The True Cost of Recovering from the LA Wildfires, Part 2

CHRISTINE: This is the second part of a three-part series on the LA Wildfires, one year later. If you haven’t listened to part one yet, go back and find it in our feed. It’s called The True Cost of Recovering from the LA Wildfires: Part 1.

ABIGAIL: Forty sixty three and I think that’s this one. That’s green. Yeah. There’s the mailbox.

CHRISTINE: In December, I drove up a beautiful winding road with my co-host Rosie Guerin and our producer Abigail Keel. We were headed to our colleague, Gregory Han’s, home.

In January 2025, Gregory and his wife, Emily, evacuated from their home, thinking they’d be gone for a few days. But the damage and destruction from the Eaton Fire kept them from moving back in for six months.

GREGORY: Yeah, you can see it’s Oaklined Street.

ROSIE: Eucalyptus or something? What is that?

GREGORY: You are probably smelling there’s sage. There is… [FADE DOWN]

CHRISTINE: Gregory’s house is on top of a big hill. He lives on a small cul-de-sac with a handful of other homes, all built in the Meadows neighborhood of Altadena. A year out from the fire, none of the homes around him looked burned. The fires didn’t come up this side of the hill. But it doesn’t mean they weren’t damaged.

GREGORY: Yeah, so when I arrived here, this area was the most obvious contaminated with particulate matter. The all of this curb had caught everything that was blowing this way,…So the the smoke had come over this way and apparently like blown with the wind down this way because our neighbor and our friend Sandy, she lost her roof, so it’s all redone.

ABIGAIL: This across the street. Yeah.

GREGORY: Yeah. Across the street. And so apparently it blew in here and it just accumulated all around the circle. This circle driver which I love became a big catch.

ABIGAIL: So what did it look like?

GREGORY: It looked like somebody dumped a bunch of like salt and pepper, like big white and gray and black pieces that had accumulated into piles. So I came one time fully PPE’d and gathered it and put it in a baggie and sent out a sample to test right away.

ROSIE: What did the sample that you sent away? What did that that one come back as?

GREGORY: It showed high lead.

CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset and this is The Wirecutter Show. This is part two of our special series looking back at the LA Wildfires, one year later. Gregory, and our other colleague Mike Cohen, both survived the Eaton Fire, which raged through the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. They faced different consequences. Mike’s home was destroyed. Gregory’s was damaged. But they are both still navigating what it means to live through a natural disaster.

Because Gregory and Mike are both Wirecutter writers, they tend to be practical and service-minded. And they’ve thought a lot about what others can take away from their experiences. Last summer, they published an article that gave their best advice for anyone who might face a natural disaster. We’re drawing from that article and what they’ve learned in the six months since.

Last time, we heard about what happened during the fire and immediately after for Gregory and Mike…and about one of their biggest lessons: investing in your community before a disaster.

Today, we’re going to hear more about what’s happened in their lives since the fires. And they’re advice for how to navigate a big piece of the puzzle of recovery: insurance. They’ve got one simple suggestion you can do now that you’ll thank yourself for later…

GREGORY: In a disaster…you just assume, I think that they will take your word for it. And that’s a very unsafe presumption, you know.

CHRISTINE: We’ll hear more from Gregory and Mike after the break.

One thing that Gregory and Mike both told us about their year since the fires is that they sometimes feel like they’re living someone else’s life.

Gregory was displaced for six months, while his home was remediated – which means it needed to be professionally cleaned and repaired to make it safe to live in again.

Mike doesn’t have a home to move back to. Soon after the fires, he and Chelsey moved in with family in Texas. In April, they came back to LA. After a few different AirBnBs, they settled into a rented apartment.

MIKE: When I wake up in the morning and I choose the clothes to wear. They’re not my clothes. All of these clothes that I’m wearing right now were donations, which I’m so grateful for. But when I look at myself in the mirror, I don’t, I literally don’t recognize myself. It feels like everything is temporary for us since the fires…we don’t know what the rebuilding process will look like. We don’t know if we’ll get back to Altadena. We don’t know if Altadena will be fully safe for us to go back to. We don’t know if it’ll be the Altadena that we bought a house and wanted to raise a family in.

