.webp)
.webp)
Days after losing her home in the same fire that destroyed her Los Angeles elementary school, third-grader Gabriela Chevez-Muñoz resumed classes this week at another campus temporarily hosting children from her school. She arrived wearing a t-shirt that read “Pali” — the nickname for her Pacific Palisades neighborhood — as signs and balloons of dolphins, her school’s mascot, welcomed hundreds of displaced students.
“It feels kind of like the first day of school,” Gabriela said. She said she had been scared by the fires but that she was excited to reunite with her best friend and give her hamburger-themed friendship bracelets.
Gabriela is among thousands of students whose schooling was turned upside down by wildfires that ravaged the city, destroying several schools and leaving many others in off-limits evacuation zones.
Educators across the city are scrambling to find new locations for their students, develop ways to keep up learning and return a sense of normalcy as the city grieves at least 27 deaths and thousands of destroyed homes from blazes that scorched 63 square miles (163 square kilometers) of land.
Gabriela and 400 other students from her school, Palisades Charter Elementary School, started classes temporarily Wednesday at Brentwood Science Magnet, about 5 miles (8 kilometers) away. Her school and another decimated Palisades elementary campus may take more than two years to rebuild, Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said.
Students from seven other LAUSD campuses in evacuation zones are also temporarily relocating to other schools.
As Layla Glassman dropped her daughter off at Brentwood, she said her priority after her family’s home burned down was making sure her three children felt safe and secure.
“We have a roof over our heads. We have them back in school. So, you know, I am happy,” she said, her voice cracking. “But of course, there’s a lot of grief.”
Many schools have held off on resuming instruction, saying their focus for now has been healing, and trying to restore a sense of community. Some are organizing get-togethers and field trips to keep kids engaged in activities and with each other as they look for new space.
The Pasadena Unified School District kept all schools closed this week for its 14,000 students. It offered self-directed online activities but said the work was optional.
Between 1,200 and 2,000 students in Pasadena Unified School District are known to be displaced but the number could be as high as 10,000 based on heat maps of where families lived, district Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco said Thursday. The district aims to reopen some schools by the end of next week and have all students back in classrooms by the end of the month.
Schools that did not burn down were damaged by falling trees, debris, ash, and smoke that requires extensive cleaning and environmental testing, she said. Hundreds of school staff members citywide lost their homes or had to relocate, compounding the challenges.
Some schools are passing on online learning altogether.
“We all did COVID. We did online instruction. We saw the negative impacts,” said Bonnie Brimecombe, principal of Odyssey Charter School-South, which burned to the ground. Families have been dropping their children off at the local Boys and Girls Club so students can be with each other, she said.
A total of 850 students attend her school and a sister school in Altadena, Odyssey Charter School-North, which emerged undamaged but is still expected to remain closed for months. At least 40% of the students lost their homes in the fire, she said, making it especially urgent for their well-being to find new space and resume school as soon as possible. “At this point, we are trying to reopen in-person the very first day that we can,” she said.
Over the long term, disruptions can have profound effects on students’ learning and emotional stability.
Children who experience natural disasters are more prone to acute illness and symptoms of depression and anxiety, research shows. The physical and mental health impacts put them at greater risk of learning loss: Absences can undermine achievement, as can the effects of trauma on brain function.
Among the schools seeking space for temporary classrooms is Palisades Charter High School, which has 3,000 students. Nestled between Sunset Boulevard and the Pacific Coast Highway, “Pali High” is the kind of California school that Hollywood puts on the big screen and has been featured in productions including the 1976 horror movie “Carrie” and the TV series “Teen Wolf.”
Most of the buildings are still standing, but about 40% of the campus was damaged, officials said. The school is looking into other campuses, nearby universities, and commercial real estate spaces that would allow all its students to stay together until it’s safe to return, said principal and executive director Pamela Magee. The school delayed the start of the second semester until Tuesday and will temporarily revert to online learning.
Axel Forrest, 18, a junior on the lacrosse team, is planning to gather with friends for online school. His family home is gone and for no,w they are at a hotel near the Los Angeles airport.
“I feel so out of it, every day. Do I cry? Do I mourn the loss of my home and school? I am trying not to think about it,” he said. The longer school is out, the more idle time his mind has to wander.
