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Rebuilding Lessons From Former Fire Victims

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From left, fire survivors and neighbors, Annie Barbour, Ernest Chapman and Danielle Bryant in Santa Rosa on Jan. 23, 2025. Their homes burned down during the Tubbs Fire in 2017. (Gina Castro/KQED)

Here are the morning’s top stories on Wednesday, February 5, 2025…

  • More than 16,000 structures were lost in last month’s wildfires in LA. Residents there are now beginning the difficult process of deciding whether they can — or even want to — rebuild. For those who do, experts and survivors of past wildfires say there are ways to build in some resilience against future fires. In Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park, that’s what many residents did after the 2017 Tubbs Fire decimated their neighborhood. 
  • Big water releases from two Central Valley dams are leaving farmers flummoxed. It’s the result of an executive order from President Trump that’s supposed to help fight wildfires in Los Angeles. But the water is unlikely to reach its intended destination.
  •  Governor Gavin Newsom is in the nation’s capital on Wednesday where he plans to meet with President Trump. Newsom is hoping to secure aid for victims of the deadly wildfires in Los Angeles.

Rebuilding LA: Here’s What Fire Survivors And Experts Say Is Key

Annie Barbour knows what it feels like to lose everything she worked for in an instant. The home she bought in Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighborhood in 1989 was almost paid off. She had just started to make renovations to prepare it for her son and his wife to live there someday. Then it burned — along with more than 5,600 other structures in the 2017 Tubbs Fire. When she returned to the spot where her home once stood, all she could see was rubble. “This whole place looked like a bomb had gone off,” she said. “You could see all the way through Coffey Park. No houses all the way to the railroad tracks. It was decimated.”

Now, there’s a one-story, taupe house with white eaves and a neatly trimmed front yard. Many of her neighbors’ homes have been rebuilt, as well. To the untrained eye, it might look like any other suburban neighborhood in the state, but most of the homes now have features designed to withstand wildfires to come.

Barbour and her neighbors’ experiences with rebuilding offer lessons — backed by the latest research from architects and experts — for Southern Californians displaced by January’s wildfires, who are now just beginning to think about whether to rebuild. Fire experts say understanding how wildfires move and grow can help homeowners protect their house against the next one. That means reducing the fuels that feed fires, said Ian Giammanco, a researcher at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. “If you think about a hurricane or tornado, they’re not getting more intense because they’ve destroyed a bunch of buildings, but a wildfire absolutely is when it turns into one of these conflagration events,” he said.

Central Valley Farmers Confused By Trump’s Executive Order

Saying they were acting on orders from President Trump, the Army Corps of Engineers last week significantly increased the amount of water released from two dams – the Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Lake Success.

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The move left many farmers in the Central Valley perplexed. Joel Isaak has farmed in Tulare County for 50 years. “We should keep it until we know we have some excess, but right now it looks like we’re going to have a dry year,” he said. Isaak and other farmers rely on water stored at those dams to irrigate their fields in the spring.

The Army Corps of Engineers oversees the dams and said they released the water to help with firefighting efforts in Southern California. But Los Angeles is separated from the Sierra Nevada by hundreds of miles and a 4,000-foot-tall mountain pass, making the water transfer costly and impractical, as it’s unlikely to ever reach its intended destination.

Seeking LA Fire Aid, Gavin Newsom Is Set To Meet Donald Trump In D.C.

A day after California lawmakers finalized approval of $25 million in legal funding to challenge the Trump administration, Gov. Gavin Newsom headed east Tuesday for his first D.C. visit of the new Trump era.

The Democratic governor left for Washington midday, his office announced, and is expected to stay through Thursday to lobby for assistance for the Los Angeles fires.

His office confirmed that Newsom will sit down with President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly threatened to condition aid for Los Angeles — including on changes to water policy and a voter ID requirement — since the devastating fires broke out nearly a month ago.

The trip to Washington follows a week and a half after Trump briefly stopped in Los Angeles to survey fire damage. Though the president conspicuously excluded Newsom from that tour, he did manage — after much public back-and-forth — to greet Trump at the airport, where the two men embraced. It was reportedly their first conversation since the president’s first term ended four years ago.

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