Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs Donna and Bob Williamson call the strange souvenirs pulled from the ashes of their home their Museum of Misery.There is the green wine bottle that melted, its glass neck drooping, that looks like it was pulled from a Salvador Dalí painting. Silver forks that fused into a thick, lumpy utensil, its prongs fanning out like a porcupine’s needles.A platter they received on their wedding day that read, “For better or for worse.” Just a shard survived. The piece that says, “For better.”The collection sits in cardboard boxes at the back of the garage off their new house in Santa Rosa, Calif., a city of about 175,000 people in the Sonoma wine country.The Williamsons know the pain and uncertainty being experienced by those who lost their homes in the Los Angeles fires — of wondering how they will ever rebuild and recoup the treasures they lost. Building anything in California is expensive and bureaucratic even in the best of times, and now thousands of residents in Southern California will be vying for the same permits, labor and materials at once.“There’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” Mrs. Williamson said. “But it’s going to be a long tunnel.”The Tubbs fire, which killed 22 people and leveled more than 5,000 homes in 2017, provides lessons on what Los Angeles-area residents can expect as entire neighborhoods try to rebuild in a California city. As in the two major Southern California fires, the inferno that ravaged Sonoma County paid no heed to wealth, flattening estates in the hills, modest bungalows in the flatlands and a mobile home park called Journey’s End.Fierce winds were howling there the night of Oct. 8, 2017, when an electrical system sparked a fire north of Calistoga, a town about 16 miles from Santa Rosa that is known for its hot springs and its bold red wine. Flames were blown across hillsides before they descended into Santa Rosa, where they jumped Highway 101 and quickly flattened neighborhoods.The collective weight of the debris that had to be hauled away after the Tubbs fire and smaller blazes nearby was more than two times the heft of the steel and concrete that make up the Golden Gate Bridge. The first step in Los Angeles, too, will involve removing the remnants of homes and belongings, a process that could take months as officials sort out the details of the arduous and environmentally sensitive process. Only when inspectors determine that the cleared lots are free of toxic materials can rebuilding begin.After that, California’s web of state and local laws can make it tedious and expensive to obtain the permits needed to undertake new construction. The state’s Legislature has passed dozens of laws intended to make it easier and faster to build housing, but the system remains sclerotic.The city of Los Angeles is worse than most: It takes over a year — 466 days — to obtain permits for a new single-family home there, compared with 187 days statewide, according to an analysis of permit data by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.But disasters have a way of creating a sense of urgency.Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order on Jan. 12 that suspends two of California’s most stringent environmental laws — the Coastal Act and the California Environmental Quality Act — for homes and businesses being rebuilt after the fires. Karen Bass, Los Angeles’s mayor, followed with her own order a day later that expedited permitting for recovery efforts, established a new task force for debris removal and accelerated the creation of more temporary housing for displaced families.In a state where wildfires are becoming more frequent and destructive, this has become something of a playbook. After the Tubbs fire, Santa Rosa created a permitting office that was designed to ferry rebuilding homeowners past the bureaucratic slog that can slow projects in normal times.“I had a rule for my staff that if you can make a decision on the spot, make it,” said David Guhin, who was Santa Rosa’s planning director during the fire.The next year, after the Camp fire in Butte County, the town of Paradise opened a similar one-stop shop — the Building Resiliency Center — in a vacant bank branch downtown. The Camp fire was the state’s deadliest blaze and destroyed more than 18,000 structures.The Williamsons, conservatives who are not normally fans of California’s politics or its regulations, said that the permitting process was not as bad as they had feared. They emphasized the importance of hiring an architect and a contractor who know the most up-to-date California codes because new homes must abide by a slew of fire safety and energy efficiency measures that most likely did not exist when the original homes were built. For instance, new homes in California must have solar panels, automatic sprinkler systems, thicker walls with more insulation, vents that prevent ember intrusion and fire-resistant roofs.“The big cost factor is the energy efficiency stuff,” said Dan Dunmoyer, chief executive of the California Building Industry Association. “That’s when you start adding 50, 60, 70 thousand dollars.”Still, Coffey Park, the middle-class neighborhood in the flatlands, was rebuilt faster than many people expected, and residents returned sooner there — many within two years, and some even faster — than they did in the wealthier neighborhoods in the hills. Insurance payouts generally covered a higher share of their smaller, simpler rebuilds. And many neighbors were able to use the same construction companies to produce their homes at a larger scale, pouring foundations up and down the block and installing framing on several houses at a time.That could suggest a faster timetable for rebuilding homes in Altadena, a Los Angeles suburb where middle-class homeowners may put a premium on speed over custom architecture. The homes that burned there were still worth, on average, more than $1 million, but still significantly less than those in Pacific Palisades neighborhoods overlooking the ocean.Annie Barbour, 62, was a grocery store employee when her 1,500 square-foot tract home in Coffey Park was incinerated. She and her neighbors formed a group called Coffey Strong, getting together for wine and whine, she joked, but also to advise one another on rebuilding and to hold officials to account.“I got my keys to my house a year and two weeks after the fire,” she said, adding that such a timeline is unusually short. She now works for United Policyholders, a nonprofit that helps disaster victims navigate their insurance claims. She flew to Los Angeles on Tuesday to help fire victims and went in Maui in 2023.Near her rebuilt home sits a refurbished Coffey Neighborhood Park, paid for by government grants and private donations. The old park was destroyed by the fire, and the new one has a dog park, a modern playground and bike racks in the shape of hearts and coffee cups. On a nearby corner, five cherry trees were planted, one for each resident of Coffey Park who died in the fire.The rebuilding process was bumpier in Fountaingrove, a wealthier neighborhood in the hills. Tim Slater, 58, lives on a cul-de-sac there with 15 homes. Mr. Slater, a pilot and a former Eagle Scout, managed his rebuilding like a second job and said that he had completed it in two years, the second fastest on the street. Others are still not done more than seven years later.Just four of the original households remain, while others sold their lots to developers and moved elsewhere. Some unhappy couples divorced and chose to split the insurance payout and separate rather than rebuild together. Others left California because they could not bear the prospect of more wildfires, Mr. Slater said.It took the Williamsons about five years to rebuild their home. They added cathedral ceilings and a laundry room. The deer have returned, and so has a family of hawks in a nearby tree. Their Farmers Insurance payout, plus compensation from Pacific Gas and Electric, provided enough to cover the nearly $2 million cost of their rebuilding.But life is far from idyllic. Charred trees remain. Some developers replaced country homes with ostentatious mansions that look out of place. And the Williamsons received a letter in August stating that Farmers Insurance was ending its coverage of their new home, an increasingly common decision in California. Their new insurance costs have quadrupled.Mr. Williamson, 82, had thought about leaving California rather than rebuild. He considered Texas or Florida, but figured that those states have tornadoes and hurricanes, and they lacked Northern California’s weather, wine and beauty. Nor did they have his beloved handball team, members of which helped one another find architects and contractors and bucked one another up.“We built up 20 years of friendship,” he said. “We’re too old to go through rebuilding that again.”