CHRISTINE And speaking of family, you your life does look a lot different this year, right? Than it did before the fires.

MIKE: Yeah. So the fires were pretty much the first week of January. A week later we found out we were pregnant. With our first child. And so it was a roller coaster.

CHRISTINE: Mike’s daughter Florence was born in October.

And so yeah. Everything is different. Everything is different. Everything that makes you feel like you when you wake up in the morning and you’re like, oh, this is my coffee machine. The way that I like to do it, everything is different.

CHRISTINE: One hurdle disaster victims face, after their immediate safety is taken care of, is…where to live and how to replace their stuff. Mike and Gregory both assumed that FEMA–the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which provides disaster assistance – would offer some of this help. But the first check they each received after the fire was much less than they’d expected, covering only a fraction of their expenses.

GREGORY: We got seven hundred, was it? Seven hundred and seventy dollars. Yeah, everybody got the seven seventy.

MIKE: Everybody gets the seven seventy.

GREGORY: Yeah. And that was to cover maybe some groceries, some basic necessities. And then everybody else I haven’t heard of anybody else getting any other FEMA aid.

MIKE: No, we’ve been rejected multiples times and we’ve appealed multiple times…

GREGORY: Same here.

CHRISTINE: Other LA Wildfire victims have received more.

As of June 2025, FEMA and its federal partners reported dispensing over $3 billion dollars in funds to wildfire survivors.

In reality, many of those initial costs for Gregory and his wife were covered by their home insurance.

GREGORY: We ambled into the our insurers mobile disaster tent that they set up in Altadena. We walked in and said, We we need help. We’re affected by the fires and we need help we need money for groceries. We’re not working. We just need money to get by. And we were really fortunate because the guy who we met said, Oh, I’ll approve today right off the bat…Some of our neighbors immediately next to us did not get approved for two weeks. And it’s really that luck of the draw of insurance that is really maddening. I remember walking out of the tent, I said, At least for the next three months we’ll be okay. And that’s how you move forward. It’s like next week, next month, yeah.

CHRISTINE: Eventually, though, disaster victims need more than just money for groceries and immediate housing – you need to start replacing the items you use everyday. The items that make up your daily life. You need money for these items. And to get that money from an insurance company, you need to prove that you actually owned these items. That’s where the list comes in.

MIKE: This is the list of every single thing in your home if you were to take your home and dump it out.

CHRISTINE: Home insurance policies cover not just your home…but also the things inside it. Your personal property. And when, like Mike, you’ve lost everything and need money to replace that property, insurance asks for a list of exactly what they’re paying to replace.

MIKE: Most people can’t tell you what’s in their backpack right now. If you were to dump all of it out and itemize it. Imagine having to do that with every single drawer in your entire home, every box in your attic, every shelf with every single book. You will get paid some amount for every single item, but only if you can remember it…They’re they’re they’re protecting themselves against fraud. They’re only paying out as much as they have to…And we’re on the other side of it going, I don’t know how many pairs of socks I had.

GREGORY: There are a lot of things that are hidden away that you just store away and forget, just just being an American. So when you go through the process of making a claim with your insurance, they want proof that you own these things…By having everything documented, you’re already doing the footwork with the insurance. There have been instances where we had to push back and say, oh no, no, no, that’s not what you we owned. You’re giving us the lesser of this thing…

CHRISTINE: Mike and Gregory’s advice for what to do now to protect yourself before a disaster…is to start making this list. Document your possessions. Keeping receipts, especially digital ones, will help. But you’ll also want photographic evidence of your items. It’s something Mike and Gregory both wish they had done more thoroughly before the fires.

If you had had photographic documentation of everything that you had in your home, would it have made it easier in the weeks after the fire with your insurance company?