“As time is passing I’m realizing this is going to be my reality for the next year or two. I am not going to have anywhere to live permanently for a while,” he said. “And what am I going to do for school now? It’s going to be online but for how long? Where will the temporary campus be? How far away is it?”
At Oak Knoll Montessori, educators have been holding meetups for its 150 students at locations including museums, parks, and a library in an effort for students to find some joy. The fire destroyed the school and several dozen students lost their homes.
The only thing that survived the fire was the school’s chicken coop, and its five chickens.
“The chickens have been a nice beacon of hope,” said Allwyn Fitzpatrick, the head of the school. “All the buildings blew up. We have nothing. Not one chair.”
Fitzpatrick has found a potential new location for the school and hopes to reopen before the end of the month.
“We have been trying to focus all our attention on the children and how we can temporarily help them normalize all this. Which is an insurmountable task,” Fitzpatrick said.
The fires that have engulfed Los Angeles cap the hottest decade in history. Each year in the last ten was record-warm, but 2024 was the warmest ever recorded. Last year, Earth was 1.6°C hotter than the temperature average of the late 19th century, which was before widespread fossil fuel burning had significantly altered the climate.
Still, the conflagrations that have so far claimed 25 lives and razed thousands of homes are not inevitable – even on our overheating planet.
“While climate change sets the stage for larger and more intense fires, humans are actively fanning the flames,” says Virginia Iglesias, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Extreme heat dries out vegetation and the soil. Wildfires ignite more easily, spread faster, and burn with greater intensity in these conditions, as parched land is more flammable. In the western U.S., aridity caused by climate change has helped double the amount of combustible forest since 1984.
Nights are warming faster than days globally, and dusk has brought no reprieve from the fires menacing the residential areas of Pacific Palisades and Altadena. It’s been more than a week since the first spark but firefighters warn several more may pass before the flames are fully contained.
High winds and whiplash
Something is filling the fires with oxygen and spreading their embers to dry brush. The Santa Ana winds that blow down the San Gabriel Mountains between autumn and January lose moisture and gain heat as they rush downslope, and these gusts reached hurricane strength (exceeding 80 miles per hour) at the start of 2025.
“When the wind is blowing like this, there is very little chance of stopping fires,” says Jon Keeley, a plant ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Santa Ana would cause much less havoc in a more typical wet season, which runs from October to April in California. Ming Pan, a hydrologist who tracks the state’s water supplies, estimates that soil moisture in southern California is in the bottom 2% of historical records for early January.
| Dreamstime.com)
In other words, the area around LA is about as dry as scientists have ever known it to be at this time of year. Why? Well, southern California has received less than 10% of the rain it would normally get from October onward. But it had the opposite problem last winter.
“Unusually wet winters in both 2022-23 and 2023-24 led to increased vegetation growth, providing more fuel for the fires,” says Doug Specht, a geographer at the University of Westminster.
“This cycle of wet and dry extremes, known as ‘hydroclimate whiplash’, is part of the increasingly intense climate cycles caused by climate change.”
Affluent LA is the most recent arena of climate disaster to capture the world’s attention. Yet it is the poorest 20% of humanity who have felt the sting of whiplashes between drought and downpour most keenly according to Specht.
When unusually heavy rain meets baked ground that cannot easily absorb it, as it did across much of east Africa in spring 2024, flash floods and landslides follow.
‘Perpetually on the brink of catastrophe’
Now we come to the more immediately tractable causes of these fires.
“Fire is a natural process that has shaped ecosystems for over 420 million years,” Iglesias says. “Indigenous people historically used controlled burns to manage landscapes and reduce fuel buildup. However, a century of fire suppression has allowed vast areas to accumulate dense fuels, priming them for larger and more intense wildfires.”
European colonization has transformed relationships with the land. Subsequent arrivals to southern California have included invasive plants capable of overrunning native flora and forming dense, uninterrupted fuel beds.
The legacy of these fires may be more invasive plants and more flammable landscapes. That’s because invasive species are typically better at exploiting extreme weather, their tendrils colonizing land disturbed by fire before native species can recover.
