that Lara “wielded executive power to overcome entrenched opposition from all sides and modernize insurance regulation to meet the climate crisis,” following what the department described as extensive public outreach.

Shaping policy and rules

The commissioner has real power to shape rules that directly hit consumers’ wallets, either through regulation or by partnering with legislators on new laws.

A few years back, several major insurers pulled out of California or stopped renewing policies after a string of catastrophic wildfires drove up claims costs. Insurers argued that the rates they were allowed to charge didn’t reflect their actual risk, and that state regulators were too slow approving rate hikes. Lawmakers tried and failed to fix the problem through legislation, prompting Gov. Gavin Newsom to order Lara to find a solution. Last year, Lara rolled out new rules that borrowed heavily from those stalled bills — including provisions the insurance industry had pushed for years.

Under the new framework, insurers can factor in forward-looking catastrophe models — not just historical loss data — along with reinsurance costs when calculating premiums. Translation for homeowners: rates are likely to keep climbing, if they haven’t already. The department is also working to process rate-increase requests faster.

Lara’s office and the insurance industry both say the strategy, dubbed the “sustainable insurance strategy,” is showing early signs of success. Some insurers have started writing new policies again in California, though the department can’t yet say how many are actually new business, according to Soller.

The state’s FAIR Plan — the insurer of last resort for property owners who can’t find coverage elsewhere — ballooned in recent years as private insurers retreated. Its growth has slowed lately, something the department points to as evidence the new rules are having an effect. As of June, the FAIR Plan carried nearly 700,000 active policies, up 8% since last September but a staggering 157% higher than September 2022.

Another rule change affects so-called “intervenors” — members of the public who can formally challenge an insurer’s request for a rate hike under Proposition 103, the voter-approved law governing insurance regulation. Intervenors can be compensated for their efforts, and the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, founded by the author of Prop. 103, has long dominated that role. The group says it has saved Californians $6.4 billion between 2002 and 2024.

“(The intervenor process is) an extra check on insurance prices going higher and higher,” said Will Pletcher, an attorney with Consumer Watchdog. He noted that insurance companies will always have deeper pockets than consumers, making outside scrutiny of proposed rates essential.

Homeowners in California — where home values are the nation’s highest — pay premiums that rank in the middle nationally, but those costs have jumped 23% since 2023, according to a Bankrate.com analysis.

Lara’s new regulation requires intervenors to demonstrate their input is “substantial” and separate from the department’s own analysis, and that it actually influences the outcome. Thirty-two consumer, labor and advocacy groups oppose the change, warning it will make it harder for intervenors — who earned $14.2 million collectively from 2002 to 2024 — to get paid, potentially discouraging future challenges to rate hikes and leaving consumers with higher bills.

Tension between Lara and Consumer Watchdog isn’t new. The group has repeatedly questioned his relationships with the insurance industry and pushed for greater transparency from his office.

“The current commissioner is trying to punish (founder) Harvey (Rosenfield) and Watchdog, so you have these messed-up rules,” said Robert Herrell, executive director of the Consumer Federation of California, another group that occasionally intervenes in rate cases.

Herrell, a former department employee himself, argued that outside scrutiny brings value the department’s own staff can’t always provide. “You don’t want to just rely on the expertise of the department,” he said. “Outside, fresh eyes could see new things.”

Lara has also floated a rule the insurance industry doesn’t love — requiring companies to submit plans detailing how they’ll manage solvency risk. Wang, who helped draft the proposal, said it’s about giving regulators the fullest possible picture to keep the market stable.

Insurers already report financial data to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, and industry representatives argued in public comments this summer that the new requirement would be redundant and costly, requiring new staff and expertise. Some advocacy groups, including Public Citizen, back the proposal and want the department to go even further by mandating specific disclosures about climate-related risk.

The commissioner’s authority extends to other corners of the market, too. In July, a California appeals court upheld Lara’s right to let insurers factor marital status into auto insurance pricing — a practice allowed since 1996 under rules established by former Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush. Consumer groups have found that unmarried drivers often pay more as a result. The case is likely headed for further appeal, possibly to the California Supreme Court.

Holding insurers accountable

Beyond setting policy, the commissioner has authority to investigate insurers and push for changes in their conduct, sometimes working alongside lawmakers to force compliance.

Following the devastating 1991 Oakland Hills fire, many homeowners learned they didn’t have nearly enough coverage. Then-Commissioner John Garamendi, now a member of Congress, pressured insurers into providing an extra $300 million in coverage. Garamendi earned a reputation as an aggressive consumer advocate willing to clash with the industry — a strategy that produced mixed results over time.

More recently, survivors of the devastating January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires — many still struggling to rebuild — called on Lara to resign late last year, frustrated by what they described as slow claims processing and inadequate support from his department.

“Fire survivors are 100% right that the way they’re treated is wrong,” said Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a consumer advocacy group. But she acknowledged the department’s hands are somewhat tied when it comes to certain insurer practices, such as assigning survivors multiple adjusters, and it has no power to resolve individual disputes between policyholders and their insurers.

