The wary grind of recovery
The disaster is actually the easy part.
It’s been three months since the fire consumed our home. Since then, my wife and I have been navigating the long and grinding road of “recovery”—a word that feels too clean and hopeful for what it actually entails. What we’ve found is not just loss, but layers of broken systems, indifference, and unnecessary burdens that few talk about once the headlines fade.
The theater of recovery
Recovery, it turns out, is mostly performative—an endless maze of paperwork, hold music, and Kafkaesque systems that pretend to help while actively slowing you down. Take our application for the right of entry process: submitted early, untouched for 60 days, and after countless calls where we were assured that "everything is fine", we were eventually told it was “awaiting our action” due to “missing documents.” This despite having confirmation that everything was received successfully. The only answer that the helpful bureaucrat could offer: “Sometimes the electrons get mixed.”
And that moment perfectly captures the quality of help we’ve encountered. We wait hours to talk to the "right person", who ends up either guessing the answer, telling you the wrong answer, or uttering some absolute nonsense. They read from scripts, bounce you between departments, and ultimately leave you more confused than when you started. Or worse, leave you believing you've got the right answer, only to learn later it's the exact wrong answer. On the rare occasion that they do have the right answer, they have no authority to resolve anything. Everyone who hears about how our insurance has treated our claim says it shouldn't need to be that difficult, but there's nothing they can do about it.
The truth is, managing recovery has become a part-time job. On good weeks, I spend two to three hours a day dealing with it. On bad ones, four to five. It’s a grind of emails, voicemails, forms, follow-ups, and resubmissions. It's preparing documentation three different ways for three different agencies, all while navigating systems that seem deliberately designed to keep you out.
You don’t get paid for this work. You don’t get recognition for doing it well. And it never ends. This is what recovery really looks like— the slow erosion of your time, energy, and faith that the system is capable of helping people when it matters most.
The one-way expectation of responsibility
Every institution involved—banks, mortgage companies, insurance—moves with lightning speed when they need something from _us_. Submit this affidavit. Fill out that form. Return this by Friday. But when we need something? Expect weeks of delay, vague updates, and repeated follow-ups.
For example, our insurance company took over a month just to process our itemization of a single room. Updates are inconsistent, timelines evaporate, and every step forward seems to require three follow-ups and a week of waiting.
And yet, there’s no accountability. No apologies. Just more forms, more waiting, and more polite indifference. If you're late on _your_ paperwork, there are consequences. But if _they_ are late—if their delay costs you weeks of progress and hope—there's no recourse. You're told to be patient, to understand that they're “handling a high volume of cases,” as if you’re supposed to be comforted by the fact that you're not the only one being ignored.
The invisible grief of rebuilding
Rebuilding a house is one kind of hard. Replacing what was _inside_ it is another—and it’s deceptively brutal. You don’t realize just how much you’ve accumulated over a lifetime until it’s gone. Suddenly, you're staring at a blank slate and tasked with recreating 30 years of living, comfort, and personal taste in a matter of months.
You think it will be as simple as going to a store or shopping online. It isn’t. Every item requires a decision: What did we have? What brand was it? Do they still make it? And that’s just for a toaster. Now multiply that by every object in your kitchen, your bedroom, your garage, your closet, your living room, your bathroom—every drawer, every shelf, every cabinet.
You’re forced into a corner. Either you compromise—buy whatever’s available, the fast fashion equivalent of home goods—or you spend hours scouring outdated product listings, review forums, and secondhand sites, trying to find something that even remotely resembles what you lost. And when you do find something, it’s often more expensive, lower quality, and backordered.
And even when you _do_ replace something, the results are disappointing. Everything now feels flimsy, mass-produced, temporary. You're surrounded by objects that look like your old life but feel hollow by comparison.
There’s no joy in it. What should be a process of rebuilding a life starts to feel like furnishing a stage set. It’s all surface. The weight, the familiarity, the meaning—those are gone. Even things you didn’t realize you loved until they weren’t there anymore, like the exact curve of a handle or the perfect fit of an old mug in your hand, can’t be replicated.
And underlying it all is a quiet but relentless pressure: buy fast so you can move on, or slow down and stay stuck in limbo. But the truth is, you can’t buy your way back to normal. Not when the market only offers slightly shinier versions of broken.
The vanishing act of support
The first thing we noticed is how quickly people and institutions move on. In the immediate aftermath, there were recovery centers, non-profits, massive public outpourings of support, and promises to cut the red tape. Trust me, the red tape is redder than ever and support is actually very limited. That which we did apply for is still pending, with the exception of nominal assistance from FEMA and the Red Cross. Then there were benefit concerts, donations, and high-profile pledges for “the victims.” Where did that money go? We and our neighbors haven't seen even a sliver of those funds. It's hard not to feel like those efforts were more about making donors feel good than helping those actually affected.
Even more disheartening was how quickly friends disappeared. I didn’t expect everyone to keep life on hold while we had to, but the silence from people we once considered close has been harder than we thought. It’s a strange kind of grief to realize that everyone else is able to go on with their lives.
A better way?
I don’t have all the answers, but I know this: the way we do recovery now is broken.
Some ideas:
A community-based insurance pool. Something like a credit union for disasters. Something with a distributed risk pool, initially funded by a very high premium placed into very conservative investments, and with very firm rules and payout criteria. Something that doesn’t force you to itemize every fork in your burned-down kitchen.
Transparency mandates for public-facing systems. No more “two views” where the bureaucrats see something different than the public. The system should show the same data to both sides.
Service-level agreements for insurers and mortgage companies. If we’re required to meet deadlines, so should they. There must be standardized response times and accountability for delays.
Better consumer protections. Rebuilding should not rely on navigating 15 fragmented agencies, each with their own broken process and outdated tech.
The bottom line
Recovery doesn’t end when the fire is extinguished. That’s when it really begins. But the systems we’ve built aren’t designed to support people. They’re designed to preserve appearances and manage liabilities.
If we really cared about disaster survivors, our county supervisor, fire department, emergency services, and Army Corps of Engineers would stop patting themselves on the back after permitting one new home and start asking how the other 9,000 homes are going to make it.