The overwhelming majority of wildfires that affect people are also ignited by them, intentionally or otherwise. Lightning has been ruled out for the LA fires so that leaves a wealth of human explanations: arson, unattended campfires, overheating engines, or sparks from power lines that utilities have neglected to replace.
“More people now live in and at the edges of wildland areas, and the power grid has expanded with them. That creates more opportunities for fires to start,” Keeley adds.
The Eaton fire which erupted near Altadena on January 7 would have probably burned out in citrus orchards 50 years ago. Today, there is no buffer between homes and the wildland, Keeley says.
Whether it was wise to bring flammable homes and cars into this fire-adapted wildland is a debate that should have started nearly a century ago, after the catastrophic Malibu fire in 1930. It didn’t, and late urban historian Mike Davis had a lot to say about why.
“Davis, who died in 2022, painted a vivid, if pessimistic picture of Los Angeles as both a real and imagined city perpetually on the brink of catastrophe,” says Alexander Howard, a senior lecturer in English and writing at the University of Sydney.
“Davis’ Los Angeles is a place where – as he comprehensively details – commercial greed overrides common sense and the social good, where institutional racism marginalizes vulnerable communities, and where wilful political inertia ensures history repeats itself with devastating consequences.”
Davis criticized liberal California politicians who greeted each new fire with calls to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but continued to allow real estate developers to “profitably but insanely, [build] in high-fire-risk areas”.
Although motivated by greed, these developers were not alone in their assessment of southern California as a tranquil paradise ripe for luxury housing. LA’s urbanization occurred “during one of the most unusual episodes of climatic and seismic benignity” according to Davis, who traced natural disasters and climate change back several centuries.
“These spans are too short to serve as reliable proxies for ecological time or to sample the possibilities of future environmental stress,” he writes. “In effect, we think ourselves gods upon the land but we are still really just tourists.”
Last week, a rare winter firestorm, whipped to apocalyptic proportions by near-hurricane force Santa Ana winds, and made worse by the fact that Southern California has had a shockingly dry winter, swept out of the mountains and into several Los Angeles communities. These included the affluent coastal community of Palisades and the historically African American neighborhood of Altadena, an hour’s drive to the east, at the base of the Los Angeles National Forest. Over the course of hours, as the winds carried embers from one community to the next, tens of thousands of Los Angelenos lost their homes.
What remains in the Palisades and Altadena is a cross between Dante’s Inferno and the Somme. Things that don’t normally melt melted. Things that aren’t usually reduced to ash were so reduced. Altadena and the Palisades lost a number of their schools, their grocery stores, their banks, their cafés, and their restaurants and bars. Entire economic and cultural ecosystems, nurtured over decades, were burned out of existence.
Dozens were killed by the flames and smoke; tens of thousands of Los Angelenos lost their homes and businesses; hundreds of thousands more had to be evacuated; and untold billions of dollars of damage—the exact amount likely won’t be known for months—was inflicted on a state that for years has been reeling under climate-change-related disasters and property and fire insurance systems that have reached something close to a breaking point.
Over the last couple of years, California’s Department of Insurance has worked at repairing this broken system, putting in place new regulations that allow insurers to use forward-looking catastrophic modeling in asking for rate increases—and, in exchange, requiring those insurers to significantly raise the number of policies they write in areas that they have fled in recent years. According to department press secretary Gabriel Sanchez, those regulations kicked in at the end of 2024 and were, at least until this recent disaster, expected to start delivering more insurance options for customers by the middle of 2025. “Our goal is to have more companies writing more policies, to stimulate competition,” Sanchez says.
The LA fires threaten to undo whatever progress they made.
On the ground, insurance concerns mingle with more immediate worries about surviving the flames. Fifty-four-year-old William “Joey” Galloway, a longtime Altadena denizen and businessman, lost a commercial building on East Mariposa Street, which his father had bought back in the 1980s, but he says at least he had insurance on the building. “State Farm and all the big companies won’t do it,” he explains, in a strong basso voice, about the nonrenewal he faced after the building’s previous policy expired. “It’s some little company.” He can’t remember the name of the new insurer, but he says it’s a good policy and that he was able to file a claim a day after the fire destroyed his building.
