California Wildfires and Home Rebuilding Efforts
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention reports that since the fall of 2017, around 70% of the state’s most catastrophic wildfires have taken place.
This timeframe has relied heavily on data from state and local governments to assess the speed and scope of fire recovery, especially concerning the most significant fires.
The Times accessed data from the CAL Fire Damage Testing Database, often referred to as DINS, back in February. They specifically focused on residential structures that were destroyed, covering categories like single-family homes, multi-residential units, and mixed-use commercial/residential buildings.
Aside from the Pallisard and Eaton fires in January of this year in Los Angeles County, reports were limited to incidents that resulted in the destruction of over 1,000 residential structures during this timeframe. Five notable fires were identified: Tubbs (2017), Carr (2018), Camp (2018), Woolsey (2018), and North Complex (2020).
The analysis by The Times revealed that 22,438 residential structures were lost across these five fires. Approximately 75% of those were single-family homes, 23% were mobile homes, and less than 2% consisted of apartments, condominiums, or other types of multifamily buildings. Due to certain limitations in data, multifamily residences were treated as a single structure, regardless of the number of units. In their report, The Times often used the terms “housing structure” and “home” interchangeably.
Homes were destroyed across 16 different jurisdictions. To find out when and how many homes were rebuilt, The Times gathered occupancy certificate data from the building departments in these communities during March and April. They also accessed information from the California Department of Housing and Community Development, which oversees mobile home parks.
Utilizing GIS software, The Times mapped out the coordinates from Cal Fire data to align each destroyed structure with the respective city or county that granted permits for reconstruction. They combined the count of homes lost, as reported by Cal Fire, with data on rebuilt homes from local and state building departments. Finally, the daily issuance of certificates of occupancy was summarized to create a reconstruction timeline for each fire, with attention to ensuring that only homes approved prior to April 1st were included.
The Times made some adjustments to their methodology when needed. For instance, the Tubbs Fire led to the destruction of a mobile home park with 162 lots in Santa Rosa, where two low-income senior apartments comprising 132 units were later constructed. In this case, the analysis was modified to reflect these 132 replacement units instead of the 162 mobile homes that were lost.
Ultimately, the analysis found that 8,420 homes had been rebuilt, meaning that about 38% of the homes lost in these five fires have been restored.
The results presented by The Times could vary from those reported by different jurisdictions for a couple of reasons. Local authorities may have a stricter inventory of demolished buildings than what is detailed in the Cal Fire DINS data, enabling them to update their rebuilding figures continuously.
