How do you reconstruct a place like the palisades?

While the husband and wife were inspecting the beardmore list, many other much more influential people were performing a version of the same calculation: billionaire developers, private equity company on both coasts, politicians and political consultants and former residents were trying to understand what the revenues would be. The earth probably did not burn again for at least 10 years, because the fire had consumed the whole brush, grass and structures – all the fuel available. What was less certain was how the neighborhood could be, how expensive it would be, whether to invest or leave.

The Palisades were not the only fire in January: multiple structures had been destroyed and the lives lost in the fire Eaton, which affected Altadena, a community of the working class and the middle class that also had a wider population to begin with. But Los Angeles is a city with two main sources of power: properties and celebrities. The Palisades, the population 27,000, were able to exploit both. And so the question of what should happen to this small postponement of a neighborhood extended well beyond its borders; Has reached the highest levels of business and government of Los Angeles. When the sun set from the burning area, you could look beyond the lots, through the silhouettes of the fireplaces and try to distinguish the shape of the future of the city.

Beardmore and I was talking about all this when the buyer and his wife came out. They saw some water in the basement, they said, but it is not a big problem-sembrava tied to the rain, not tied to the fire. So they asked if Beardmore thought that the city would put the electrical lines underground, to help try the neighborhood. Beardmore’s response gave a taste of how complicated the reconstruction process would be: it touched finance, the logistics of buildings, the policy of multiple city agencies and the disparity in real estate values ​​between the various parts of the poles. So he concluded that everything would involve so many interbloke forces, it was impossible to predict.

The buyer said he would think about it.

The Palomana were Beautiful land, and in a certain sense, this was the problem. Beauty has made it easy to live in denial. In the days when the wind blew particularly strong, the residents could think of the dry brush and the herbs in the canyons above the city. “In those days, my wife and I look at each other and we said:” I hope the fire is not “,” said Bill Bruns, a local historian and former publisher of the Palisadian post. But as soon as the wind lowered himself, Bruns returned to feel safe. “If I found you on the hills and look at your gaze on the canopy of trees that extended for miles and the ocean,” he said, “You would think of yourself, nothing will ever happen to the palisades.”

And it was true: again and again, the neighborhood was lucky. A brush fire in 1924 was quickly contained. The 1961 Bel-Air fire, which burned almost 500 houses, was interrupted just above the northern edge of the Palized. In 1978, an electrical line apparently triggered a fire in a nearby canyon that burned a church and several houses, but the firefighters put it out. Getty’s fire in 2019, which led to the evacuation orders, could easily have escaped from hand if the winds had been higher. It has always been a relief for residents when the Palisades avoided a megafiro. But there was a downside. Every year in which the mountains did not burn, there was more grass and brush – more potential fuel. The danger has marked.