MIKE: Yes, if we had had photographic documentation, video documentation that was really intentionally done, it would have been so much easier. We could have started the conversation and the negotiations with our insurance company with that documentation. Instead, what we had to do was reach out to all of our friends and go through all of our photos and try to find as much of it as we could. We went through friends’ instagrams, we went through deep dives of our photos. Really luckily, we had just gotten our dog the year before. And as any first-time young puppy owner will tell you, you’re taking videos of them all the time throughout your entire house. Oh, here’s Una running away from the Dyson Vacuum V8 Absolute model. Oh, there’s Una. She’s turning the corner and she’s right next to the air purifier. Like we sent our insurance adjuster so many videos of our dog that by the end, she actually remarked on it and was like, Your dog is really cute and you’ve done a great job training her.

CHRISTINE: The process…of making the list and negotiating with insurance for payment…It looks different for everyone, depending on what you lost, and the insurance you have. But Gregory and Mike have both been surprised by just how long it can take.

GREGORY: We’re still in the process of working with our insurance to replace or be paid a certain amount with depreciation of what we lost, what we had to throw out due to contamination. And I will say that it’s a six-figure amount, which is crazy. It all adds up.

CHRISTINE: They recommend taking a video walkthrough of your home. Film as you walk from room to room. Open every drawer, open every cabinet. For important items, show the brand or model. Don’t forget your garage, the attic, or the basement. You want the video to be your exhaustive, dump-it-all-out list.

How frequently should people be documenting their homes if they’re trying to prepare themselves for some unfortunate event that might happen in the future? Because I mean, I think like people would have the intent to do this, but it seems like a kind of something that nobody wants to do.

MIKE: Do it when you move. You’re moving into a new place, you’re probably gonna take a video. Of it so that your landlord knows what it looks like and you can prove it to them. Do it when you move. Do it when you have a major life event. Oh, we got married. Here’s everything on our registry. Oh, a parent passed away and now we’re having to go through all of their possessions. And then do it once every couple of years and you’re gonna be fine. And lastly, like do it today. Do it today, it’ll take eight minutes.

CHRISTINE: And don’t forget your important documents. Photos. Family heirlooms. Take photos or scan your identification and legal documents. Make sure that if you were to lose access to these physical items, you could still access the information they hold.

GREGORY: When you go to the bank to say, hey, I need some cash just to get some groceries, if you if you don’t have proof that you bank with them, you know, it’s it’s it’s hard. It’s it it becomes very, very difficult to prove prove a lot of things that we take for granted when we have just access to it all the time. So having a digitized version of your life that you can like say all these things are true about myself, when you’re asked of it, because you run into so many challenges of who you are and what your life is in an in a disaster that you just didn’t expect. You just assume, I think that they will take your word for it. And that’s that’s a very unsafe presumption, you know.

So having digital access to things that are normally part of your life, like just gives you a little bit of an insurance policy.

CHRISTINE: Beyond documenting your stuff, there’s something else you should do now. You probably won’t like it. It may require that you face some of your greatest fears. But it could save your home–if not your life.

We’ll talk more about that…after the break.

GREGORY: Down there is a creek. That goes all if you hike it all the way up it goes to a waterfall.

CHRISTINE: It’s December 2025 and I’m standing in Gregory’s backyard with Rosie and Abigail. It’s beautiful. There’s a dining table area, string lights…and two lounge chairs, overlooking an incredible view of the mountains and the city below. Gregory said he thinks the six-foot tall hedges that used to block this view might have been what got him the house. No one else realized quite what was behind them. He ripped them out when he moved in.

GREGORY: So you came up on that road right there. And this is a good place to look out. That bare spot right there, there used to be several homes and those I believe fifty three homes burned. So that’s where it stopped. The fire had stopped there. Just right there. Yeah, like right where that where you see like it’s kind of bare now. Yeah. Those homes up there…

ROSIE: You can hear the creek.

GREGORY: Yeah. Yeah, it’s really, really Em Emily and I sit here like two old fogies very often and just quietly listen to that and you know the…

CHRISTINE: You can hear a little bit of the city, but it’s so peaceful.

Gregory turns back towards the house. The entire back side of it is made of glass sliding doors. Five sets, two doors each. You can see into his kitchen, his living room. His two cats paw one of the panes of glass.

GREGORY: There’s our cats, Hani and Hobie., they were this big when they left and now they’re

ROSIE: They’re thriving!

GREGORY: Yeah, they’re thriving.

