The True Cost of Recovering from the LA Wildfires, Part 3

CHRISTINE: This is the third episode in a three-part series about the LA Wildfires…a look at the aftermath and the process of recovery one year later. We recommend you listen to this series in order, so if you haven’t heard parts one and two yet, you can find them in our feed labeled The True Cost of Recovering from the LA Wildfires.

MIKE: Yeah. So Woodbury is one of our east-west running streets here.

CHRISTINE: That’s Mike Cohen, again–my colleague and a deals writer for Wirecutter. He lost his home last January in the LA Wildfires. He’s showing me, our executive producer and co-host Rosie Guerin, and producer Abigail Keel around Altadena in December 2025.

MIKE: And to the left there’s where we had the recovery center, like the disaster relief center. That’s where FEMA, Army Corps, everybody set up in a big tent…On the left, this is core, that’s where they’re showing us a bunch of different ADUs and different modular homes that you can purchase trying to help people with the cost of rebuilding. Buy an ADU, plop it on their plot, and then live in it while their house is being rebuilt.

CHRISTINE: What Mike just mentioned there, the ADUs – that stands for “accessory dwelling units”…they kind of look like tiny homes. ADUs are pretty common in LA. People use them as offices or guest rooms. Using insurance money to buy an ADU is an option for people who’ve lost their homes, like Mike. They can put one on their land to live in while they rebuild.

CHRISTINE: Are the people that are doing that…are they at all concerned about the sort of remaining toxicity in the soil blowing around and breathing that in? Is that something that is kind of a risk you’re taking if you come back and live on your property while you’re rebuilding before everything has been remediated?

MIKE: Yeah. That’s been a real concern for a lot of the people, even people whose homes are still standing…people who’ve come back to live in the area are raising that concern with everyone of well, I can only afford to live outside of Altadena for so many months with additional living expenses. But if I’m coming back to Altadena for the next couple of years living in a trailer, what am I living through?

CHRISTINE: Mike and his family have been living in a rental apartment about 20 minutes away from Altadena. They’re still figuring out what to do next…attempt to rebuild or try to sell and move on? It’s a tough decision, especially because Mike can’t really afford either option.

And his time to make a decision is running out. The help he’s getting from insurance to pay for his rental, won’t last much longer.

MIKE: Our additional living expenses are only for a couple more months. And the moratorium on our mortgage, whereby we didn’t have to pay each month, is also going to expire next month.

CHRISTINE: So you’re gonna reach a point soon where you’re going to be needing to pay rent to live somewhere and you’re going to need to pay the mortgage on your home that burned down.

MIKE: Yeah. I don’t know what we’re going to be able to do…It’s going to be up to the finances…And the amount of time that we have is running out. And I think that that’s the predicament that most people in Altadena find themselves in.

CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset and this is The Wirecutter Show.

When we set out to make this series, we really wanted to focus on the lessons that Mike and our other colleague, Gregory Han, had learned a year into recovering from the LA Wildfires. What were the things that stuck out to them once the dust had settled? What are the pieces of advice they wish someone had given them?

In the first episode, we learned about what Mike and Gregory each lost in the fires, and how crucial their communities were in providing them help and support in the immediate aftermath.

Last episode, they shared advice for some of the pre-work you can do ahead of time that could help in the wake of a natural disaster – things like documenting your possessions, now. And making sure you understand what’s covered by your home-owners or renters policy.

Today, we’re going to spend some time talking about the true costs of recovery…the money, the time and the emotional toll that finding your feet after a natural disaster can take. We’ll expand on how to make sure you have enough insurance. And also, what insurance could never cover.

We’re also going to hear about some of the ways Mike and Gregory have learned to advocate for themselves, and why, if you’re ever in a disaster, you might need to be prepared to do the same.

More, when we come back.

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

MIKE: Get more.

GREGORY: Yeah.

CHRISTINE: When I talked to Gregory and Mike, they both told me that over the last year, they had incurred costs that may never be covered by insurance. Costs like replacing items, lost wages, and, for Gregory, covering repairs and upgrades to his home. For Mike though, the financial aftermath of the Eaton Fire is staggering.

