Craig Fugate, who led the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the Obama administration, has seen a lot of natural disasters. He knows the difference between destruction and utter devastation, and puts the nation’s truly cataclysmic events — those that erase entire communities in a blink — in a category all their own.
The wildfires that have ravaged Los Angeles in recent days fit into that group, he said.
“This is your Hurricane Katrina,” Fugate said in an interview with The Times. “It will forever change the community. It will be a touch point that everybody will remember, before and after. And for Los Angeles, this will become one of the defining moments of the community, the city and the county’s history.”
Many in L.A. and across California already understand the before: Bone-dry months with no rain. Deadly Santa Ana winds at hurricane strength. Built-out suburbs in one of the most densely populated regions in the nation, bumping up against kindling-dry forest and scrub land.
It is the after that remains unclear — that stirs worry and fear.
There are the immediate questions, like where people who have lost their homes will stay tonight, tomorrow and the rest of this week, and the longer-term ones, such as whether L.A. should rebuild in areas that remain vulnerable to the increasing cruelty of climate change.
Another question that has loomed large: As the region tries to move forward, will politics get in the way?
Scenes of sheer devastation in L.A. — from Altadena to the Palisades to Pacific Coast Highway — have been met with finger-pointing and barbs traded at the highest levels of government.
FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate with President Obama in the Oval Office in 2016.
(Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press)
Could the recovery be hampered by President-elect Donald Trump and his spat with Gov. Gavin Newsom over fire and water management in the state? Could Trump, who takes office in just over a week, unilaterally cut federal aid already promised by President Biden?
Biden and current FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell on Friday stopped short of guaranteeing the funding would continue under Trump, with Biden saying he hoped it would. Criswell said that Biden followed the law in declaring the disaster declaration and that “it shouldn’t be rolled back.”
Both Fugate and Peter T. Gaynor, a FEMA administrator in the first Trump administration, seemed more confident the aid would continue.
“That initial assistance is locked and loaded. It’s coming,” Fugate said.
“President Trump has been in office before and he’s seen disasters. He’s visited disasters. And so he knows how complicated these things are. He’s not new to this,” Gaynor said. “He’ll continue to support disaster victims no matter what state they are in or who they voted for, including in California.”
But, Gaynor said, “the way forward is going to be hard — and that’s an understatement.”
Fugate agreed. He also noted that much of the path forward won’t be up to FEMA or the federal government.
“There are going to be some big challenges that even the federal government is not prepared to deal with,” he said. “A lot of these decisions are going to have to be made at the local level.”
The scope of destruction is hard to fathom. All week, the numbers have risen — now to at least 16 dead and more than 10,000 structures damaged or destroyed.
Cost estimates have also continued to climb. JP Morgan on Thursday doubled its estimate from a day earlier, to about $50 billion, but a final total won’t be known until the true extent of the damage and reconstruction costs are known.
By comparison, Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 storm that devastated New Orleans, killed more than 1,800 and cost about $200 billion, according to federal estimates.
According to Fugate and Gaynor, the full scope of the disastrous fires won’t set in for a while — but the marching orders are clear.
On Thursday, Biden pledged that the federal government will cover 100% of disaster assistance costs to California for the next 180 days, saying, “Climate change is real.”
For FEMA, they said, that means go time.
“The floodgates for federal assistance are now open, and there’s a method to request and receive those resources and pay for it all — so that’s the positive thing about what’s going on,” Gaynor said.
Every type of disaster has a unique footprint. In hurricanes and floods, everything is wet and much is ruined or destroyed, but belongings are still around to be found or salvaged. After fires, there are just barren landscapes where “the only things that are left are barbecues, engine blocks and propane tanks,” Gaynor said.
“With wildfires, there’s nothing left but ash. It’s almost like a total erasure of their history. So for a lot of people, that’s going to be the compounding trauma,” Fugate said. “It’s not only that they lost their home, they lost their memories.”
For FEMA, that can mean less physical debris to clear — though there is still plenty of that. But there is also next to no infrastructure left. “The only thing left are the roads,” Fugate said.
Part of the immediate task for FEMA and state and local officials is securing and cleaning up dangerous and environmentally degraded sites.
FEMA Administrator Peter Gaynor with President Trump at a coronavirus task force briefing at the White House in 2020.
(Patrick Semansky / Associated Press)
Biden’s declaration makes federal funding available to state, local and tribal governments for debris removal, hazard mitigation and other emergency measures.
The other immediate task — including for FEMA — is getting all of the people who have been displaced by the fires into shelter, Fugate and Gaynor said.
The federal funding approved by Biden can cover temporary housing and home repairs, as well as loans to cover uninsured losses. And part of what FEMA will be doing is coordinating temporary housing assistance for victims — including through hotel and motel vouchers.
FEMA can operate a temporary housing assistance program for up to 18 months, and state and local officials will be able to request that the president extend that time period if the need is still there.