“The reality is that (the department) cannot stand in the shoes of a private attorney,” Bach said.

Even so, former Commissioner Dave Jones argued the office should be more aggressive about pursuing enforcement actions.

“I think it’s important to have a commissioner that is willing to exercise the authority that he or she is granted within the statutes, and is independent not just from the influence of the insurance industry, but also from the governor and the Legislature,” Jones said.

Lara’s department did launch an investigation into how State Farm handled claims from last year’s Los Angeles County wildfires. In May, the department found that State Farm had violated state law — including delaying and underpaying claims — and recommended millions of dollars in penalties along with a possible one-year suspension. However, no hearing has yet been scheduled, and fire survivors filed a lawsuit last month against Lara and the department demanding a judge be appointed to oversee the matter and seeking to participate as intervenors.

The department also took legal action against the FAIR Plan, accusing it of wrongly denying smoke-damage claims stemming from the Eaton and Palisades fires. Smoke damage can be difficult to detect and there are currently no standardized testing protocols, though two bills recently passed by the Legislature would create first-in-the-nation standards for evaluating such claims.

According to the department, survivors of last year’s fires filed roughly 13,000 smoke-damage claims. Lara convened a task force to study the issue, and its recommendations — including testing for toxic contaminants that would affect what insurance must cover — have been folded into the pending legislation now awaiting the governor’s signature. Lara has backed Assembly Bill 1795, while the companion measure is AB 1642.

Wildfires may dominate the current conversation, but the commissioner’s portfolio touches many other areas of insurance as well. During Jones’ time in office, health insurance was a central focus, coinciding with the launch of Covered California under the Affordable Care Act.

While the commissioner reviews health insurance rate changes, the office cannot actually block rate hikes — despite Jones’ unsuccessful push to expand that authority.

Still, Jones managed to bar certain insurers from California’s small-business health insurance marketplace, citing patterns of excessive rate increases. He also joined other consumer advocates in successfully pushing for caps on what Covered California enrollees pay for specialty medications, a move that put him at odds with then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration.

“That made people very unhappy with me, but it was the right thing to do,” Jones said. “We need a commissioner who’s willing to do that.”

Original source: CalMatters

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For much of the early 1900s, wildfires operated on something close to a deadline. After a series of devastating blazes, the U.S. Forest Service wanted to prove it could control the forests under its watch. In 1933, the agency established what became known as the “10 a.m. rule” — a mandate that any wildland fire be fully extinguished by 10 the following morning.

The policy grew out of horror over the Big Burn of 1910, a firestorm that tore across roughly 3 million acres along the Montana-Idaho border in just 36 hours, killing at least 85 people and wiping out five towns. Unlike an earthquake or a tornado, fire can be fought directly — with water, retardant, hand crews, bulldozers, and sometimes intentional burnouts designed to rob a wildfire of fuel.

But those very tools, history has shown, can create new dangers down the road.

The heroics tied to the 1910 disaster helped cement the Forest Service’s reputation and justify its existence as a federal agency. As former New York Times reporter Tim Egan once put it, the agency “owes its existence” to that fire. Yet Egan also pointed out the long-term cost of decades of aggressive suppression: forests packed with dead and overgrown timber that had never been allowed to burn naturally. He linked that buildup to catastrophic blazes later in the century, including the 1988 Yellowstone fires and major Idaho fires in the 1990s.

Researchers eventually gave this phenomenon a name: the “Wildfire Paradox.” In a 2013 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Rocky Mountain Research Station scientist David Calkin explained that stamping out nearly every fire — something crews manage to do 95% to 98% of the time — sets the stage for the rare fires that escape control to become far more destructive, burning hotter and spreading faster than firefighters can contain.

Land managers began recognizing this pattern in the 1960s and started allowing some fires in remote wilderness to burn themselves out, reducing fuel loads naturally. The Forest Service loosened the 10 a.m. rule in 1971 and scrapped it altogether by 1978.

In the decades that followed, fire policy continued to evolve alongside a warming, drying climate and shifting public priorities. A wetter mid-century period gave way to increasingly parched conditions by the century’s end. The 1988 Yellowstone fires burned 1.4 million acres in one of the country’s most iconic landscapes. Colorado’s 1994 South Canyon fire killed 14 firefighters and triggered a major overhaul of federal fire policy. Meanwhile, more and more homes were being built at the edge of fire-prone wildlands — an area now commonly referred to as the wildland-urban interface, or WUI.

By the early 2000s, a string of record-setting fire seasons made clear that firefighting had become one of the Forest Service’s largest and most unpredictable expenses, often outpacing available funding. Suppression costs, which hovered far lower in the 1990s, topped $2 billion in 2017 alone.

Then came 2018, one of the deadliest fire seasons in state history, highlighted by the Camp Fire, which killed more than 80 people in and around the Northern California town of Paradise.

Now, political pressure is once again pushing federal agencies toward a more aggressive suppression posture — for Southern California communities long familiar with fire season, a development worth watching closely.