He leases out the building to seven local businesses, including the Amara Kitchen, which had opened to great acclaim several years ago and was part of an economic revival movement in the community. Around back, in the alley behind his lot, which he named Mariposa Junction, Galloway had recently started hosting a series of community events, at the request of the local chamber of commerce. There was a night market for local artists during the summer and a “Sip and Shop” fundraiser for the chamber in December.
When Galloway drove into the neighborhood last Wednesday to see the damage and scope out his buildings, he recorded on his cellphone a shocking scene of flames, smoke, and rampant destruction. It was daytime, but the smoke was so intense it might have been the middle of the night. His building had been reduced to a shell, he says, and the alleyway behind it was devastated.
Galloway’s situation of facing a nonrenewal from his insurance company is similar to that of tens of thousands of other Californians. Large carriers such as State Farm, Allstate, USAA, and Travelers have turned away increasing numbers of existing customers and have also stopped accepting new property insurance applications from Californians. Many of those customers, including some in the Palisades area, have, in consequence, signed up with smaller, less pedigreed insurers—companies that Sanchez says are out-of-state operators not subject to California’s regulations—or they have had to fall back on the state’s last-resort fire insurance program, the FAIR Plan, which now covers close to half a million California homes.
As nonrenewals have accelerated, demand has skyrocketed for FAIR, which the state set up to assist homeowners who were otherwise unable to get coverage due to the growing number of weather-related disasters and wildfires. The program is funded by a pool of money required from private insurance companies but typically has premiums that are higher than traditional private insurance, as well as higher deductibles, and it covers fewer extras, such as the full cost of relocation during the months or years in which a building or home is rebuilt.
Galloway has, so far, managed to avoid using FAIR. His family trust owns and manages 12 residential properties, none of which had their insurance policies renewed over the past year. Eight of those policies ran out on January 1 of this year. Thankfully, after considerable time and effort, he succeeded in getting new policies written, at a far higher price, on seven of the buildings. “My rates went up three times,” he says. For the eighth, however, a 25-unit residential building, he had not yet managed to find a new carrier willing to cover him when the fires erupted. Had that building gone up in flames, the result would have been financially devastating for the Galloways; it would also have resulted in a huge crisis for the renters whose homes would have been lost.
For years, elected officials and consumer advocacy groups like the Consumer Federation of America, which has promoted consumer rights since the late 1960s, have been pressing insurers to integrate climate risk into their insurance planning. They wanted insurers to build up more reserves for disasters, and they believed that in an era of climate change, everyone would benefit if the insurance industry lobbied to put the brakes on housing development in areas, particularly at risk for fires and floods. Instead, insurers turned a blind eye to the growing risks, seeking to take in as much profit as they could for as long as they could. It was a somewhat similar situation to the subprime home loan market in the years leading up to the 2008 crash. “They kept their heads in the sand,” CFA director of insurance Doug Heller argues. “They ignored it, knowing if they ever felt the risk they could just walk away,” since they only provide insurance on a year-by-year basis.
Now, insurers are belatedly waking up to the risks of rampant climate change—much as lenders woke up, too late, to the risks of the sub-prime market in 2008—and their response has been to abandon high-risk areas, despite the fact that these same regions have been extremely profitable for the industry over the last few decades. State Farm alone has built up a $140 billion surplus in recent years that, the Consumer Federation and other groups claim, ought to allow it to pay fire victims without further destabilization of the market. And the National Association of Insurance Commissioners recently found that America’s insurance industry was, collectively, sitting on an “all-time high” surplus of $1.14 trillion.
And yet every new natural disaster has the insurance industry predicting a market collapse and arguing for increased rates and deregulation. Making matters worse for California, and compounding the financial damage of disasters, the Los Angeles fire crisis comes just before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration and the looming threat that his administration will withhold federal emergency funds or add conditions to such funding to punish the state for its leadership’s opposition to extremist MAGA policies such as the mass round-up of immigrants.
The scale of California’s insurance crisis can be seen in the numbers. Just in 2024, State Farm announced that it would not renew policies for 30,000 homeowners in the state, including more than 1,000 policies in the Palisades. Other companies were engaged in a similar pull-back exercise, often raising premiums astronomically because of the threat of climate disasters, only to then hold onto those profits by refusing to reinsure people in high-risk areas.
