Why Relocating After a Wildfire Can Be Impossible

More people were displaced by wildfires between the start of this year and the end of July than in all of 2024. Globally, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre puts the number around 496,000 wildfire displacements — more than half of which occurred in Los Angeles County during the Eaton and Palisades fires in January.

“Displacement,” of course, can mean many things, and often in the case of wildfires, “most people can return quickly” once the danger has passed, the IDMC writes. But many in Los Angeles County are now entering their 10th month of displacement — and still more may choose, or have chosen, never to return.

Though the former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan called this kind of internal displacement “the great tragedy of our time,” voluntarily deciding to move away after a wildfire in the United States is something of a luxury. There are only three states in the U.S. in which insured homeowners have the legal right to replace a wildfire-destroyed home by buying a new property instead of rebuilding; for many, mortgages anchor them to properties that are covered in rubble and toxic ash. Three-quarters of homeowners who believe they have adequate insurance discover only after a fire that they’re actually underinsured, meaning that their policies cover less than 75% of the cost of rebuilding.

While there is limited data about how people disperse after a wildfire, recent tragedies have shed light on those who’ve either cashed out, cut their losses, or remain displaced in what was intended to be temporary housing. In 2018, for example, the Camp Fire burned down almost the entire town of Paradise, California, and as of 2021, 80% of the local population still had not moved back. Nearby Chico became “the epicenter for Paradise’s long-term relocation,” Abrahm Lustgarten writes in his book about climate migration, On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America, though “smaller numbers of people moved farther,” with survivors ultimately resettling across all 50 states. Cheryl Maynard, a Camp Fire survivor I spoke to for this piece, even told me she’d heard about Paradise residents making it as far as Ukraine.

In some cases, though, this dispersal can lead to a stigma against those who either chose to leave or decide against returning. In Lahaina, the fact that native Hawaiians are being forced to find housing elsewhere is viewed as a form of “climate gentrification.” Even in Los Angeles, “many survivors have been quietly selling due to the many obstacles they face,” Joy Chen, the co-founder and CEO of the Eaton Fire Survivors Network, told me in an email. “Nearly all are reluctant to speak publicly. Locally, there’s been a lot of backlash to those who sell, and the folks I’ve spoken with just want to move on without drawing attention.”

Every story is different and personal, however — from being forced into temporary housing turned permanent to the reluctance of starting over. In an effort to better understand why people move away after a fire, I spoke to four California wildfire victims about their relocations and what they plan to do next. Their stories have been condensed and edited below.

Rossana Valverde, 69

Pasadena, California — Eaton Fire, 2025

I grew up in Pasadena. It was a nice community where you could ride your bike outside and there were other kids on the street — you could all get together, hang out, and get up to no good. It was an all-American town. I stayed, and I built my family there.

This was the third house I’d owned in Pasadena. I got married at 27, and when I was 30, we upgraded to a bigger house because we wanted to have kids. We bought a 1,700-square-foot house and we were really happy there, but at some point, we decided we needed something a little bigger. So we bought a house in 1990 that abuts the Eaton Canyon, about 300 yards from the Edison Tower where the January fire started. There is a wrought-iron fence in our backyard, and it goes straight down into the national forest. My husband and I were young and stupid, and we didn’t have any money, so we bought the worst house on a nice street. It was a real fixer-upper.

In 1993, a fire came through and burned right up to our backyard. We had only minutes to get out. When we came back and the house was still standing, we couldn’t believe our luck. So we moved back in; we got out our mops and brooms, and we cleaned it up. Five years later, my husband was dead of cancer. I don’t know if the toxins caused my husband’s death, but I don’t know that they didn’t. And I was left with a 6-year-old and a 12-year-old to raise by myself.

