Elias: Consumer issues likely to plague long recovery from L.A. fires

And so the word went out almost precisely two months after fire incinerated most of the Pacific Palisades district in Los Angeles: “The water is OK again, you can drink it, come on back home.”

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Immediately, the old Latin slogan caveat emptor (“let the buyer beware”) gained new relevance for survivors of January’s fires in the Palisades and burned-out Altadena, 40 miles east — and for prospective survivors of big new fires that state authorities predict later this year. Because no matter what happy talk came from embattled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, few paid much heed.

“In the tragic Camp Fire (which in 2018 destroyed the town of Paradise in Butte County), it took a year (to restore water quality). It was done here in two months,” she said.

That may not matter much. The great bulk of the thousands of residents whose homes did not burn are not moving back for the time being. There enters the sometimes bitter reality of caveat emptor.

Frank and Grace Milton (not their real names) ran afoul of this very quickly. Once the 70-something grandparents learned their home survived and that, at a minimum, all its internal walls and ceilings would need scrubbing, they took bids from rehab contractors.

Such contractors are subject to California’s anti-price gouging law (penal code section 396), but for washing their walls, estimates for the four-bedroom Milton place began at $40,000. That wasn’t including polluted furniture, carpeting and beds that all would need to be replaced.

They gave one contractor a $500 deposit, then never heard from the firm again. An out-of-state company, its “office” was a South Carolina cellphone. Does $40,000 for a three-day job constitute price gouging? It was the best price the Miltons could find.

Lawyers differ on whether it’s gouging, and if the company did not previously operate in California, no one will say for sure for lack of a baseline price. Similar problems reportedly plagued survivors of the 2017 Tubbs Fire near Santa Rosa, which destroyed more than 5,600 structures.

No one knows the full extent of such possible fraud and gouging; there is no formal registry. The Miltons still have not secured a dependable rehab contractor. Another family whose home in the nearby Sunset Mesa subdivision (a reported 400 out of 500 homes there burned down) is unsure they want to return, even if their home can be cleaned up.

“Our house and some others survived, but we can see no other standing homes from our windows,” said the Sunset Mesa family’s husband. “We don’t yet know how much toxic material penetrated our house. We’re not sure we want to move back to such pure desolation.”

Meanwhile, that couple pays $15,000 a month for an 850-square-foot one bedroom apartment in a nearby part of Los Angeles. That’s more than three times the pre-fire going rate in the area. Rent gouging is illegal, but the apartment was never previously on the market.

The couple rented their current place while feeling pressure after living a month in a string of Airbnb rentals and on relatives’ couches. They’ve been unable to prove they’re being subjected to illegal price gouging.

All this is before most returning residents even begin to test toxicity in their walls and yards and well before the fires widely predicted statewide later this year materialize. Yet there are also positive stories of reliable contractors and newly fenced properties sporting contractor signage.

So when Bass and other politicians crow about speedily taking care of one part of reconstituting fire areas, survivors of these and future fires easily see how empty even comforting words can be.

For many present fire victims, the bottom line is that they’ll wait until today’s overheated activity dies down before deciding their futures. Meanwhile, others are moving elsewhere or planning to wait two or three years for the value of their lots to recover sufficiently to be sold off without heavy losses.

In the end, as with the Camp Fire — where almost seven years after the blaze, about 43% of structures are rebuilt or permitted to rebuild, with more than 3,000 more permit applications pending — this now looks like a decade-long process with good and bad news but likely to be plagued by consumer issues, regardless of anything politicians say.

Email Thomas Elias at [email protected], and read more of his columns online at californiafocus.net.