MIKE: So, like most Americans, we are insured, but we are underinsured…In our scenario, we bought our home we put about 10% down in order to get our mortgage. The insurance only covers the actual structure. It doesn’t cover the piece of land, because they presume that you can sell that. So when you’re looking at that coverage, a lot of people would say, make sure that it’s at least half, if not more, of the total purchase price of your home. We got a little less than half.

CHRISTINE: The amount of coverage you should have on your home isn’t always straightforward. It will depend on a number of factors, but ideally it should cover the cost to rebuild your house and any structures on your land–and that may not be the price you paid for your property or its current market value. Because building costs tend to go up over time, it might be more than you’re currently insured for.

Many Americans do not have enough home insurance. Estimates show that as high as almost 2 out of 3 homeowners across the country are underinsured, just like Mike.

This means that if their home was destroyed today, the amount of coverage in their policy would not cover the full cost of rebuilding their home.

Mike’s coverage for a total-loss, the situation he’s in, does not match what prospective builders are quoting him to re-build on the same lot. And this is a situation that many people in Altadena and the Palisades now find themselves in. According to the Insurance Information Institute, the cost of rebuilding nationwide has gone up by nearly 30 percent over the past 5 years, because of things like supply chain disruptions, rising building material costs, and labor shortages. And in the wake of a natural disaster, like the LA wildfires, those costs tend to rise even further because so many people need to rebuild at the same time.

For Mike, the difference in what he can get from insurance and what it would cost to rebuild is hundreds of thousands of dollars. And he still has to pay his mortgage for the home that burned down.

Mike’s other option is to take the insurance payout and sell the land.

MIKE: I don’t think that plot of land in a burned down or flooded out or mudslid area is going to be worth that amount to cover the difference.

CHRISTINE: This spot Mike finds himself in…its called “the insurance Gap”

MIKE: Right now we’re stuck in that gap. If we take the insurance money and try to pay off as much of our mortgage and sell our plot, we’re still down about a quarter of our investment. So then we have to rebuild, but we can’t afford to yet. Not to the house that we had, and not really to a house that we could sell for the original purchase price either. So we’re stuck.

CHRISTINE: One thing that anyone should consider doing – no matter where you live, whether you own or rent, or what risks you face-is to check in with your insurance agent annually to make sure you have enough coverage. This may sound like a hassle, or expensive. But it might not cost that much more per month–and it could end up saving you financially if you’re ever in a total loss situation.

If you’ve remodeled or upgraded your home in other ways that increase its value, you should also make sure you have the right amount of coverage.

Stop and ask yourself a question: Could you afford to rebuild after a total loss?

The insurance gap is one example of a financial cost in the aftermath of a disaster. But the true cost of recovery includes much more than finances. My colleague Gregory Han says that for him, it includes reckoning with a new sense of self.

GREGORY: I wake up and I don’t know where I am, what the day is, and sometimes who I am. That’s a real real weird sensation. The edges of what I think defines me have been I think softened in a way that I’m still trying to get a foothold.

…there’s a survivor’s guilt that resonates through my life too. It feels weird sometimes having…having good moments at home when I know just down the street, somebody’s like looking at where their couch used to be and where they used to cuddle up with their kids…

CHRISTINE: The grief– and how much that grief interrupted his normal state of being and productivity, has also surprised Gregory.

GREGORY: I didn’t work that much while I was displaced because my full-time job was navigating everything to try to get us back home, and then also being a caretaker to my wife. And it’s been really hard to get back into this mind state like that those things are that important. Like the work is important, you know. I mean, yeah, I have to make a living, but it’s really hard to care about those things when you have escaped such instability and possible death. Some things just don’t seem that important anymore. But, you know, we’re all just trying to get by.

CHRISTINE: Gregory is a freelance writer, he’s not employed full time by Wirecutter or anywhere else. And it’s the same for his wife, Emily. They’ve been able to make it work. But now, Gregory is feeling the weight of instability. We talked last time about the costs he incurred in the aftermath of the fire repairing his home.

CHRISTINE: How are you covering those costs?

GREGORY: We are dipping into savings. So my wife and I…before everything went pear-shaped. We were doing well and we started saving for a rainy day and also for retirement…And that rainy day came in the form of fire…Now I’m feeling completely unstable and feeling really, to be frank, very frightened about what my senior years are gonna be like because now we’re in a situation like, okay, now we have to worry about property tax, now we have to worry about in the home insurance. And how are we gonna afford that in a climate unstable landscape of possible home catching on fire again.

