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.

The post Wildfires Can Leave Lasting Psychological Scars appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

California Strong, founded by the Southeast Ventura County YMCA and professional athletes after the 2018 California wildfires, and dedicated to providing immediate financial support to victims whenever a disaster strikes in the state, is accepting applications for assistance from those impacted by the Mountain Fire. The first round of funding is in early December.

Former Milwaukee Brewers player Ryan Braun, fellow California natives and major league players Christian Yelich and Mike Moustakas, Mike Attanasio of the Milwaukee Brewers ownership group and Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff all took part in forming California Strong. With the YMCA, California Strong provided financial assistance to the families who were directly impacted by the Woolsey and Paradise Fires and the Borderline Shooting.

“California has had its share of natural disasters over the years,” says Braun. “California Strong will always be there ready to step in to help.”

Fire victims can go to www.californiastrong.org and fill out a needs assessment form prepared by the Ventura County Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (VC VOAD). VC VOAD will review the applications and select funding recipients.

California Strong is also accepting donations from the community. “We know that neighbors want to help neighbors,” says Ronnie Stone, Southeast Ventura County YMCA President/CEO. “This is a direct way to offer support. All of the money raised will go directly to helping families in need.” A donation link is on the www.californiastrong.org website.

California Strong will use previously raised funds in its initial disbursement along with any additional funds raised.

Since its inception, California Strong has donated over $2.6 million to more than 1,400 disaster victims throughout the state.

The post California Strong Accepting Applications For Mountain Fire Assistance appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Speaking to reporters from a golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes on Friday, Trump said he would strong-arm California’s governor into agreeing to send more water from California’s lush north to farm fields in its drier south.

“Gavin Newscum [Newsom] is going to sign those papers,” Trump said, seemingly referencing a 2020 federal decision to increase water deliveries by weakening endangered species rules that Newsom sued over. “If he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires, and if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires, he’s got problems.”

Newsom snapped back within minutes of Trump’s remarks, saying in an X post the former president “admitted he will block emergency disaster funds to settle political vendettas.”

“Today it’s California’s wildfires. Tomorrow it could be hurricane funding for North Carolina or flooding assistance for homeowners in Pennsylvania,” Newsom wrote, referencing two swing states where Kamala Harris and Trump are neck-and-neck in polls ahead of November.

California currently has several large fires burning, including the Airport, Line and Bridge fires in mountains outside of Los Angeles, which have burned more than 100,000 acres combined. The state received federal aid to help combat the fires this week at Newsom’s request, most recently on Wednesday for the Airport and Bridge fires.

Trump has long threatened to withhold disaster money from California as punishment for its environmental policies. He has also long used California’s water wars as a way to appeal to agricultural interests in the Central Valley, who depend on deliveries from the State Water Project and the federally run Central Valley Project.

The former president stayed true to a campaign promise when he changed Obama-era rules in order to send more water to farmers four years ago.

“The reason you have no water is because Gavin Newscum didn’t want to do it,” he said Friday. “I had it all done.”

Newsom sued over the Trump administration’s rules in February 2020, the day after Trump finalized them at a rally-style speech in Bakersfield, touting their effect on water deliveries. The rules aim to deliver more water to Central Valley farmers by incorporating more flexible pumping rules that would let managers of the massive set of canals, reservoirs and pumping plants take more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

“To protect a little tiny fish called a ‘smelt,’ they send millions and millions of gallons of water out to the Pacific Ocean,” Trump said Friday, referencing California’s efforts to protect vulnerable fish species. “If they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles.”

The Biden administration is currently rewriting the rules and plans to release its version by the end of the year, before a potential 2025 Trump presidency. Newsom’s administration has said it will seek a separate state permit that would allow it to operate the state side of the pumps according to more-stringent endangered species rules, regardless of who wins in November.

Newsom officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Aiming to both quell soaring prices and bring back firms that have left the Golden State, regulators are proposing sweeping reforms that they believe could revive a competitive insurance market.

While experts agree that the status quo may no longer be sustainable, opinions remain divided on the merits of the proposed changes — which some fear could drive up prices further.

“The situation is hurting consumers badly,” Amy Bach, executive director of the consumer advocacy group United Policyholders, told The Hill.

“It doesn’t feel like it’s going to resolve on its own,” Bach added.

California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara last week called for public input on the final phase of his wildfire modeling regulation, which is many months in the making and has sparked significant debate.

Lara’s strategy would update Proposition 103, a 1988 ballot measure that served “to protect consumers from arbitrary insurance rates and practices” and encouraged a competitive and fair marketplace, according to the Insurance Commission. 

Proposition 103 determined that rate changes could only occur with the authorization of the commissioner, while also establishing a public participation process in which so-called “intervenors” could provide technical input and recover associated costs.

Lara’s office said in a press statement that his update aims to close a loophole in Proposition 103: Insurance firms today can request rates at any level to help compensate for an increased risk of losses but are not required to cover all Californians.

The new regulation, in contrast, would require companies to insure properties in distressed regions at a rate equivalent to 85 percent of the firm’s statewide market share. 

In addition, the proposal would incorporate the state’s first use of “catastrophe modeling,” localized simulations of potential risk based on historical analyses and probabilistic calculations that such events will occur in the future.

