Wildfire recovery tends to overlook damage that can’t be measured. In Altadena, the number of buildings that burned in the Eaton Fire says little about what residents really lost.
For much of the history of wildfire in California, fires burned through rural and exurban terrain. The Eaton Fire, however, burned through a dense, residential community with one of the highest rates of Black homeownership in California, where schools, childcare centers, churches, and nursing facilities were woven into the fabric of the neighborhood. The number of structures lost in Altadena says very little about what was actually lost, and the number of people affected. A methodological shortcoming, a flaw long accepted, is dramatically compounding the fire’s damage and making recovery far more difficult. The Eaton Fire has revealed systematic inadequacies in how disaster loss is assessed.
This essay is about what the count misses.
