A nicely groomed yard – and standing home. Was it because the house was set away from other homes and surrounded by watered grass that the house did not succumb to ashes? Photo was taken May 5.
A reader wrote: Thank you for the comments on landscaping. It is a good question with many issues.
As the clover in our front yard inches up toward 10 inches (the back yard where the fire tried to take our home is still without signs of life, we have paid our gardeners (and cleaning crew) every month, but they are not ready to come back.
Until the adjoining properties are cleared and ours is remediated, they know it is not safe, nor would we want them exposed to the contamination in and surrounding the house. So, who do we get to remove the 6 or 8 or 12 inches of contaminated soil, while we fight with an insurance adjuster who, despite thick piles of ash and soot inside and 4 months after the fires, the house reeks, as do your clothes after 10 minutes inside, and the black mold growing thicker in and under your refrigerator, says “I’d mop it and call it good,” and then ghosts you for weeks at a time while they vacation?
I grieve deeply for everyone who lost a home, as our daughter did. But the complex issues of the owners of “surviving” homes are not uniform nor readily solved. I’m sorry if my clover garden in front offends…I now think back fondly to my days as a kid when I had the riding lawnmower and had to mow our 10 acres every week! John Deere may be getting my order.
MORE GARDENERS:
About gardeners, another resident wrote: It might not appear this way, but we’ve continued to pay our gardeners their monthly fee since the fire. They come every week and hand water the surviving plants.
Our irrigation system is damaged and can’t be used until it’s replaced. The reason our garden looks unkempt, is that the process for remediation for a heavily smoked-damaged property with lead present is complicated and slow. First, we waited an eternity for the testing results. Now we are getting bids from many different trades to clean and fix everything. We need to submit this to our insurance company as a package and then barter for a fair settlement. Then there is a convoluted process for the precise sequence of cleaning and de-toxing and repairs. And then layer on all this the unpredictable availability of various trades. So, believe me, we’re working on it!!!
(Editor’s note: And there are some of us, who knew our properties would be razed, dug up our cycads and the strawberry plants next to the garage – they are now on our apartment patio. Our house and garage were stucco and the walls did not burn, but rather collapsed in or out – they fell on my blueberry bushes, so I couldn’t save those plants. Yes, our house was hardened no attic vents, but the heat from the surrounding homes burning and the wood fences that separated our properties was too much. It was not landscaping, which is the narrative with the proposed Zone O, which would require a five-foot clearance around structures, like a gravel moat.)
The plants were next to the garage. When the garage burned on January 8, the walls collapsed in. (Below) Firefighters are helping to open a safe in the garage.