To try to rein in this chaos, California Department of Insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara has pushed significant reforms to Prop 103, the 1988 proposition that set up the modern insurance market in California and limited the rate increases that insurers could impose on customers. Prop 103 mandated that insurers use the past 20 years’ history in calculating risk and thus setting premium fees; Lara proposed allowing insurers, in an age of rapid climate change, to instead use forward-based models, predicting how risk would change in the future. The result would let insurers charge more. In exchange, Lara got the insurers to agree to provide more coverage in hard-to-cover areas and to reward clients who made a good-faith effort to “harden” their homes against fires, by putting in new roofs and other changes, with lower premiums.
Lara’s hope is that, in bringing competition back to the insurance market, rates eventually will, for many consumers, start to drop once more, especially as more communities and individual homeowners harden their properties and land against fires. In a best-case scenario, it will, however, likely take years for the market to fully stabilize—and last week’s firestorm will only make the process more difficult, given the extent of the damage and the costly insurance payouts that must follow.
True, this isn’t a problem in any way unique to California, with its fires, its floods, its droughts, and its windstorms—not to mention the perennial, non-climate-related issue of earthquakes. Florida’s insurance industry is also in crisis, with rates soaring; Texas’s system is a mess; North Carolina’s is facing a reckoning after recent hurricanes, as are state systems dotted around the country. In fact, while fires tend to grab the headlines, insurance companies pay out a higher percentage of claims to victims of wind and hail damage in the Midwest than they do to fire victims in California.
Recognizing that this was a national issue, then-Representative Adam Schiff put forward a bill last year that would have done for the property insurance industry what the Affordable Care Act did for the health insurance industry: prohibit companies from refusing to insure customers based on the equivalent of preexisting conditions, and disallow the practice of cherry-picking customers so as only to have to cover those least likely to use insurance services. But the bill went nowhere. Now, with the GOP in charge of the White House and both houses of Congress, it is even less likely to gain traction.
As a result, efforts to protect consumers and rebuild stable insurance markets in an era of climate catastrophe are falling to the states. And even states with the muscle of California are fighting an uphill battle. “You’ve got this combination of things colliding all at once,” says an official with the state’s Department of Insurance. “Every insurance company is making decisions in a vacuum, and there’s chaos.”
The fires haven’t just hurt property owners. They are also causing huge upheaval for renters, many of whom lack adequate insurance. Galloway’s friends 28-year-old Josef Larry, Josef’s cousin Kevin, and his mother are among the uninsured. In the pre-dawn hours last Wednesday morning, the flames suddenly roared off of the mountainsides and into the populated areas of the flats. Josef’s family had minutes to evacuate their rental home. In the end, they managed to save their pet dog and the clothes on their back. Everything else was lost to the inferno. The family had no renters’ insurance, and now they have been left with nothing.
“The more days go on, the more I feel that sock in the stomach settling in,” Larry, who runs his family’s floor-finishing business, Larry’s Hardwood Floors, explains. “I had no renters’ insurance. I had it on my list [to do] but never did.” While he had liability insurance for his business, he didn’t have property insurance to cover his tools. As a result, between his personal property losses and his business property losses, Larry says that he “lost everything, down to my grandfather’s passed-down rifles, my machines, my wood and materials, my nails. Everything.”
The Department of Insurance says that it is aware of the crisis now confronting renters, but there isn’t yet a statewide policy in place to respond to this. Instead, says Gabriel Sanchez, renters should contact the department and its staff will try to assist them, on a case-by-case basis.
It’s a mind-warping situation for these renters to be in. “Terrified is an understatement,” Larry says. “I have to start from zero.” Temporarily living with relatives in a suburb of Ontario, he hates the feeling of being a burden on others. “It’s something I have as a man,” he says. “I need to figure it out. I’m more of a giver. I don’t feel comfortable taking it. I’d rather work for my money than have someone giving it to me.”
- Wildfires and Rent Hikes: Following wildfires in Los Angeles County, rent prices have skyrocketed, with some increases exceeding 50%, despite a state law capping increases at 10% during a declared emergency. Governor Newsom declared a state of emergency on January 7th.
- Price Gouging and Illegal Activity: California Attorney General Rob Bonta condemned this practice as illegal price gouging.