On the day of the Eaton Fire, my [second] husband and I were sitting and eating dinner when, at about 6:15 p.m., the TV went out. I said, “It must be Spectrum again.” We didn’t think much of it. Then we heard a loudspeaker, but we live right above the Eaton Canyon Nature Center, and they’re always rousing people at dark, saying, “The park is closed.” So that’s what I thought it was. But then there was a loud pounding on the front door, and it was my neighbor who’d just pulled into his driveway from work and saw a small fire directly underneath the tower across the canyon. The wind was blowing 70 or 80 miles an hour at the time, and he apparently rushed into his house and screamed for his wife to call 911 and to get the kids and the dog. And then he ran over and started knocking on doors.

We walked outside and there was the fire. I go, “Oh no, I know this drill.” Just then, a whole bunch of fire trucks pulled in, and I think that’s the only reason [the house] survived — because we were the first place burning, and the infrastructure wasn’t stressed yet. There are about eight to 10 houses in our cul-de-sac, and we had four huge fire trucks and probably 40 firefighters. I went back into the house, and I had a list from the last fire of the things I should take; I’d printed it up and taped it inside a closet door, but there was not going to be any time for that. We grabbed our hard drive, laptop, and three dogs, and got into our cars.

By then, it was black outside, with golf ball-sized embers flying by your head. It was like the videos of the fall of Saigon; it was the same damn way. Once I got out of the cul-de-sac, it was complete chaos. Nobody was obeying traffic lights or signs. My son had called — he lives in Monrovia, which is about 20 minutes away — and he was saying, “I saw the fire, I’m gonna come.” And I said, “There’s no time, forget it.” I finally made it to his house, and my husband was already there. And we have been there for seven months now.

The house in Pasadena is absolutely in the same condition as it was on January 7, when we left. It hasn’t been touched; it’s just full of all this toxic stuff that you can’t really see. State Farm’s adjuster came by with a little Kleenex box, and he wiped my hallway and said, “Oh, it’s not that bad. You just need a cleaning lady.” But we spent $6,400 to find out it’s full of lead, arsenic, and nickel. Seven months later, we still don’t have enough money to even start the cleanup. The original estimate, before we knew about the heavy metal contamination, was for $120,000. When we found out about the contamination, we got another estimate, and it’s up to $350,000 because everything has to be trashed. All the upholstered goods have to go. The hardwood floor has to go, because it’s grooved and distressed, and you can’t get the lead out of that. The carpets have to go. The window treatments have to go.

Fortunately, I get along with my son and daughter-in-law, but they’re a young couple and they’re relatively newly married, and they just bought that house in October. Then we move in with our three dogs, and it’s only a 1,000-square-foot house. I said, “We need to find someplace to rent. We can’t stay here.”

I talked to my financial planner, and he said, “We worked with people in Paradise after the Camp Fire, and people identical to you, with no fire damage but just smoke damage, they weren’t back in their house for one or two years.” And I said, “You’ve got to be out of your mind.” But it’s true, because you’re fighting with insurance the whole time. State Farm is still only okaying month-to-month rentals, and try to find a place to rent month-to-month with three dogs. So I asked my financial planner, “Is there any way we can buy another house right now?” And he crunched the numbers and said, “Everything’s got to be financed, but we can get a conventional loan and finance a mortgage, and then we can borrow against your portfolio for the down payment. You can survive for about two years that way before it gets financially untenable.”

So we put in an offer. We bought a house. We aren’t officially living there yet because it’s really dirty. We’re here every day, cleaning everything. But we’ll be in Monrovia, about seven or eight blocks from my son’s house, and the house wasn’t in the plume of the fire.

I worry that [the insurance company is] not going to give us enough money to clean up our house appropriately. I’m just not going to feel safe there anymore. My kids are, of course, advocating that we not go back. As my son says — because he’s so charming — he says, “Mom, you’re old now. You got out of two fires. Your luck has run out. The first one, you had a 10-minute warning. The second one, you had a six-minute warning. I don’t think you should push it.”