Whether relying upon such simulations, also known as “cat models,” would end up lowering or raising consumer rates, however, is a matter of contention.

Those in favor of employing these tools argue that other states have long done so and that proactive efforts to adapt California homes to a changing climate could mitigate risk.

“Over the past several years, the state has put billions toward wildfire mitigation efforts and homeowners have made significant investments in home hardening,” Lara said in a statement.

“This is not accounted for by our existing retrospective, past-focused models for ratemaking,” the commissioner continued. “We want consumers to reap the full benefits of these efforts through modern, forward-looking models on how rates are calculated.”

But others are far less certain that the models would account for such improvements — especially because the technology is often proprietary.

Bach cited catastrophe models as a reason for her muted enthusiasm about Lara’s proposal. Yet she expressed willingness “to let the commissioner’s sustainable insurance strategy go into place.”

“If it doesn’t work, then I guess we go back to the drawing board,” Bach said, expressing approval for the mandatory coverage component of the regulation.

Bach stressed that thus far, she has seen no indication that catastrophe models, when applied to wildfire-prone areas, are accounting for active mitigation efforts in price determinations. She also expressed concern that wildfire models are much newer than those for, say, hurricanes.

“We are nervous,” she continued. “The reality is that prices are so high already, and affordability is so low right now.”

Nonetheless, Bach acknowledged that California’s lack of catastrophe models was contributing to the exodus of insurance companies from the state. Beginning in 2022 and 2023, many big firms stopped offering services to new customers, often citing wildfire risk. 

“The writing was on the wall that cat models are going to come to California, just for practical reasons,” she acknowledged.

“We’re glad at least there’s a quid pro quo — that as a condition of insurers getting to use cat models, they also have to pledge to insure more homes in the areas that have been abandoned,” Bach added.

Harvey Rosenfield, founder of Consumer Watchdog and the author of Proposition 103, decried catastrophe models as “completely unjust, untested and unreliable.”

“Models are cloaked in the guise of technological infallibility, but they are drafted, they’re written, they’re controlled by humans,” Rosenfield told The Hill.

He also argued that their use would violate provisions of the voter-approved Proposition 103, because this would deny consumers their legal right to examine the details of these models.

“Nobody has the power to rewrite Proposition 103 to eliminate its protections,” Rosenfield added.

The applicability of catastrophe models to wildfire risk assessments was one focal point in a June 2024 working paper about the adaptation of insurance markets to a changing climate. Although these models have improved the ability of insurers to gauge wildfire risk, the resultant projections remain “inherently uncertain,” according to the paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“The modern catastrophe models bring a lot of value to insurance pricing and rate setting,” co-author Judson Boomhower, assistant professor of economics at the University of California San Diego School of Social Sciences, told The Hill.

“They give you a much more nuanced view of risk for a given property or a given area,” added Boomhower, who is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

That more detailed vantage point, he explained, is more sophisticated than the “backward-looking historical rate-setting methods that insurers have been required to use in California.”

Nonetheless, Boomhower also recognized that catastrophe models “are sort of a black box” due to their proprietary nature and resultant questions of transparency.

“Those are legitimate challenges for regulators to think about, but at a high level, this is the best scientific method for assessing catastrophe risk,” he said.

Boomhower described Florida as “a little bit ahead” of California from this perspective, as the state requires companies to give regulators some insight into how their individual models work.

In the working paper, Boomhower and his colleagues reconstructed pricing formulas used in California by six major insurers — combining data from company-provided premiums with proprietary information from about 100,000 households.

The authors found that following the 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons, both premiums and the rate of policy cancellations in high-risk areas surged. They also observed increasing reliance on the state’s “quasi-private insurer of last resort” —  called California FAIR —  the basic but expensive property insurance provided when traditional coverage is unavailable.

Among the paper’s key findings was the fact that insurers exhibited “striking variation” in how firms priced wildfire risk, with some only divided the market roughly, at the zip-code-level, and pricing risk at a more granular level — using catastrophe models.

“There’s tons of heterogeneity in wildfire loss risk, even within zip codes or even within neighborhoods,” Boomhower said.

Insurers with less sophisticated models seemed to end up with a slew of higher-risk customers and greater-than-expected costs, which the authors dubbed the “winners’ curse.”

Meanwhile, they found that companies using the more granular models tended to attract lower-risk customers. With that in mind, Boomhower projected that there would be “a lot of competition among insurance companies to find the low-risk homes in these designated high-risk areas.”

“There are parts of the state where wildfire risk has increased really rapidly,” he continued. “Those are places where insurance rates probably do need to go up relative to where they’ve been historically, just to reflect the increasing risk.”

To the extent that Proposition 103 has held rates down, Boomhower acknowledged that the proposed updates could end up raising prices.

“On the other hand, that may be what you need to ensure availability in some of those places,” he said.

While the status quo may not be ideal for anyone, Rosenfield stressed his belief that insurance firms might come back to California without a change in regulation — simply because it will be in their financial interest to do so.

“California is the biggest single insurance market in the planet, and they’re just going to come back in and take advantage of that,” he said.

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