Last June, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Empowering Commonsense Wildfire Prevention and Response.” The order opens by referencing the devastating January 2025 firestorms in Los Angeles, arguing that they exposed the dangers of state and local governments being unable to respond quickly enough to major blazes.

According to multiple sources within the wildfire policy community, earlier drafts of that order included language essentially reviving the old 10 a.m. rule.

“No one was dumb enough to use 10 a.m. policy language, but there was fear of a fire getting away,” said Bobbie Scopa, a firefighter with 45 years of experience at the local, state and federal levels who now serves as vice president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. “Anytime you light a fire or purposefully don’t put out a fire, you own it and you own every bad thing that can happen. You’re taking a risk when you do that.”

Similar language calling for full suppression of all wildfires also appeared in early drafts of the Fix Our Forests Act, a bill working its way through Congress.

Matt Weiner, CEO of the advocacy group Megafire Action, said enshrining that approach into law could have had serious unintended consequences.

“We were able to get that out of it,” Weiner said. “And long-term, we will push aggressively against the 10 a.m. rule being included in statute anywhere. We don’t want to just create a suppression super-agency. We want a system that recognizes the need for a lot more beneficial fire on the landscape.”

Even so, the push toward aggressive firefighting hasn’t disappeared. At a July 22 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Forestry and Horticulture, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz told lawmakers his agency remains focused on hitting wildfires hard and fast this year.

“Keeping fire small protects firefighters, communities and also saves funding,” Schultz testified. “I assure you every fire has a full-suppression strategy.”

For residents across the Inland Empire and greater Southern California — where wildfire season now stretches nearly year-round — the debate over how aggressively to fight fire, and at what long-term cost, remains far from settled.

Original source: CalMatters

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Joe Denham, who serves on the boards of the Sierra Unified School District and the Sierra Resource Conservation District, watched the 2020 fire scorch 13 acres of his family’s ranch and destroy homes belonging to friends and neighbors throughout his Fresno County community. Now, as Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers debate a new package of wildfire recovery reforms, Denham is urging California to act before another catastrophic blaze exposes the same failures that plagued his community’s recovery.

Denham, who has worked as a firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service and Cal Fire and spent much of his career around the Sierra as a river guide and land steward, says he supports the governor’s proposal because it would prioritize wildfire victims over what he describes as outside interests — hedge funds, trial attorneys and insurance companies that he believes have profited while families waited for help.

“Any serious reform must put victims ahead of out-of-state interests,” Denham argues, pointing to his own experience navigating the aftermath of the Creek Fire as evidence that the current system is broken.

The fallout from that disaster, he says, extended well beyond burned structures and displaced families. In the years since, Fresno County schools have watched enrollment shrink as families unable to secure or afford insurance simply gave up on rebuilding and moved elsewhere. Local businesses that once depended on those families have struggled to stay afloat as their customer base thinned out.

Many residents in the Sierra Nevada foothills saw their insurance policies canceled outright or their premiums climb beyond reach in the fire’s aftermath. A significant number were pushed onto the state’s FAIR Plan, the insurer of last resort, which Denham describes as costly relative to the limited protection it actually provides. He says he’s heard similar concerns from neighbors who doubt the plan could withstand payouts if another major wildfire hit the region.

Beyond the insurance struggles, Denham points to a rebuilding process bogged down by years of litigation, where attorney fees and outside investment groups chipped away at settlements before victims ever saw compensation. Families who had already lost everything, he says, were let down twice — first by the fire, then by the system meant to help them recover.

Denham believes the fix is straightforward, even if the path to get there hasn’t been: increased investment in wildfire prevention, reforms to stabilize the insurance market so coverage remains affordable and accessible, and a restructured recovery system that puts fire victims at the front of the line.

“Every fire season that passes without reform is another season where a community like mine could go through exactly what we did — and come out the other side with even less to rebuild with,” he said.

With wildfire season looming and the memory of the Creek Fire still fresh for many in the region, Denham is calling on state leaders to seize this opportunity for reform now, rather than waiting for the next disaster to force their hand.

His perspective stands in contrast to that of other fire survivors, including one from the Palisades Fire, who has criticized the same proposal as yet another financial break for utility companies rather than a genuine solution for victims.

Original source: CalMatters

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On the anniversary of the Palisades and Eaton fires, it’s easy to assume catastrophic fires are the new American reality. But they don’t have to be. If we can take advantage of technological innovations, we may be able to create a future that avoids such devastation.

Last year’s fires around Los Angeles showed that wildfire is a complex hazard, shaped by how we build, govern and respond. Across the country millions of Americans live in the wildland-urban interface, where homes and flammable landscapes meet. But many of these communities lack the resources to prepare for major fires or recover from them. Meanwhile hotter, drier weather that drives longer fire seasons is increasing risk.

But the story doesn’t end there. Land managers, fire chiefs, technologists and utilities increasingly agree: Catastrophic fires are often the consequence of a fragmented system that struggles to adopt technological innovations. Embracing new tech could prevent routine fires from turning into disasters.

Promising technologies already exist that could be used to combat wildfire. Satellites and sensors can detect new ignitions in minutes. Artificial intelligence models can project fire spread in real time. Drones can map hazardous vegetation so it can be cleared to reduce fire risk, sometimes by autonomous vehicles that can work faster, more safely and more efficiently than humans. Sensors can monitor power lines and shut them off before sparks ignite. New building materials can keep homes intact even when embers land on them.

These tools can’t eliminate wildfire, nor should they, because fire is a part of healthy ecosystems. But they can reduce wildfire’s destructive potential. They can lead to fewer evacuations, fewer neighborhoods lost, fewer lives turned upside down.

So why aren’t they widely deployed?

The United States lacks a coherent system for advancing and scaling wildfire technology innovation. Diverse actors — including federal and state fire and land management agencies, local fire districts, tribal governments, utilities, insurers, research institutions and private companies — operate under different authorities, budgets, procurement rules and data systems. Innovators who want to help don’t always know where to go. Philanthropies fund pilot programs, not adoption at scale. Fire agencies struggle to test or purchase new and unproven technologies.

And yet we have examples of what effective innovation can look like. Within the U.S. military the Defense Innovation Unit identifies promising commercial technologies and helps the services field them within a year or two. At the federal Department of Energy the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy identifies high-risk, high-reward technologies related to power generation, transmission and storage. In‑Q‑Tel, a nonprofit created by the Central Intelligence Agency, uses a venture capital model to invest in commercial technologies needed by intelligence and national security agencies.

None of these organizations invented every technology they advanced. Their success came from creating connective tissue. In a recent study, colleagues and I looked at how the models that led to those successes could help strengthen the wildfire technology innovation pipeline.

Wildfire needs its own version of a federal coordination entity dedicated to connecting innovators, funders, researchers, fire agencies, utilities and communities. As a neutral coordinator, such an entity could scan emerging technologies for broad situational awareness; establish shared standards to support interoperability; assist with testing and adoption to strengthen buy-in by end users; help innovators and state and local agencies navigate procurement challenges; and provide targeted funding to accelerate deployment. It also could ensure that innovators and investors look beyond headline-grabbing fire-suppression tools and instead toward mitigation and prevention technologies that can save lives and money in the long run.

Land management, controlled burns, updated building codes and community planning all remain essential. Technology can make those efforts more effective. It can give firefighters better information and residents more warning. It can help communities to avoid disaster or, failing that, to recover faster.

Some states, utilities and federal agencies already are pushing innovation. For example the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as CAL Fire, created a new Office of Wildfire Technology Research and Development. Colorado created a center of excellence to bring innovation to aerial firefighting.

But without national coordination, progress remains uneven. Communities with fewer resources risk falling further behind.

The anniversary of the L.A. wildfires is a reminder of what is at stake. Americans have transformed public risk systems before — in national security, earthquake preparedness, hurricane forecasting and aviation safety — through coordination and smart investment. Wildfire should be next.

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One morning last month, they crammed into a small job center in Pasadena, Calif., ready for more work. But on this day, the situation felt too dangerous.

It wasn’t the contaminants or toxic fumes. Outside the Winchell’s Donut House just blocks away, federal immigration agents had detained six people.

The day laborers went home instead of heading to their job sites.

“They’re living in fear,” said Jose Madera, the director of the Pasadena Community Job Center, which earlier this year helped train about 40 immigrant workers in fire cleanup. “They don’t know what can happen if they go to work — are they going to come back?”

Immigrant workers are playing a crucial role in the recovery of Pasadena, Altadena and Pacific Palisades after the devastating fires in January. They have hauled debris, cleaned smoke-affected homes and in some cases begun reconstruction in the months since the Eaton and Palisades fires burned more than 16,000 buildings in the region.

But raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have plunged workers in various occupations into a state of panic, leading many of them — regardless of immigration status — to stay home. And residents worry that the raids have already hurt recovery efforts in fire-torn neighborhoods.

In two dozen interviews, residents, officials, real estate agents, contractors, community organizers and workers described ways in which the Trump administration’s raids have affected the rebuilding process in Southern California. Many of those involved agreed to speak only if they could remain anonymous because they feared retaliation from the federal government.

“At a time when our communities need help healing from a natural disaster, the Trump administration is manufacturing a man-made one,” said Lindsey Horvath, who serves on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Undocumented immigrants, who make up a sizable share of construction workers in California, have the most acute concerns about the potential for raids. But even Latino workers with legal residency or American citizenship are worried about confrontations with federal agents.

The reconstruction of fire-torn communities has been a priority for President Trump, and the threat of a slowdown has revealed a potential seam in his immigration crackdown. A Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman made a point of saying that agents had not targeted construction sites in Pacific Palisades or Altadena.

