‘Absolute hell’: Residents struggle against nature, bureaucrats, banks and builders to recover from 2020 Santa Cruz Mountains inferno

Just a month after she bought her red-doored dream home, Ana Wold’s little gray Boulder Creek house burned to the ground in the 2020 Santa Cruz Mountains firestorm. Now she’s walking away from a half-built replacement, putting it up for sale after more than four years of battles with an insurance company and a contractor.

“It’s been hell, absolute hell, and I have been spending money like it’s water,” said Wold, a 51-year-old sales director for a technology company in Fremont. “I wish to God I didn’t start building.”

The CZU inferno destroyed about 700 homes in Santa Cruz County. Of those, 127 residences have been rebuilt and another 134 are under construction, according to the county. Across the burned expanse, brushy thickets have taken over where houses once stood. Vacant lots and partially finished homes abound.

“It’s been slower than anybody could’ve expected,” said Bruce McPherson, a long-time county supervisor who left office at the end of the year. “We didn’t have the staff in the county and we didn’t have the funding to give adequate resources to the planning and public works departments immediately for such a huge undertaking.”

In Sonoma County, ravaged by wildfires the same year, construction is complete on nearly 60% of parcels ravaged by the LNU Lightning Complex Fire and 44% of those torched by the Glass Fire.

Meanwhile, as many Santa Cruz Mountains residents struggle to rebuild, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order in January to suspend environmental requirements for rebuilding and cleanup after the catastrophic Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles County. The quick action sparked ire from Boulder Creek to Bonny Doon.

“I am super happy for those people, but what about us — why didn’t our fire matter?” said Antonia Bradford, an organizer and advocate for CZU fire victims. “We didn’t get any help.”

Bradford blames county officials and onerous permitting for months of delays and hundreds of thousands of dollars in added costs for the Boulder Creek house she and her husband rebuilt. Newsom’s office said in a statement that California “is constantly refining our approach, to be responsive to the unique circumstances of each incident, while applying experiences from prior disasters elsewhere in the state.”

The experiences of CZU Fire victims and damning grand jury findings depict a county government unprepared to meet the needs of overwhelmed residents. The recovery was mired in a mix of challenges, including widespread lack of sufficient insurance, the onset of the COVID pandemic, steep terrain, aging septic systems and sky-high construction costs.

The grand jury report on post-CZU recovery, issued in June, concluded that “a substantial number of those who lost their homes simply walked away without rebuilding.” Many “found themselves under-insured to the degree that they simply could not bear the cost to rebuild.”

“We’re stuck,” said Tina Cortinas, 52, a Saratoga High School special education teacher who lost her yellow three-bedroom Boulder Creek home to the flames and whose insurance payout isn’t enough to rebuild.

Others were so dispirited by the “lengthy and often bewildering permitting process, that no amount of money could see them through to completion,” the grand jury report said, Phaedra Schrock, 43, a property manager in Los Gatos, said she was “one of the lucky ones” who rebuilt her Boulder Creek home, but said it took two years just to get the necessary permits.

“They fight you the whole way through,” Schrock said.

The grand jury faulted county agencies for lacking an effective disaster response plan, causing “unnecessary expense” for many residents. County departments failed to provide “timely guidance” on permits, leading many to spend unnecessary time and money, the grand jury found.

Even the luckier fire victims were not exactly lucky.

“I had really good insurance and it still wasn’t enough,” said Chris Culp, 59, a retired Santa Clara County firefighter who had to pay about a third of the rebuilding costs for his house on a hilltop west of Boulder Creek a few miles north of Bonny Doon.

Lumber prices had exploded, in-demand contractors could name their price, and it took a year just to get the county approvals to start digging, Culp said. County officials talked about helping residents rebuild quickly, but “as soon as the fire’s out and the cameras are gone, it’s back to business as usual,” he said. “The process grinds to a standstill.”

Rebuilding requires permits related to environmental health, fire access and geologic hazards, with surveys, studies, reports and permits typically costing around $21,000 per property, the grand jury reported. Half of the burned-out residents had to replace septic systems. Another quarter needed upgrades that could cost more than $100,000. In geologically hazardous areas, bills skyrocketed and delays multiplied.

Overall construction costs tripled amid the pandemic, the grand jury reported, so a 1,500-square-foot house that would have cost $350,000 to rebuild pre-COVID could cost more than $1 million after the fire.

County officials cite the area’s unique challenges. Most residents hitting bureaucratic hurdles needed septic upgrades, or had precipitous terrain and landslide risk, said David Reid, director of the county’s Office of Response, Recovery & Resilience. Many homeowners were forced to comply with state requirements for 10,000 gallons of water storage.

“Oftentimes there’s only so much county or jurisdictional government can do to accelerate recovery,” Reid said. “We can’t just eliminate state code.”

McPherson, the former supervisor, noted that county departments handling CZU rebuilding processes have been dealing with the impact of several massive storms since 2017.

In Bonny Doon, retired nurse Christine Homan, 74, and her husband Steve are content in their rebuilt home, looking out over a grove of redwoods that are charred but standing tall, draped in the bright green foliage of new beginnings. Other fire victims, for reasons beyond red tape and money, will likely never rebuild, she said.

“You can’t discount the emotional piece of it,” she said. “Some people don’t want to go back to a place where they lost everything.”