- LATU's Response: The LA Tenants Union has been tracking price gouging allegations and demanding an emergency eviction moratorium and a rent freeze.
They argue that landlords are exploiting the crisis for profit. - Interview with Lupita Limón Corrales (LATU Organizer):
- Corrales emphasizes the failure of local government to provide timely information and resources to affected residents. Many residents only learned of the fires when they were directly threatened.
- She draws parallels between the current situation and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the lack of initial government protections for renters.
- She criticizes the focus on cracking down on looting and new development while neglecting the immediate needs of displaced and vulnerable residents. 75,000 people are living outside the county and are being abandoned.
- Corrales describes LATU’s response, which includes providing mutual aid, distributing supplies (like air purifiers), and disseminating accurate information in multiple languages.
- She stresses the importance of community building and mutual aid networks, not only during the immediate crisis but also in the long term. She emphasizes that this will not be the last crisis.
- Corrales criticizes the city council's delayed and insufficient response, which falls short of a full eviction moratorium.
- She also points out the broader implications beyond immediate rent gouging, such as job losses and subsequent inability to pay rent, leading to further evictions.
She notes some homes are being listed at over $20,000 a month when many Angelenos live on $20,000 a year.
- City Council Delay: The Los Angeles City Council delayed a vote on proposed rent-hike and eviction restrictions for some residents, which LATU deemed insufficient as it didn't include a full eviction moratorium.
- Call to Action: The article emphasizes the need for community support, mutual aid, and sustained organizing to demand stronger protections for renters and address the root causes of the housing crisis. The article stresses the importance of connecting with neighbors and building community networks before crises occur.
While firefighters battled blazes in the Los Angeles area this week, Alejandro, a 55-year-old from Mexico, was one of several day laborers leading cleanups near scorched neighborhoods in Pasadena and Altadena.
Donning a yellow safety vest, a mask, and glasses, he helped pick up branches and fallen trees and direct traffic while others worked.
“The country would fall into crisis” without workers like him, said Alejandro, who spoke in Spanish and requested his last name not be used because he is in the country illegally.
“It wasn’t just one (home),” added Alejandro. “There were thousands.”
When President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House next week, he has said he plans to deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally. Immigrant advocates say that could impact America’s ability to quickly rebuild after major damage from floods, hurricanes, fires and other disasters.
As the number of extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change increases, there is a growing workforce of laborers, many of them without legal status. Some crisscross the country following extreme weather events, helping to put back together entire communities. Many are highly skilled electricians, plumbers, and masons. Others do manual labor, like cutting up and hauling away fallen trees and branches.
“The fact is that the people who rebuild those areas — from Palisades to Malibu to Altadena — it’s immigrant construction crews,” said Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “They’re the ones who are the second responders.”
In 2023, the U.S. was hit with 28 climate disasters that each exceeded $1 billion in damages, the most ever, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. While it is too early to know the toll of L.A.’s wildfires, an early estimate by AccuWeather put the damage and economic loss at $250 billion to $275 billion.
Trump has called climate change “a hoax” and during his campaign accused immigrants of taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.” Data show that immigrant labor contributes to economic growth and provides promotional opportunities for U.S.-born workers.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump’s transition team, told The Associated Press in a statement that Trump “will enlist every federal power and coordinate with state authorities” to deport “illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers... while simultaneously lowering costs for families and strengthening our workforce.”
The disaster restoration industry boomed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which transformed the Gulf Coast into one of the largest construction sites in the world. Many mom-and-pop construction businesses got bigger and consolidated. Some were eventually bought by private equity companies that saw a highly profitable industry with money coming in from insurance companies and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Mario Mendoza has worked in disaster restoration since Katrina. Within days after the storm, Mendoza was cleaning up mud-caked homes and businesses, removing debris, demolishing walls, and ripping up floors, some with asbestos.
Mendoza, a 54-year-old worker from Honduras in the country without legal status, remembered seeing dead bodies in homes he was hired to clean. Some bosses refused to pay him. In the years since Katrina, he has helped Louisiana communities rebuild after tornadoes and hurricanes.
“We’ve been the line of support for cities after disasters,” he said, speaking in Spanish.