Still, there are growing signs of frustration in California over the raids across Southern California and their chilling effect on labor in the state. Videos that appear to show arrests at work sites have circulated across social media, giving the impression that federal agents have tried to detain anyone they think looks like an undocumented immigrant.

California Democrats have criticized President Trump for months. In late June, six Republican state lawmakers also pleaded with him to focus enforcement efforts on immigrants with criminal backgrounds.

“The recent ICE workplace raids on farms, at construction sites, and in restaurants and hotels have led to unintended consequences that are harming the communities we represent and the businesses that employ our constituents,” the Republicans wrote, noting that the resulting fear was making the state’s affordability crisis worse.

Though federal agencies were largely responsible for the initial stages of the cleanup, contractors play a significant role in rebuilding efforts. About 75 percent of construction laborers in Los Angeles County are immigrants, and nearly half of those are undocumented, according to a recent analysis conducted for the Bay Area Council, a California business group.

It is not clear how much cleanup and construction efforts in Southern California have been affected by fears of ICE enforcement. But as the raids have intensified, residents and community organizers say construction crews have thinned out. In one case, workers vanished when they were halfway through a job. Others have packed their tools into passenger cars instead of construction vehicles, as well as staggered their work shifts to avoid drawing attention.

Last month, at least 11 people were detained during three separate raids in Pasadena. The city borders Altadena, where the fire incinerated thousands of homes and left others uninhabitable. One video of the arrests outside the doughnut shop showed an agent detaining two men, who the Pasadena’s mayor said were on their way to work on fire recovery efforts.

In a separate episode, federal agents questioned workers at a construction site in the Altadena fire-rebuilding zone, said Brock Harris, a Los Angeles real estate agent who works with the developer involved in the project. No one was arrested, Mr. Harris said, but “the next day, half the workers didn’t come to work.”

Pablo Alvarado, the co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said ICE agents showed up on a street in Altadena where construction crews were repairing two roofs damaged by the fire. The workers fled, Mr. Alvarado said, leaving their tools behind. “As long as they are around,” he added, referring to the federal agents, “workers are going to stay inside.”

But federal officials said that agents with ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have not gone after workers in the fire recovery zones.

“ICE and CBP have NOT targeted any construction sites in Altadena and the Palisades,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, wrote in an email, adding that “we will continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets.”

The dread is palpable among workers. On a recent afternoon, three men in white protective suits who were clearing weeds and other debris at a fire-damaged property in Altadena said that they had stayed home for a couple of weeks when raids intensified in Los Angeles in June.

Sergio, a traffic controller who immigrated from Mexico as a child and has been working in Altadena for months, said that the rebuilding process had already seemed to be “falling behind.”

He said that he was in the country lawfully, having arrived through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but he feared reprisal from immigration officials and asked to be identified only by first name. He has been afraid of being profiled on the street by federal agents, and his boss has told him he could miss work if he needed to. He said that he felt that anyone who looked like they were an immigrant laborer could be detained by ICE agents.

In the Pacific Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood on the west side of Los Angeles where thousands of buildings burned in January, there have not been any raids, according to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, which has been tracking enforcement efforts. But contractors there said that deportation anxiety was still shrinking the work force.

The owner of a contracting firm with rebuilding projects in the Palisades said many workers and subcontractors — regardless of their legal status — have opted to stay home on many days since the sweeps began. The owner, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of drawing the attention of immigration officials, said other contractors have experienced the same.

It has become increasingly complicated to make construction plans ever since the raids ramped up last month. Workers have texted on some mornings to say they don’t feel safe showing up. The owner has empathized with them but said that the missed days will eventually delay construction.

Oscar Mondragón, the director of a day labor center in Malibu, said that in the past couple of weeks, only about half of the 40 workers contracted each morning by the center were showing up. Some of those workers, he added, were removing smoke-related hazards in homes that were polluted in the Palisades fire.

“All they want is to work, not to do any harm to anybody else, just to work for their families and their own good,” Mr. Mondragón said.

Marco, an immigrant from Mexico who asked to be identified only by his first name because of deportation concerns, said that the raids had forced him to weigh economic survival against the fear of being arrested by immigration officials.

He worked on debris removal in Pacific Palisades shortly after the fire, and he said he has stayed home many days since the workplace raids began.

But doing so had become unsustainable. He had no choice, he said, but to risk an immigration raid in order to survive.

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Trump was asked outside the White House if “recent dust-ups” with Newsom over immigration raids and subsequent protests would impact California’s request for $40 billion in wildfire aid.

“Yeah, maybe,” Trump said. “Hatred is never a good thing in politics. When you don’t like somebody, you don’t respect somebody, it’s hard for that person to get money if you’re on top.”

The aid is meant to help cover the response to the wildfires in January, including the Palisades and Eaton fires, which killed at least 30 people and destroyed some 17,000 structures.

Newsom responded to Trump’s comments in a social media post Wednesday.