But it’s home, right? My whole life is there. Neighbors I’ve known for 35 years. I had saved up my nickels and dimes for about three decades to make it my Barbie’s dream house. I don’t know how much money we’re going to have to put into the house to get it into shape where we can either go back or sell it. But how could I sell it without making sure it’s clean? Somebody else is going to live there. What if they have little kids?

Larry and Jackie Slayen, 82 and 80

Kenwood, California — Tubbs Fire, 2017

Larry: Kenwood is beautiful wine country. We had been looking for a home where we could spend time with our family on weekends and in the summertime, and that’s why we bought the house. We lived there for about 12 years before we started renting it as an Airbnb on weekends, or sometimes for a week at a time. On the night of the fire, the last tenant had just moved out. Though the Kenwood house was our primary residence, we were luckily not living there at the time, so our most valuable possessions weren’t there, either.

We were awakened at 3:30 in the morning by a friend who had heard there was a fire up near Kenwood. We went to the TV, turned it on, and watched it. Coverage focused on the area around the Kaiser hospital, but we knew it was in our area because we’d heard from a neighbor who was running for his life and who said our house was on fire and there was no way there’d be anything left.

We didn’t get up there until two and a half weeks later. They’d completely closed the area off to get rid of all the dangerous brush. It was hard going back.

Jackie: In the beginning, we thought about rebuilding. It felt like we were fighting back. Like, “Just put the house right back where it was!”

Larry: We immediately got in touch with a contractor who could clean up the place. He went through the bureaucracy to get the okay to clean it all up. We got an architect. We were ready to rebuild.

Jackie: Then I looked at our lives and said, “Do I really want to start picking out doorknobs again? To go through two years of hassle trying to rebuild?”

Larry: At that time, we were in our late 70s. We just figured, This is just ridiculous. This is going to be such a heartache.

We were really careful and diligent, though. There are people out there who will deal with the insurance process for you, but they take 30% of the proceeds. You don’t want to do that, but some people don’t think they have the time or the intelligence to go through it all. We went through the whole thing, start to finish, and it took us two years and eight months before we were done. We had this house here in Marin County that we were renting, so we didn't have to worry about moving anywhere, and so we were able to go through the process slowly. It’s very emotional, but a few days after the fire, you’ve got to sit down and do your homework.

After we received the money for the trees and shrubs and the loss of the house, we still had the land, so we put it up for sale. A young couple — speculators — bought it, and they built a home in their style, and then they put it up for sale.

Jackie: The real problem is — like the new people who bought the house — they don’t know what Kenwood was like before. We were surrounded by the Trione-Annadel State Park, and when we looked out, we could see miles of trees. Now, when you look out, you see trees, but they’re all burnt. Every time we go up there, it just looks burnt to me.

Cheryl Maynard, 63

Paradise, California — Camp Fire, 2018

I lived in the Paradise area for eight years. I’d lived in Magalia, which is just a few miles to the north of Paradise, but it was very cold — much colder than I was used to. So I sold my three-bedroom home and moved down to what they called the Banana Belt. We actually received some sunlight through the trees.

On the day of the fire, I had a friend visiting me from out of town. The day before, I had received a phone call from PG&E — a live person, not a recording! — saying that if there were high winds, they would be turning off the power. That morning, I got up and it looked kind of cloudy, but there was no smoke. My friend needed a prescription from CVS, and I told her, “You probably should call them.” But she was stubborn and looked at me like, I’ll do it when I want to. So we hung around for a little bit, and then I heard her calling CVS on her own terms. The guy there told her, “Lady, what are you doing here? The whole town is leaving. I’m locking up and I’m getting out of here.”

We thought, “Okay, we’d better leave.” I’d helped out in the condos there; I was on the safety committee, and we could evacuate 40 people in about 35 minutes. But they’d canceled the committee, so we didn’t have it on the day of the fire. I didn’t know if people were going to make it out or not. We had one person with no legs, married to a deaf lady, and I worried about them so much.