After disasters, workers are hired by residents, contractors or subcontractors to tear down moldy walls damaged by flooding, or tarp and repair roofs and windows blown off by powerful winds. They remove debris and felled trees from people’s homes, clogged streets and roadways. Then they rebuild. Those without legal status are vulnerable to exploitation and wage theft. They sleep in pickup trucks or tents, sometimes on parking lot floors or the destroyed houses they’re reassembling. They are roofers, carpenters, tile installers, and laborers.
Day laborers hired to clean up homes often don’t have protective equipment or safety training, exposing them to “severe hazardous materials” and dangerous environments, said Jessica Martinez, executive director for the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a network of labor organizations that have trained workers in post-hurricane recovery. She added that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric also discourages workers from asking for basic resources because they fear being targeted and deported.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, some 10.8 million people were working in the construction industry in 2020. The Center for American Progress estimates that nearly 1.6 million immigrants working in 2021 in construction — a workforce in which Latinos are overrepresented — were in the country illegally. The numbers are higher in states like Texas and California.
In addition to workers already in the U.S., every year tens of thousands of people legally acquire H-2B visas, which allow them to temporarily enter the country to do non-agricultural work. Construction is one of the industries with a high prevalence of H-2B workers.
Stan Marek, CEO of the construction company Marek Brothers, said mass deportations would significantly hinder efforts to clean up and rebuild after disasters, and contractors would struggle to complete existing and future projects.
“If you don’t have the people, you can’t fix it,” said Marek, a Republican. “We still haven’t fixed everything from (Hurricane) Harvey, which was years ago. Some people’s ceilings are still sagging, falling in.”
The U.S. also has a housing shortage, raising questions about how the Trump administration will address that with fewer construction workers. In an interview with the New York Times last year, Vice President-elect JD Vance said construction workers without legal status could be replaced by the millions of “prime age” men and women who have dropped out of the labor force. He also said they could be convinced to join the trade by paying them higher wages.
Florida provides a glimpse of the possible effect of any upcoming large deportations. In the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia which struck the Big Bend region in August 2023, some workers without legal status were too fearful to finish recovery jobs they had started because of a Florida immigration law that had taken effect in July. One of the strictest in the nation, it requires businesses employing 25 or more people to verify their workers’ legal status, among other things.
“A lot of the workers that I know didn’t want to risk staying there,” said Saket Soni, executive director of the nonprofit Resilience Force, which advocates for the growing group of disaster restoration laborers. “They wanted to finish the work, but they couldn’t risk deportation. So they put their tools down and left.”
Sergio Chávez, a sociology professor at Rice University who is writing a book about the disaster recovery industry, sees a few alternatives for filling a potential construction labor shortage: either Trump will have to expand the H-2B worker program or hire Americans who will do the job for higher pay.
But Marek isn’t convinced. “Everybody says pay them more. We’ve tried paying them more,” he said. “Our starting wages are higher than they’ve ever been. And they would rather go work at Buc-ee’s,” referring to the travel store chain.
Reeling from destructive wildfires, including the deadliest in California history, state lawmakers in 2020 passed new requirements for clearing combustible materials like dead plants and wooden furniture within 5 feet (1.5 meters) of homes in risky areas.
The rules were set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2023. But as Los Angeles grapples with blazes that have destroyed thousands of homes in what could be the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, the regulations still haven’t been written. The state Board of Forestry and Fire Protection has no firm timeline for completing them.
“It’s frustrating at every level of government,” said Democratic state Sen. Henry Stern, who was part of a group of lawmakers who authored the legislation. “I feel like a failure on it, being quite frank.”
Most of the neighborhoods ravaged by the Palisades Fire are in areas that must follow state requirements to keep the immediate surroundings of their homes free of combustible materials and would be subject to the new rules because they are deemed at highest fire risk by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The fire, driven by hurricane-force winds that spread embers by air, destroyed at least 5,000 structures across areas including Pacific Palisades, Malibu and Topanga Canyon.
Under the latest proposal, existing homes would have three years to comply with the regulations, so it’s not clear how many homes would have been saved. But clearing the immediate area around homes likely would have made some difference, several experts said.