“Sucking up to the president should not be a requirement for him to do the right thing for the American people,” the governor wrote. “These are families who’ve lost their homes, their belongings — the irreplaceable pieces of a life built over decades, reduced to ash.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has suggested he would withhold disaster aid because of his dislike of Newsom. In September, he made similar statements while speaking about a slow-moving landslide threatening entire neighborhoods in Palos Verdes.

The Trump administration’s ongoing immigration enforcement raids across Southern California — and the federal response to ensuing protests and unrest — have drawn the ire of Democrats in California, led by Newsom.

Federal officials have said that the immigration enforcement operations would continue in the Southland, despite the protests and the pleas of local Democrats.

On Tuesday, an appellate panel heard arguments but made no ruling on whether Trump or Newsom will control the state’s National Guard. The case stems from California’s legal challenge to Trump’s decision to deploy the Guard over the objections of Newsom. A San Francisco federal judge last week ruled the move was illegal and unconstitutional, and the Trump administration appealed.

Trump ordered the Guard deployed to Los Angeles shortly after the violence broke out in the first weekend of protests, later deploying U.S. Marines to the area as well. On Tuesday, the Department of Defense said the 49th Military Police Brigade would serve alongside the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team and two U.S. Marine units under a central command, totaling around 4,100 soldiers.

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Investigations into the cause of the fire are ongoing and have not concluded that Edison’s equipment sparked the blaze, Edison International Chief Executive Pedro Pizarro said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call.

But Edison’s probe into the start of the fire has not revealed any other possible sources of ignition, Pizarro added.

“Absent additional evidence” and “in light of pending litigation, it is probable that Edison International and Southern California Edison will incur material losses in connection with the Eaton fire,” Pizarro said.

Edison has previously acknowledged that it could be responsible for the blaze and said earlier this month that a dormant power line might have been the cause.

But Tuesday’s comments are the clearest signal to date that the company is likely to sustain substantial losses from the devastating wildfire.

“It’s still very early days here and the liability is simply not estimable today,” Pizarro said. “I’m not sure when it may become estimable.”

The Eaton fire killed 18 people and destroyed thousands of homes and other structures. Early estimates put the cost of damages at $10 billion, but experts said that number would grow. The total estimated economic loss caused by the January wildfires has surpassed $250 billion.

Southern California Edison, based in Rosemead, is an investor-owned public utility that provides electricity to about 15 million people across a 50,000-square-mile area in Southern California. Along with the utility, which is one of the largest in the country, Edison International also owns an energy advisory company, Trio.

In all, Edison International employs more than 14,000 people and had a valuation of around $30 billion before January’s wildfires. The company’s valuation closed Tuesday at $22.6 billion.

If Edison has to cover the damages caused by the Eaton fire, the utility will be partially protected by an emergency fund that state lawmakers created in 2019 in the wake of earlier wildfires. The fund is designed to protect utility companies from bankruptcy in the event the utility is found responsible for a wildfire and has to make a large payout.

Video of flames at the base of an Edison transmission tower in Eaton Canyon the night the fire began raised suspicions that the utility’s equipment was at fault.

“Unlike when we were dealing with TKM and Woolsey, we have the wildfire fund that we will be accessing,” Edison International Chief Financial Officer Maria Rigatti said on Tuesday, referring to previous wildfires tied to Edison’s equipment.

The emergency fund is supposed to cover up to $21 billion in damages on behalf of a utility company, but had only amassed $14.7 billion as of December 2024.

Under state law, a utility does not have to reimburse the wildfire fund after using it to cover damages if a review finds it acted prudently to prevent a fire, such as by shutting down power to transmission lines amid high winds. But if Edison is found to have been imprudent, it will have to pay back $4 billion to the fund.

“Based on everything we know today and the information that we’ve reviewed, we believe that Southern California Edison will make a good-faith showing that it was prudent,” Rigatti said.

On Tuesday, Edison International reported first-quarter net income of $1.4 billion and earnings per share of $1.37, up from $1.13 a year ago.

Shares closed at $58.73 on Tuesday, about half a percent higher and down 26% so far this year.

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That money comes from Proposition 4, the November ballot measure that authorized a $10 billion bond to pay for climate-related projects such as water systems and wildfire mitigation.

In his January budget proposal, Gov. Gavin Newsom recommended that $325 million of the bond money should be allocated in the upcoming fiscal year to a variety of wildfire prevention programs. The remainder would be spent over the next five years. 

But Democratic Assemblymember Steve Bennett, chair of the budget subcommittee on climate, energy and transportation, told the administration in a hearing on Wednesday that the state should pursue a focused strategy to make the most use of limited resources.

“It can’t be a little bit here, and a little bit here, and a little bit here,” said Bennett, who represents Oxnard. “We need a comprehensive plan to say these are the resources we have; by linking these things together, this is how we could maximize our effectiveness.”

Robyn Fennig, assistant director for Hazard Mitigation for the state’s Office of Emergency Services,  described the proposal for the upcoming fiscal year as one part of a broader strategy that might include trying to secure matching federal funds.

Bennett also noted that the state faces an enormous challenge to address the threats from climate change. 