CHRISTINE: The possibility of a future disaster looms over Gregory and Mike in their decisions. Is it a good idea to rebuild in Altadena? To stay here at all? They’re tough questions to answer. But, at least for now, both of them feel like Altadena is home.

Still though, Gregory is worried about his lack of a financial safety net, especially now that he’s dipped into his savings. That’s one of his major takeaways from the last year: If you can, save money — any amount you can – because maybe it’ll help you cover the cost of a hotel room in an evacuation…or pay out-of-pocket to test for contamination you’re worried about.

Mike, on the other hand, feels a little complicated about the idea of an emergency fund being enough for most people.

MIKE: There is no proper amount of a rainy day fund that would be the safety net that we were looking for…That’s what insurance is for.

CHRISTINE: The “gap”, Mike says, can’t be closed with a few months’ worth of expenses saved. He knows people who have started GoFundMe’s to help them close the gap. Or taken out loans with the Small Business Administration, or SBA, a federal organization that offers low-interest loans in disaster areas. Mike could take out an additional loan to help close his gap. But this would add to overall monthly costs that are already becoming overwhelming, between paying rent and his outstanding mortgage.

Mike’s recommendation goes back to what he talked about last episode – that knowing your insurance policy and making sure it’s enough is crucial.

MIKE: The best thing that we can do is unfortunately increase your premium and see if they can be that rainy day fund…You can afford the extra forty-two dollars a month somehow. You can’t afford the six figures of destruction and rebuild costs that insurance won’t cover because you saved $42 a month.

CHRISTINE: There is one other option for covering the gap that some survivors are hopeful for. A lawsuit. The power company, Southern California Edison or SCE, is currently being sued by the Federal government, Los Angeles County, as well as other cities and individual victims for negligence in maintaining its equipment in Eaton Canyon, where the fire started.

SCE has denied it was responsible for starting the fire.

They are offering a voluntary compensation program to qualifying victims – compensation that could come much sooner than the results of the lawsuit, which may not go to court for at least another year.

But waiting for the outcome of that lawsuit could mean higher payouts for victims.

Not every natural disaster will have an accompanying lawsuit or someone to blame. The Eaton Fire could, but even so, the waiting game…is part of the true cost of recovery.

Navigating the insurance process has been more complicated and arduous than Mike or Gregory would have ever imagined a year ago. Their last twelve months have been a steep learning curve. It hasn’t been easy.

MIKE: It is an Olympic level marathon…And it means little things like the car is completely totaled, it’s been burned, it’s a crisp. My insurance payout for my car insurance says, Oh, this is how much we think your car is worth. Now I have to go back and look up Kelly Blue book and I have to go around and find through car gurus and other things, other prices so that I can say, no, I think this is how much it’s worth…

So unfortunately, you have to be your own advocate to protect your own interests.

CHRISTINE: Be prepared to be your own advocate. That’s the last big piece of advice that Mike and Gregory have taken away from this year. We’ll talk more about what that means to them after the break.

Gregory and Mike both told me over and over again how much work it was to manage their affairs after the fire. Both quickly learned that they had to negotiate with their insurance companies for everything. And not just that, they had to ask the same questions and make the same claims repeatedly. Sometimes those negotiations were collaborative and supportive…other times they were frustrating and adversarial.

Gregory and Mike called it another full-time job. An exhausting, emotionally draining full-time job. And it’s not a job either of them wanted to do…but it’s one they say you should be prepared for if you find yourself in a position like theirs.

I should mention…There are services and organizations out there that can become, basically, your case manager after a disaster. But these services aren’t always free.

So if you take on the job yourself…they have a few suggestions.

MIKE: One of the first things we learned was don’t take their first offer And that that was as true for the car as it is for our ALE, our rent. Negotiations with our mortgage and them holding our insurance money. All of these things are parts where…It’s not like these people are services that work for you. You are contracted with them, but they’re there to protect their own interests.

CHRISTINE: So, don’t take the first offer. Consider these interactions with insurance and other agencies what they are: negotiations. Gregory says that it can also help to let go of any timidity, embarrassment, or shame.

GREGORY: I’m pretty much an introvert in many ways, but when it came to the home, I became an extrovert. I became very forceful of like not unkind or you know, rude or anything, but I was like, I’m going through this process and I will fight you tooth and nail to make sure that my wife returns to a safe home.

CHRISTINE: This process really brought out that forceful side of Gregory. Forceful, but not mean. That’s an important distinction. If you ever find yourself in this type of situation, consider that it might be best to stay on good terms with the folks you’re negotiating with.

MIKE: Insurance adjusters are people too. We’ve actually had an amazing time with our insurance adjuster. She actually became one of the very first people that we shared our pregnancy status with…and she was kind and she kept track of, oh, you guys are in your second trimester now, I know how that is. Get back to me when you can…like these people are good people enough. It’s just the systems and the positions that they put us in can become adversarial and I’ve always said like I always try to lead with compassion, the benefit of the doubt, and reaching out to them on a human to human level.

CHRISTINE: Human to human also means…whenever possible try to meet face to face. Gregory told me the meetings he had in person, as opposed to over the phone or via email, often went smoother and resulted in better outcomes. It’s not always an option, but when it is…do it in person.

It sounds exhausting. It sounds…like you said it’s like a marathon. It sounds like it takes an immense amount of executive function to stay organized and on task. How do you tackle that?

GREGORY: The first several months my wife felt overwhelmed and I said, Let’s just break this up day to day and we’ll complete one thing every day. And one one thing we complete, whether it moves us forward or not, at least we made an effort.

MIKE: So I’m lucky that my employment is Sunday through Thursday. So my weekend is Friday, Saturday. That gives me one business day where all the administrative offices are open. So Friday is FEMA Fridays for me. I call FEMA in the morning. I’m probably on hold for a number of hours. So during those hours, I can also call the SBA, or I can be drafting an email to my mortgage company…It’s staying on top of every email that I send or portal message through the Small Business Administration’s website and following up every two to three days. It’s staying ahead of my mortgage company because I have to check in with them every month, proving that my house is still destroyed and I’m not living in it.

CHRISTINE: Mike and Gregory also recommended keeping extensive notes. Gregory has kept a spreadsheet of whom he’s contacted and when. He took screenshots of portal messages with insurance.

Mike recorded phone conversations when he could…to go back and listen to later.

MIKE: It’s hard to process all of this information. It’s hard to hold in your head all these different figures. So we’ve gone back and re-listened to a number of conversations in order to say, oh, they said that we can apply for rebuilding. No, no, they said refinancing. No, wait, let’s go back. Oh, it’s actually both rebuilding and refinancing.

CHRISTINE: Make sure you ask permission to record phone calls. Different states have different rules about recording.

MIKE: Something we do is often when we get off the phone with our like insurance adjuster, we’ll say, Can you send us an email in writing summarizing everything we’ve done? Yeah. Or I’ll just say, hey, is it okay if I record this and I’ll have AI send us an email summary of everything we’ve discussed and you can agree or disagree with it, but I just want to make sure that we’re both looking at the same facts in black and white.

CHRISTINE: Finally a great use for AI.

GREGORY: Yeah. Yeah. AI has actually been useful in this situation.

CHRISTINE: We’ve tossed out a lot of advice in this series and…we’ll list all of it in the show notes for this episode.

One other detail about becoming your own advocate…is that your friends and neighbors and the people around you…might not advocate for themselves in the same way you do. Gregory found this difficult at the beginning of his year.

GREGORY: I think the work that I’ve done for Wirecutter and for other outlets, I’ve been asked to be an expert in things. And I think initially when this happened, I went into expert mode, researcher mode, like just really delving into what I needed to do, and then using that information to try to help other people.

CHRISTINE: He would frustratedly watch neighbors take less than they could have from insurance companies. Or skip expensive tests for contaminants they couldn’t see or smell, claiming the risks were overblown anyway. Eventually he realized…The best way he could help was to listen.

GREGORY: They’re a lot of them are masking their concerns because actually because of they’re not able to afford to be careful. And once I really digested that, I really I started being much more caring about how I delivered that message. I hear you. I see this is really expensive. Maybe we can do one test, you know, spend a hundred dollars to do this. So I have to recognize my frustration is valid just as much as their response, and I’m gonna try to meet them halfway.