ABIGAIL: Ahahah. Standing up!

GREGORY: Yeah.
CHRISTINE: He points to the corner of the house where the side wall meets the glass doors.

GREGORY: But this is where a lot of the that corner right there, that last window is where a lot of of the particulate matter got into. But all across here inside was a line of soot char ash. You could just see it… [FADE OUT]

CHRISTINE: The fires were a huge shock to Gregory. They upended his life. But they weren’t a surprise.

GREGORY: Growing up in Los Angeles, I had numerous occasions where we had to evacuate. So I never took wildfire, you know, lightly. I’m very much like somebody who has a go bin emergency supplies ready to go, have backpack ready to go, I have all this forethought in understanding like these fires can come so quickly faster than you think.

CHRISTINE: When he bought his home, he considered the area and evaluated its risks. It was right by a national forest, there was only one road in and out.

GREGORY: And I knew if we were gonna buy into this neighborhood, we’d have to be ready in so many ways. And so I had a mind state that what could what’s the worst thing that could happen?

CHRISTINE: This mindset, of confronting what you are really at risk for based on where you live, is something that Gregory and Mike both said stuck out to them a year after the fires. While you certainly can’t truly prepare for the realities of every possible disaster, you can be aware and take some precautions.

After Gregory moved into his home, he invested a lot of time and money into a process called “home-hardening”. This term means you’re making your home and the land around it more resistant to heat, embers, and fires. So your house is less likely to catch fire.

For Gregory, it meant regular clean up of brush, leaves, and pine needles from his gutters and yard. Trimming back trees that were too close to the house. And replacing the old vents that surrounded his home with custom intumescent venting. Intumescent materials swell when exposed to heat, and are used for passive fire protection. Gregory’s vents have three layers, including an intumescent honeycomb layer that swells closed in the presence of intense heat. He showed them to us when we walked around his property.

GREGORY: But you can see the intumescent vent. This vent that goes all across, this is what we paid for. This is the three layer intumescent venting. So it’s a a thin a very narrow filter, then it goes to an intumescent material that will close off after four hundred and thirty degree temperature, and then another layer of venting. So this had prevented a lot of things from going in.

CHRISTINE: There’s no way to know if the home-hardening Gregory did prevented his home from catching fire. But he does believe that the vents he installed helped block particulate matter and ash from entering. Neighbors without upgraded vents saw more ash in their attics.

Gregory paid for those upgrades out of pocket. The vents alone cost him over $7,000 dollars.

CHRISTINE: Did any of this fire hardening you did for your home impact your insurance premiums? Did it give you any kind of like discount or anything?

GREGORY: Yeah. You know, we thought that that would help. And we contacted our agent and said, Hey, we put in these intumescent fire resistant vents. Anyways, the agent said, Yeah, you’ll save about seven dollars. And I’ve been thinking about that, like I don’t know why the insurance aren’t incentivizing fire hardening efforts because they save money in the long term.

CHRISTINE: Although Gregory didn’t see a meaningful decrease in his premiums for the vents he installed, the Insurance Information Institute, an industry research group, says home owners could see bigger premium discounts for other upgrades. Things like installing an impact-resistant roof, which is more resistant to wind.

Gregory says that his lesson in all of this is to be a realist and prepare your home for the risks it faces.

GREGORY: you have to be observant in a way that most people are averse to…it’s really it’s really tough because you can only prepare what you know and that comes from observation I think a lot of people that I have spoken to in Los Angeles, even though they know that there’s these all these fires that happen, they haven’t done anything and it’s like crazy to me because they’re and I’m not talking about people who are in an economic situation that like they can’t afford to. They just don’t want to think about it. And thinking about is the first step…Climate change is going to reach all of us in some way…but I think yeah, just observation of knowing when it’s not so bad can prepare you for when it gets really bad.

CHRISTINE: One of the major reasons why it’s important to understand your home and the risks it faces is so that you can make sure your home insurance policy covers you in the event that one of those risks actually happens.

Nearly all home insurance policies include fire coverage, but depending on where you live you may want additional coverage for floods, earthquakes, or other disasters. Gregory and Mike both said that when they bought their homes they were concerned they wouldn’t be able to get coverage.

