The Pacific Palisades fire and other blazes within the city limits have cost Los Angeles at least $350 million in damage to public infrastructure, according to a city estimate.
The estimate, which does not factor in damage to private homes and businesses, or public infrastructure lost in the nearby Eaton fire in Altadena, was announced Wednesday in a presentation to the L.A. city council.
City Administrative Office Matt Szabo said the $350 million figure included $76 million in damage to water and power infrastructure, as well as $48 million in losses on sanitation facilities.
“These are initial estimates,” he told the council, The Los Angeles Times reports. “They will likely grow.”
The city is preparing to submit damage estimates to the federal government after the Biden administration pledged to reimburse 100 percent of debris removal and emergency response costs submitted within 180 days of L.A. declaring an emergency.
However, some federal aid to Los Angeles may be tied up in the ongoing party changeover in Washington.
Republicans have called for attaching conditions to additional wildfire aid to California, while Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday directing federal officials to study how to cut off federal funding to local “sanctuary” jurisdictions that do not assist with federal immigration enforcement operations.
Los Angeles is among those jurisdictions.
Regardless of whether the federal aid comes through, the city of Los Angeles and the wider metropolitan area around it face huge rebuilding costs.
The Eaton fire, which occurred just outside city limits, destroyed over 9,400 structures and damaged more than 1,000 others, decimating a historically Black enclave where many families managed to buy and own homes despite decades of racially discriminatory housing policies around L.A.
“We asked at several different stopping points each day if she could just get a piece of gravel,” Kimberly Cooper, whose grandmother Dr. Dorothy Ludd-Lloyd bought a home in Altadena in 1972, told CNN. “She doesn’t want not just her history, but her parents’ history, to be erased.”
Estimates for the cumulative damage from the Eaton and Palisades fires have ranged from $20 billion to $50 billion.
The disaster is considered the worst in state history.
As The Independent has reported, the staggering costs of wildfires in California are prompting some insurers to cease offering policies in the state.
“There’s a lot of vested interest in building, with wood, in areas that shouldn’t be built in,” Glenn Corbett, a retired fire chief and professor of fire science at New York City’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told The Independent. “We need to make it incredibly expensive to build in these kinds of environments. That’s all you can do… If the insurance industry refuses to sell policies, maybe people won’t risk it.”
Climate experts argue the substantial costs of rebuilding after each fire are further reminders of the importance of taking near-term measures to adapt to the new climate crisis reality of increased natural disasters as well as long-term steps to reduce overall emissions.