“There has been a sea change in terms of what’s happening as a result of climate change,” Bennett said. “The home insurance crisis was serious, but it’s now going to be unmanageable for California if we don’t find a way to decrease our losses when these wildfires sweep it near or into communities.”

State Fire Marshal Daniel Berlant, defended the administration’s approach.

“I completely agree that [home-hardening] has to be a focal point, but our strategy has to be doing all of these things together,” he told lawmakers. “If we’re not managing the forest, we’re going to have large forest fires that burn right into our communities. ”

The bond measure language, approved by the Legislature last year, offers some flexibility on how to spend the money, Rachel Ehlers, a policy analyst with the Legislative Analyst’s Office, said at the hearing. 

But that flexibility leaves some questions for lawmakers, she said, flagging a  proposal in the governor’s budget plan to add an additional $9 million to a pilot program that gives homeowners financial assistance to make their homes more fire-resistant.

“Do you want the funding to go deep and have fewer structures that are protected, but have more of them covered? Or do you want it wide, where you’re giving smaller grants that won’t protect the whole structure, but maybe more properties get access to it? What regions of the state do you want to focus on?”

For the pilot program, established in 2019,the administration’s approach was to target the most vulnerable communities, Berlant said. 

Six counties currently are participating in it, based on factors including population health and age, as well as wildfire risk and other climate data. The state reports 17 homes have completed the fire-proofing process and another 23 are in progress. The additional money could expand the program to two more counties.

The selection process could be similar for one of the new programs proposed under the Prop. 4 funding: providing financial assistance to vulnerable Californians to create a five-foot zone around their home that could protect it from burning down. 

“You talked about, how do we prioritize? We can’t help everybody,” said Berlant. “We can educate everybody, but those that are most vulnerable who can’t physically do this work, who can’t financially afford to do this work, this program will provide funding to assist them.” 

The administration noted that Newsom’s budget proposal is a work in progress — one that was drafted prior to the Southern California wildfires.

“I recognize we have to do all the above and I recognize it is fiendishly difficult to try to figure out, “Do we do 10% here, etcetera there,” Bennett said at the hearing. “In my mind, there has not been enough focus yet on (home) hardening and I think we’re starting to recognize that.” 

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And everyone wonders: What happens now? Will people rebuild? When will things get back to normal?

Those of us who have been paying attention over the last few decades also wonder: How long before it happens again?

The New York Times journalist Seth Mydans once described this tension as our region’s “central paradox.” We are, he wrote after a major 1993 wildfire, “caught between fire and flood, beauty and devastation, dread and reckless optimism.”

So many factors helped make our current natural disaster one of the largest in American history: a warming planet, an extremely dry season that followed an extremely wet one, unusually brutish Santa Ana winds, extensive development in places known to catch fire cyclically.

But the more you learn about the natural disasters that strike our foothill and mountain communities, the more you wonder what the hell city planners and politicians were thinking when they zoned so much of it for development in the first place.

Despite the tendentious fingerpointing, no politician in the world — nor fire department, for that matter — could have tamed the hurricane-force winds that grounded firefighting aircraft while flinging devastating embers into neighborhoods where out-of-control fire was previously unthinkable.

In California, the supposedly unthinkable keeps happening.

We have wet falls and winters, followed by hot, dry summers that suck the moisture from the chaparral, which becomes kindling for the fires that are ignited by human activity — sparking power lines, arson, campfires, vehicles, fireworks — then whipped into frenzy by the devilish winds that originate in the deserts and pick up speed as they whoosh through our mountain canyons to the ocean. As it turns out, we live in a place whose weather cycles and topography are a veritable gift to the fire gods.

“Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire,” UC Riverside fire ecologist Richard Minnich once said. “You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he’ll never be arrested.”

In 2017, another wind-whipped inferno, the Tubbs fire, swept unthinkably through the flat residential neighborhoods that straddled the 101 Freeway in Santa Rosa. Twenty-two people died, and more than 5,600 structures were destroyed, including about 5% of Santa Rosa’s housing stock. It was the most destructive wildfire in California history.

That record stood for just 13 months. The following year, the Camp fire devastated the Northern California town of Paradise, killing 85 people, destroying about 14,000 homes and displacing about 50,000.

Until last week, the Camp fire was believed to be the costliest fire in U.S. history. But its $12.5 billion in damage will be pocket change compared to the eventual tally of the Palisades and Eaton fires. The real estate analytics firm CoreLogic has estimated the damage to insured properties at $30 billion so far. AccuWeather experts estimated that between property damage and economic losses, the tab will be $250 billion to $275 billion.

Over the last 30 years, it’s become a cliché in these moments to turn to the late writer and social critic Mike Davis’ famous 1995 essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” republished in his 1998 book, “The Ecology of Fear.” But the essay is an eye-opening primer for anyone who thinks the latest fires are a fluke. In fact, they are a feature of the landscape, exacerbated by our fire suppression practices, and will recur reliably, as they have forever.

The arguments over whether to rebuild, and who should bear the cost of doing so, have also been going on for decades.