That’s because major insurers have been pulling out of the California market over the past few years, citing soaring costs, untenable financial risk and state regulations. In fact, thousands of homeowners in the area lost their coverage just the year before the fires.

While there are some state-sponsored options, potential home owners are facing tough choices.

MIKE: Our realtor was always very upfront about how living in certain areas, we would have trouble getting insurance or fire insurance, or it might be more expensive because we were in high fire risk areas. And there was even a map of what is high fire risk and what is not…We saw ourselves and we were medium risk. And we thought, oh wow, well, maybe this is a risk that other people aren’t willing to take. But if it’s what we can afford, and it’s a risk we’re willing to take, maybe that means we get a house. I thought about disasters like most people think about them. Wow that’s really sad that happened to those other people. But it’s never gonna happen to me.

CHRISTINE: Mike was insured. He had fire coverage. But that, he says, is basically all he knew about his home insurance policy.

MIKE: I knew my mortgage lender needed a certain amount of it in order to okay our loan. But to me, it was more like car insurance. Oh man, how can I get my monthly premium down as much as I can?…I don’t think I read my entire policy when I got it. I saw three or four numbers. They seemed like enough. I signed on the line and I paid every month or every year.

CHRISTINE: When Mike signed his contract with an insurance company, he got a document that was forty-some-odd pages long.

MIKE: After the catastrophe happened, one of the first things that we did was to take our entire insurance policy, drop it into an AI chatbot, and ask it questions and say, what does upgrade code and rebuilding amenities mean? What does landscaping remediation mean? Because again, the insurance company is doing a great job of crossing their T’s and dotting their I’s, but in such a way that can be obfuscating to the average individual who’s just paying a premium every month…I think it’s too much to ask for everybody to read through their insurance policy, but it’d be really great for them to at least understand what it is and what they’re agreeing to.

CHRISTINE: Know your policy. That’s what Mike and Gregory recommend today. Read it – or get help reading it – so that if you need to use it, you know what you’re entitled to.

GREGORY: and that empowers you to meet with your insurer and demand exactly what you’re owed, what you paid for.

CHRISTINE: There are three main things that home insurance can help you pay for after a disaster. One is personal property, which we talked about earlier. This covers the cost of your items.

The second thing your policy should cover is Additional Living Expenses – commonly called A.L.E. –which typically cover the cost of being displaced. So…rent money for a new apartment, while you’re waiting for your damaged home to be livable or your destroyed home to be rebuilt.

GREGORY: And so the more you know what is exactly in your policy, and that is very difficult to do. It’s very difficult to parse and it’s intentionally very difficult to understand. Once you have the information key points, then you can say, I am demanding this, this, this, and that,…because they will play the shell game of saying, Well, I don’t know if you’d really need that. Well, yeah, I need rent. I need somewhere to live. And that moves you forward. When you’re not moving or you feel like you’re regressing, that’s where the hopelessness starts kicking in, because you don’t know what to do. So knowing what to do and what to ask for is important and that starts from knowing your policy.

CHRISTINE: You want to be able to speak the same language as the insurance adjusters you might be working with. You want to know how to ask for what you need in a way where they can’t say no.

The third thing your home insurance should cover is the value of the home itself–you know, the cost to repair or rebuild a damaged or destroyed structure. This one can get really tricky. We’ll talk about repairing a damaged home first. That’s what happened to Gregory.

When Gregory was eventually able to come back to his property after the fires, his yard was covered in that salt & pepper dust he described earlier. It wasn’t just in his yard. The wind pushed through the cracks and vents in his home. It’s what collected inside his glass doors. And that dust was full of pollutants.

Pollution caused by the fires has been an ongoing concern for people in the neighborhood. Many still-standing homes have tested positive for lead and asbestos, even after extensive indoor cleanup.

Gregory felt that his home was unsafe to move back into, especially because his wife had just finished cancer treatment. He wanted to go through remediation.

GREGORY: Remediation is the process of bringing your home, your livable space back to safe levels prior to whatever disaster has affected the interior space.

