In a Wildfire-Ravaged L.A. Suburb, Red Tape Snarls the Rebuilding: ‘Everybody’s Forgotten About Us’

The grief these residents are experiencing is compounded by the permitting, fireproofing, and other requirements to comply with California’s building codes.

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Altadena, Calif. — In the wee hours of the morning of January 8, Monica Stuhlman thought she was going to die.

Driving down the hill of her Southern California street, she took one last look at her neighborhood as it was going up in flames — squinting through the darkness as pockets of fire lit up the landscape amid that night’s power outages. Black smoke and embers filled the air as gusts of hot Santa Ana winds wrapped around her vehicle.

It’s a miracle she got out of Altadena at all, given that no emergency cruisers came to warn the residents, and no evacuation notice was issued.

“The reason I knew was because my neighbor around the corner, her house had caught on fire,” Monica recalls. At that point, she called her husband, John — a Marine veteran who is now a paramedic, firefighter, and fire inspector for the city of Los Angeles — who was responding to the Palisades Fire. “I said, ‘You need to come home. We’re going to lose everything.’”

As Monica searched unsuccessfully for a hotel to stay the night, John suited up and tried to fight the fire in his own neighborhood. He saved their Jeep and a couple of boxes of personal effects. But once houses began exploding around him, power lines started falling left and right, and his own propane tank started hissing, he realized he had minutes to spare before he’d go up in flames, too.

“There was nobody stopping people from coming in,” John recalls. That prompted him to direct traffic for about 20 minutes and inform his neighbors that their houses were already gone.

These days, there’s an eerie energy in the air in this unincorporated Los Angeles County suburb. What used to look like a little slice of heaven — with its rolling hills, palm trees, and bougainvillea flowers — now looks more like the wreckage from a nuclear blast. Incinerated cars sit in abandoned driveways amid the ash and rubble. Charred palm trees, rusted fences, and bare chimneys are often the only bones that remain of old homes. Some lots have been untouched since the fires as residents weigh whether to rebuild or sell.

Click here to read the full article in the National Review