In 1993, the Old Topanga fire — one of 26 major wildfires that burned from Ventura County to the Mexican border that year — blazed for 10 days, scorched 18,000 acres, destroyed 359 homes and killed three people. Two years later, then-state Sen. Tom Hayden, who was running for Los Angeles mayor, argued for imposing more restrictive zoning in disaster-prone areas or, failing that, forcing local governments to cover costs.

“Does everybody in California think that American taxpayers are going to subsidize our lifestyle forever, that we can just present them a blank check every time we have a mudslide or a flood?” he asked at the time. “The rest of America has troubles too.”

No wonder he lost his bids for California governor in 1994 and Los Angeles mayor in 1997.

Within five years, I predict, most of the Palisades, Malibu and Altadena will be rebuilt. Memories will fade, insurance rates will rise, life will go on — until the next fire, flood or earthquake.

“We’ve invented a fool’s paradise,” Hayden once complained.

Maybe so. But time after time, we reinvent it too.

The post Column: California’s cycle of fiery destruction and reconstruction is older than you might think appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

By Wednesday morning, Ms. Brown, 63, saw that the building was “completely just not there at all.”

Iris Kameny, Ms. Brown’s mother, had evacuated to Chino, Calif., ahead of the fire, but precious family photos and artwork were lost, as was furniture Mrs. Kameny purchased around the time she got married, in 1959.

The Palisades fire and the Eaton fire, which have burned homes and entire neighborhoods as they have torn through the Los Angeles area this week, are thought to be among the most destructive fires ever to hit the city. And experts warn that the fires have put many residents, particularly those like Mrs. Kameny who have lost their homes, at risk of deep, long-lasting mental health ramifications.

“The loss of a home, the displacement you experience, the difficulty of rebuilding, living with the anxiety that this might happen to you again — all that combines to create, for many people, lasting psychological harm,” said Dr. David P. Eisenman, a primary care physician and director of the U.C.L.A. Center for Public Health and Disasters. Studies suggest that even those who do not lose homes can have anxiety, depression or psychological distress for years after a wildfire dies out.

Since 2020, California’s most destructive wildfires have destroyed more than 10,000 homes, businesses and other buildings, according to data from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

For some people who lost homes in previous California wildfires, the current disaster in Los Angeles has caused renewed anxiety.

Eric Reinbold, the police chief of Paradise, Calif., said he never thought he would live in the town again after the devastating Camp fire reduced his home and many others to “a heap of ash” in 2018. Nearly 14,000 residences were destroyed and 86 people were killed by that fire.

Mr. Reinbold, his wife and their three children evacuated to nearby Chico and lived there for five years before deciding to rebuild in Paradise.

“It was hard to make that decision, to come back to a town where we lost everything,” he said.

He said he was limiting his exposure to news of the wildfires around Los Angeles to avoid dredging up the anxiety and grief he still sometimes experiences thinking about the home his family lost and the scars to his community.

Studies have shown that wildfires can have both short-term and long-term effects on the mental health of survivors. In a paper published last year, researchers found an increase in emergency room visits for anxiety disorders after wildfire events in California and other parts of the Western United States.

Another study in Fort McMurray, a town in Alberta, Canada, that was evacuated during a 2016 wildfire, found that about a third of residents were dealing with depression, anxiety, a substance-use disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder a year after the event. And researchers who followed those affected by a bush fire in Victoria, Australia, found that about 4 percent of the people were still suffering psychological distress a decade later.

It’s not just the loss of life or property that people mourn. Survivors of wildfires can suffer a collective sense of loss from damage to the natural environment, Dr. Eisenman said. He and his wife experienced the feeling themselves this week as they watched the Palisades fire consume beloved hiking trails.

In some cases, living in a damaged home can be more difficult than a complete loss, said Jonathan Sury, a public health researcher at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia Climate School. Mr. Sury and his colleagues studied the impact of Hurricane Sandy on the mental health of New Jersey residents and found that even those whose homes sustained minor damage experienced anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder after the storm.

For residents who have fled the Los Angeles area and don’t yet know the fate of their homes, the uncertainty can be traumatic, Mr. Sury added.

Shabnam Melwani, another resident of Pacific Palisades, fled her home on Tuesday after firefighters told people to evacuate. Before leaving, she grabbed a statue of Lord Ganesh, a Hindu god known as the remover of obstacles, and placed it outside her front door.

Ms. Melwani, 55, spent the evening at her cousin’s home in Santa Monica, overwhelmed with fear. Five years ago, she packed her bags and left her community in Singapore behind in search of a new life in California for her family. Ms. Melwani feared she would lose her home again.

But Wednesday morning she received a message from a neighbor who said that her house had withstood the blazes so far, and most likely had only sustained damage from smoke and soot.

For Ms. Brown, watching her mother’s home go up in flames left her “shellshocked,” she said — but at least knowing what had happened was a “saving grace.”

“There is no question whether it might still be standing or not,” she said.

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