“We feel really strongly that it would” have made a difference in some cases based on previous research, said Steve Hawks, a former state firefighter who now works for an insurance industry research group that supported the law. “There’s no guarantees, of course, particularly when you have a high-intensity wildfire like these.”
So-called defensible space laws require homeowners in fire-prone places to keep the area immediately around their homes free of landscaping and other materials that could catch fire. California already enforces some of the most stringent defensible space laws in the West. The state began requiring homeowners in high-risk areas to clear flammable materials within 30 feet (9 meters) of their houses in the 1960s and then expanded the rules to include areas within 100 feet (30.5 meters) of structures in 2006.
The latest measure creates a new “ember-resistant” zone, dubbed “zone zero,” that bars things like brush, wooden fencing, furniture, sheds, and mulch within 5 feet (1.5 meters) of homes. The idea is to clear all materials that could catch fire from flying embers carried by winds and spread to the structure. State officials and researchers said embers are responsible for 90% of structures destroyed by wildfire.
The zone-zero law passed with bipartisan support after California experienced record-breaking fires in 2017 and 2018, including a fire that wiped out the town of Paradise, destroying more than 17,000 structures and killing 85 people.
Homes have a much better chance of surviving a wildfire when homeowners follow defensible space requirements and various home-hardening recommendations like using vent covers to keep out flying embers, said Yana Valachovic, a fire scientist with the University of California’s Cooperative Extension in Humboldt and Del Norte Counties. She is helping CalFire survey the LA fires’ destruction this week.
“I’m hesitant to put a number factor on exactly how much greater survival rate we’ll get,” she said. “But, you know, we have to do everything to push the equation.”
The Board of Forestry and Fire Protection said it’s still in “the pre-rulemaking phase” while it finds money to alleviate the potential costs under the new requirements. State officials said in a November meeting that the draft language likely won’t be considered by the board until late this year, though CalFire has already encouraged homeowners to take up the practice on its website. The agency recommended the adoption of zone zero requirements as part of a report on fire strategies requested by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2019.
Lawmakers last year also passed legislation to extend the deadline to comply — from one year to three years — for existing homes once the regulations are adopted. Some cities and homeowners are already taking on the practice voluntarily.
“There are many facets to consider as part of this complex process,” Edith Hannigan, executive officer of the board, said in a statement to The Associated Press. “This topic remains a priority for the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, and staff aims to have a draft proposal to present to the Board as soon as is feasible.”
Some of the most effective strategies include clearing dead vegetation and debris off a structure’s roof and out of gutters and replacing bark with pea gravel, said Kimiko Barrett, who authored a 2024 study looking at the costs for retrofitting existing structures in California. Replacing wooden fencing could cost more, but it also helps better protect a home.
“The cost of not doing anything could be far, far greater,” Barrett said.
Zone zero discussions have been underway for the past decade, and the idea isn’t always popular. Stern, the state senator who also lost his home in another Los Angeles fire in 2018, said he struggles to convince his family to follow the practice. His parents dismissed his advice like clearing out the rosemary bush next to their home as minor things, Stern said.
“What I don’t know is whether people are going to see that as a headache,” he said.
U.S. Rep. Laura Friedman, a Democrat who led the effort to pass the zone-zero law in 2020 as a state assemblymember, said the implementation “shouldn’t have taken years and years.” She then deferred questions to the state.
“I hope that the state acts with the urgency that the issue and these guidelines deserve,” she said.
Under the latest draft, the rules would immediately apply to new homes and allow existing buildings three years to comply.
The impact of wildfires in Los Angeles County on housing, focusing on rent price gouging and the efforts of the LA Tenants Union (LATU) to protect renters.
Key Points:
In essence, the article portrays a situation where a natural disaster exacerbates existing housing inequalities, with landlords taking advantage of the crisis. It highlights the crucial role of community organizing and mutual aid in providing immediate support and demanding systemic change.
Meeting families displaced by the LA fires was such an emotional experience 🥹 Through my nonprofit, 11:11 Media Impact, we’ve placed dozens of families in hotels for longer-term stays. 🏨 Over the weekend, I visited some and brought surprises to brighten their day 🥰 It was a… pic.twitter.com/wrFZZIHQqA
— Paris Hilton (@ParisHilton) January 16, 2025