Scraped!

The first major item in our rebuild process has been completed—Debris Removal.

What this means is the Army Corps of Engineers (or a private removal company if you have insurance) comes to the site of your house with a 30-ton excavator and a crew of half a dozen and basically scrapes the site clean, loads the debris onto trucks, and hauls it away.

Scraped clean

We dug a little through the remains and came up with some pots and a colander … and the blasted remains of my old manual typewriter. These will become mementos for the future.

The emotion? We were with the Army Corps crew for three days. The guys are technically not in the army; they are independent contractors hired for the current catastrophe. We had been warned that they would come in and bulldoze everything, willy-nilly. But they turned out to be great guys. We made friends. We hung around. The crews are working, we learned, 12 hours a day, seven days a week … and there’s work work work still waiting to be done. It’s a bonanza for them.

The first day’s emotion was mainly amazement at how good these dudes were at their job. Just to get the HUGE equipment up our narrow road was incredible. The “chimney topple” was the big moment after that. Then the excavator’s huge steel jaws grabbed the ruins of my 2016 Kia Soul EV, lifted it, shook it like a doll to make all the crap fall out, then set it down gently to be hauled away to the dump.

The next day was when the emotion hit. It’s weird to see the place where you lived for thirty-one years scraped clean down to raw dirt. You did feel, I must say, the sense of a new beginning. We hope the hurdles to come won’t be too high.

I must take my hat off to our guys on site—RTS out of Bakersfield, Tetratech, ECC and the Army Corps. The scale of the fire calamity in L.A. is massive, yet these gentlemen and their cohorts from around the country have made a huge dent in clearing the ruins in just four months. The task is a long way from done, and another long, long way from being restored. But Step One is finally rolling.

The skyline of every street and driveway is silhouetted with the booms and scoops of John Deere, Volvo, Hitachi, Caterpillar, and Komatsu excavators. The shoulders of the highways are lined with haul trucks—independent operators—waiting to be called forward to get their loads. Pacific Coast Highway and Sunset Boulevard (I’m sure it’s the same across town in Altadena, our sister wreckage site) are still one-lane, passes required, with checkpoints manned by the Highway Patrol and the National Guard (almost as many women as men), in camo, with M-4 carbines on slings across their chests.

More to come as the next steps unfold. Thank you, everyone who has pitched in to help keep us afloat. We will never forget it!

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