The need for housing assistance in L.A. will likely remain an issue for a long time, Fugate and Gaynor said — especially given how much the region already struggled with affordable housing and homelessness before the fires erupted.
“If you had affordable housing challenges before the fire, it didn’t get better” with the sudden demand for housing among fire survivors impacting the broader affordable housing and rental market, too, Fugate said.
Hurdles ahead
In coming months and years, L.A. and its surrounding communities will likely ask for Housing and Urban Development funding for new affordable housing, Department of Transportation funding for rail and roadway projects and Small Business Administration funding for business loans and recovery efforts, the administrators said.
Examples abound of the federal government swooping in to rebuild American communities devastated by disaster. After the 1994 Northridge earthquake, for example, billions in federal aid poured into the region to repair infrastructure. After a shipping vessel crashed into and destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore last year, the federal government said it would foot the entire bill to replace it — to the tune of billions.
But while much of the funding may be federal, local and state officials will face a massive lift to coordinate the recovery and rebuild, Fugate and Gaynor said.
A huge hurdle is home insurance. Before the fires, California was already facing a home insurance crisis. Insurers were already dropping customers statewide, citing increasing wildfire-related losses — and the latest fires will only compound that issue.
There are also questions about how many of the homeowners who lost everything in the latest fires had insurance policies, or may have been recently dropped and are between policies, Fugate said.
Many people may be left in the lurch, and the state may have to start considering standing up a new program for insuring homes in the fire-ravaged state, he said.
Then there is the issue of physically reconstructing communities that have been wiped out across a wide swath of urban and semi-urban landscape, Fugate said. With nothing left but the roadways, there will be huge amounts of clearing to do, as well as new utilities to be installed and environmental impact assessments to be done.
When L.A. finally does get to the point of construction, a new ream of issues related to labor and supplies will likely crop up.
“Just the sheer construction effort to rebuild enough homes to get people out of shelters” will be a massively challenging undertaking, Fugate said. “Construction workers, supplies, materials — those are all going to be huge challenges, even if people do have insurance to get rebuilt.”
And that’s if rebuilding is the goal.
Some have already questioned whether some of the devastated areas should be rebuilt, given the ever-increasing threats of a warming planet — especially in the pathway of the Santa Ana winds.
Fugate said the L.A. region is too valuable to imagine such vast swaths of land sitting vacant forever. “They’re going to rebuild,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean rebuilding exactly what existed before, he said.
State and local officials should already be in the process of considering the future communities they want to build, and the building codes they want to implement in order to ensure those communities are more resilient.
“The question is how do you rebuild these communities that make them not fireproof, but more resilient and more resistant to these types of fires,” Fugate said.
‘A political element’
Trump said on the campaign trail that he would withhold firefighting funding from California unless Newsom bowed to his demands on water management in the state.
On Wednesday, he set many Californians further on edge by reigniting the spat with a muddled and inaccurate post on his Truth Social platform in which he again suggested he had demands for Newsom — whom he called “Newscum.”
Both Fugate and Gaynor said it was not a surprise that the fires have sparked political debate.
“Every disaster has a political element to it. It’s just the nature of the beast,” Gaynor said. “There’s always somebody who has some grievance that they want to air or take advantage of in the moment, whether it’s a local official or a governor or a president.”
Gaynor said such remarks are “not useful,” but also aren’t cause for alarm — at least when it comes to the federal government’s immediate aid to L.A.
Gaynor said he worked with both Trump and Newsom on emergency responses during Trump’s last term, including responding to past California fires alongside the governor and that “in the moment, in response, in recovery, I think — again, from my firsthand experience — everyone is trying to do the right thing.”
And regardless of the posturing of politicians, FEMA officials have a “pretty clear” charge they stick to, he said: “Help people before, during and after a disaster.”
Fugate agreed. He said Trump has often made alarming comments about disasters in the past, but they have rarely translated into action.
“He communicates in this bombastic manner to get you to at least pay attention to what he’s trying to address, but doesn’t necessarily always follow through on that. It’s just a communications style,” Fugate said.
More important politically, both former administrators said, will be future discussions in Congress about the types and scope of aid to be funneled to L.A.
Will there be major infrastructure projects funded in the lead up to the 2028 Summer Olympics, which are set to be hosted by L.A.? Will HUD funding be allocated to build new affordable housing or will only mansions be rebuilt? How many businesses have been destroyed, and how much will the government be willing to spend to get them back on their feet?
There are bound to be major environmental impacts — and huge costs to mitigating them. How will the government fund those projects?
Fugate said all of those questions will be taken up by Congress, and it will be up to California’s sizable delegation — and especially its Republican members — to advocate for as much funding as possible.
Similar discussions in the past have led to “rigorous debate,” Fugate said. But funding ultimately went out — and will again, he predicted.
“At the end of the day,” he said, “Americans come to other Americans’ aid in their time of need.”
Los Angeles Times reporter Faith E. Pinho contributed to this article.