CHRISTINE: Many of Gregory’s neighbors are elderly, living on fixed incomes, and the costs for testing and remediation are far beyond what they can afford.

Gregory says now, he tries to lead by example – sharing information and resources of the services he used and listening to the concerns and decisions of his neighbors before sharing his own.

It’s easy to listen to Gregory and Mike’s stories and feel far removed, to think “this is someone else’s life and something like this won’t happen to me.” But the thing about disasters is they can happen to anyone, and what you do now may have an outsized impact on your future.

Make sure you understand your insurance policy–read it, look up terms you don’t understand, and get enough of it. Digitize your important documents. Be brutally honest about your climate risks and modify your home accordingly, if you can. And if you do experience a natural disaster, remember that you will have to become your own fierce advocate. Then, there’s our original takeaway–invest in your community, before a disaster. We want to revisit that point…

MIKE: Turn right here. So this is Emerson Way. This is my block.

CHRISTINE: The tour we took with Mike through Altadena ended at his property on Emerson way. A small cul de sac block in the middle of West Altadena.

ROSIE: How does it feel driving back here?

MIKE: Sad like a shell of what it was. No houses on our block survived. This is my plot over here on the right with the Altadena not for sale sign. That’s Lisa’s property where she was when the fires were there, when she called our house. Yeah, our whole block is gone. That was Kate and Taylor’s house, our neighbor. They had just had a kid. That was Sue’s house. Been in her family for generations. Darryl lived next door to that. He grew up in Altadena and said that he knew our house better than we did when we first moved in, because he said he grew up playing there when he was a kid.

CHRISTINE: Like him, all of Mike’s neighbors are still displaced from Altadena. He doesn’t know where most of them ended up. Or if they plan to come back. But he’s still in communication with many of them. And he’s met even more through fire survivor groups like the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.

These connections, specifically with other people who’ve been through what he’s been through… who are going through what he’s going through…Mike says they’ve been a bedrock of his year.

MIKE: We have this scar now. It’s invisible. But we walk with it and it’s ever present. The good news is that there are other people out there who also have that same scar and they understand in ways that people who don’t have that scar can’t. When I connect with other fire survivors who are going through the same things as I’m going through, they get the frustration, the grief, the gratitude, the anger and the loss in ways that I’m not able to convey sometimes. But with them I don’t have to, because they just get it. So the advice is the better you can know your community before that catastrophe happens, the stronger those bonds will be, because it will bring you all together. But it’d be great if it brought you together and you didn’t have to remember people’s names for the first time.

CHRISTINE: Gregory has also gotten closer with people in his community. He and his wife spent Thanksgiving across the street…with their neighbors. He’s also gained a new level of appreciation for his wider circle.

GREGORY: I remember one evening we hosted a group of friends to have a seafood boil and for that few hours I forgot we were displaced because we were surrounded by friends and we were just laughing and eating and having a wonderful time. The effects of that evening lasted several days because I remember that people still care and were looking out for us in ways that were unknown to us until it happened. I look back at what happened, has happened and continues to happen as a reminder of like this life we live is the sum of so many other interactions that pay off in ways that you just couldn’t expect. I mean, I there was people who showed up, like I didn’t know that they cared that much about us. And I don’t mean that like, you know, in a flippant way. It was really like, wow, would have I made that effort for you? Thank you.

CHRISTINE: Back in Altadena, we drive along a few more blocks with Mike. Although many of the lots are empty…I’m surprised by how many are under construction.

What I hear is a lot of construction. I hear a lot of you know, circular saws and hammers and we’ve seen there’s so much devastation here, so many empty lots. There are also a lot of lots worth with people on them kind of doing different things.

ABIGAIL: Working…

CHRISTINE: Yeah.

We stopped to talk with two Altadena residents walking a dog called Ozzie. They’d lived through the fire and had already moved back. This new construction in the neighborhood, they said, made them feel…more optimistic.

Back at Mike’s plot, my producer Abigail asked Mike, if there were no financial constraints, would he want to move back…and rebuild?

MIKE: If the money wasn’t the thing that was making the decision for us and I had the funds to rebuild, yeah, we would have started rebuilding already. I’m not sure what I’d be moving back to. But somebody’s gonna come live here and somebody’s gonna rebuild.

ROSIE: 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.