I always tell people if they’ve seen the movie E.T. and where they close off the family’s home, the government agent comes and like seals it in plastic so nobody can get in and out without bringing contamination or bringing contamination out. That’s very similar to what we saw.

CHRISTINE: But in order to have his home remediated, he had to prove that it was, in fact, contaminated and unsafe to live in. To do this, he needed to test the soil on his property and the pollutant levels in different places in his home.

GREGORY: We tested for soot char ash and lead specifically. And those tests were expensive. We paid out of pocket. So our insurer at at first said they would not cover testing. And that was that was a big, big problem. That’s why a lot of people couldn’t move forward was Without testing, you don’t get remediation – coverage for remediation or lead abatement remediation. So we paid over eight over eight thousand dollars out of pocket to have an industri– certified industrial hygienist come who is trained to properly take samples from across your home and look for contamination levels and break it down and then you we use that in turn to inform the remediation team and our insurer to push back on them.

CHRISTINE: Were you ever reimbursed for that out of pocket expense?

GREGORY: Yes, but it was approximately six months later.

CHRISTINE: That’s the kind of thing that Gregory wishes he had clearer language about in his home insurance policy. Covering that initial testing.

After the testing came back showing unsafe levels of contaminants, Gregory moved forward with remediation. This process is what kept him from returning home for six months after the fire.

GREGORY: They sealed the home in plastic. So the windows, the doors. Then they go in and then they put the things that they feel like were contaminated and that we agreed to have thrown out, put in plastic sealed bags and then they start disposing of items. Once all that is all taken out, they start putting your items in piles that they can start cleaning individually. So things as small as your books. Well, we had r I had records that were were cleaned. They wiped down your furniture, they wiped out down your floors, they they vacuum, they run these industrial sized air purifiers to clean the interior air. So they’re doing they’re doing it room by room. And then what you’re left with is just like piles of stuff. They don’t put things back…and it passed, because after you have remediation, then you have to have post remediation testing, clearance testing, to prove that they did the right job. So we were very fortunate. Our remediation team did a good job. And we were able to get it back in.

CHRISTINE: Some of Gregory’s neighbors are still not back in their homes. Maybe they couldn’t afford the necessary testing out of pocket, or couldn’t get it covered by insurance. Or maybe their results required remediation of a larger area, which costs more money. Everyone’s situation is different.

Insurance is something most people don’t think much about until they need it. But following Mike and Gregory’s advice now…could save you from major headaches in the future. Document your stuff. Digitize your documents. And if you’re at risk for certain natural disasters, try to adjust your home accordingly.

CHRISTINE: And maybe most importantly: understand what your insurance policy covers. This can help make sure you have the coverage you need if you face a situation like Gregory’s, where your home is damaged but not destroyed.

It can also help you understand how much coverage you have if, like Mike, you lose your entire home and need money to replace it.

CHRISTINE: Were you covered enough for your losses?

MIKE: No. And I don’t know anybody who’s been fully covered to the extent of their losses.

CHRISTINE: Unfortunately, Mike’s insurance policy is not enough to cover the full cost of replacing his home. We’re going to talk more about why that is – and why many Americans may be in the same situation, without even realizing it…Next time.

If you were to write yourself a letter today to yourself from two years ago, About insurance. what would be the main things that you would say to yourself.

MIKE: Get more.

CHRISTINE: Find part three of this series, right here, on Monday.

ROSIE GUERIN: This series was reported and hosted by Christine Cyr Clisset. The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by me, Rosie Guerin, and produced by Abigail Keel. This series was fact checked by Cole Louison, and the audio was mixed by Katie McMurran. Engineering support from Maddy Massiello and Nick Pittman. Our interview with Gregory and Mike was recorded by Tim Moore at York Recording in Los Angeles. Original music for this series by Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, Rowan Niemisto, Catherine Anderson, and Pat McCusker. Special thanks to Harry Sawyers and Jen Gushue for editing Gregory’s original article and to Daniel Ramirez from New York Times Audio. Cliff Levy is Wirecutter’s Deputy Publisher and general manager. Ben Frumin is Wirecutter’s editor-in-chief. Thanks for listening.