So I’m starting to panic. I took a quilt on the floor that I was trying to make for my son that had taken me forever — just a tie quilt, a $10 value. I took a picture of him in a frame that he and his girlfriend had given me. I took two salt and pepper shakers, one from each grandma. I left my china and my silver. I left a 100-year-old quilt, because it wasn’t in my line of sight. I left my mom’s wedding dress and my wedding dress.

Outside, the trees were burning behind the garages. One lady was in her garage next door, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, these people are inside there.” We stopped and asked if they needed help, and they said no, they had people coming. I should have made them get in my car. The condo manager drove around the parking lot a few times, honking his horn, but you couldn’t hear it because of the wind.

My friend said she was going to drive. I was holding onto my dog, who’s terrified of fire and things exploding. I told my friend, “Don’t go along the canyon because I don’t like it; it’s a drop off.” Well, the fire jumped over my car — like a rainbow — and went into the other median. I said to her, “Man, that was cool!” My dad raised me that way.

What my friend did then was, she went over into the wrong lane, and she went down against the upcoming traffic. At that point, they’d cut it off and made it that way. I was very blessed that we did not get trapped. She was doing about 70 going down that road and following a police officer. I said, “You’re going to get pulled over.” She said, “I don’t think he’s worried about me right now.”

At the bottom of the hill, another police officer directed us into a grocery store parking lot. It was packed with cars and people and dogs and animals, and we all got out and turned around and stared up at the mountain. There was just smoke and people coming down, people crying.

I went to my son’s in-laws with my friend, and on the third day, I found out that my condo was gone. So I booked a flight to where my family lived, and I’ve never been back. I went back to Chico a year later to pick up some things — I had a friend meet me there and we had lunch — but I never went back up the hill. There were so many people in the Facebook group [for fire victims] that were struggling mentally and emotionally because they were living in the burn scar, and there was no way I wanted to go up and see it. I’d talked to a tow truck driver before I left — I ran into one going into a store, and he was working up there hauling all the cars away — and I said, “How is it?” He said, “It’s bad. It’s bad.”

Recovery has been really complicated. A lady started the Facebook group after reading PG&E’s 2019 bankruptcy court documents, and she told people to vote against the plan. The $13.5 billion Fire Victims Trust was going to pay the 70,000 survivors of the Butte, North Bay, and Camp Fires — all sparked by PG&E — half in cash, half in the company’s stock. But it was approved by more than 85% of survivors. How do you get 70,000 people to agree on anything?

The day they signed the deal, PG&E’s stock was only worth $9 a share — so it was only worth $11 billion — and we had to wait for it to get to, like, $14 a share for us to break even at $13 billion. And we couldn’t sell until after shareholders were able to sell, which knocked the value of the stock down. All this was so complicated, and Wall Street manipulated the whole thing. We have been fighting to get the remaining 30% of the recovery settlement that we still have not received from PG&E. We got some preliminary payments, but most people can’t afford to stay in Paradise. Many people have a distaste because of being victimized, politicized, and not treated fairly.

There’s no hospital anymore; there’s not the medical facilities like they used to be. What are you going to do if you’re 75 and used to [a Kaiser Permanente hospital] down the street? You have to end up going to the Bay Area. Other people left because there is fire after fire in the state, and we couldn’t handle it for health reasons — the smoke, the PTSD. I’ve talked to many people who said, “There’s a fire outside my house, three miles away, and I can see smoke! Oh my gosh, I’m going to die!” Every once in a while, when the power goes out, I freak out. And imagine living in Paradise, where they have all those fires around them.

It’s been hard. Financially, I had been set up. My highest payment in Paradise was my [home owner’s association] fee — they’d just raised it to $320, and we were really complaining about that. Now I’m paying rent of $1,500-something a month, and with utilities, it’s like $1,900.

I worry about my future. I shouldn’t — I know God’s going to take care of me — but some days I do.