In our neck of the woods it is the Paradise Fire and further up the road in Redding, the fires there....more locally, we have had several threatening wildfires last summer—all arson...Then there was the Park Fire in Chico, more than 400K acres—luckily that arson fire did not destroy many structures.
Up here in Butte County, we empathize with the victims of this fire. The rebuilding of Paradise should be a template—but five years later the numbers don’t lie:
Population before the fire: 28,000 or therabouts The fire destroyed some 18K structures.
Currently maybe five to eight thousand people live there. It will be a generation, (20 years), before the population returns to pre-fire numbers.
The same can be imagined for those parts of Los Angels County. The Palisades, Altadena, etc. It will be a generation before anything is considered “normal” and that is providing there is no hinderance to rebuilding.
Guaranteed though, certain properties will not be allowed to be rebuilt.
Good post.
Here are some numbers for New Orleans as another example:
Pre-Katrina (2006): 455K
2010 Census: 344K
Today: 364K
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans