The same day Craig Forrest watched flames destroy his Pacific Palisades house in January, he was on the phone with his insurance company.
Within about three weeks, he’d received almost all of the money he was owed by Progressive.
On April 29, crews from Lush Construction broke ground on his new house in the El Medio neighborhood.
And on Oct. 5, when Forrest read my column about an Altadena man who was about to become the first person to complete a new house after losing everything in the Eaton fire, he sent me an email to say he might be the first one to make it home to the Palisades.
“I moved as fast as I could,” Forrest said, telling me he was entering the final phase of construction. “We have three teenagers and I had to give them hope and a positive outlook and show them how to deal with adversity.”
Mission accomplished.
The job was completed on Wednesday, and Forrest told me the family planned to begin moving their belongings in on Friday and possibly be home for Christmas, capping a year of catastrophic loss with a celebration of rebirth.
And how do Axel, 19; Gustav, 16, and Liv, 14, like their new two-story house, erected on the lot where their one-story house was incinerated?
Unanimous approval.
“I didn’t have my own shower and I didn’t have … a walk-in closet” in the old house, Liv said, but now she’ll have both.
“The entrance is like, wow factor,” said Axel. “You walk into this huge room and you see the kitchen. It’s just amazing. And the … natural light that comes in just makes the whole room.”
That main room is “grand and nice and modern … while still being modest,” said Gustav, and he’ll have his own bedroom after sharing one with his brother.
Before meeting with the family on Sunday, I drove around the Palisades and saw that while some houses are nearing completion, the vast majority of lots are as empty as they werewhen the fire debris was cleared months ago. There’s a long, long way to go, and the Forrests are going to have to keep their doors and windows closed for months to block out construction noise and dust.
I checked with Sue Pascoe, editor of the local publication Circling the News, which has covered every angle of the Palisades fire and the long road to recovery. She said as far as she knows, the Forrests are indeed the first family to complete a total rebuilding project.
But the majority of residents are nowhere near the finish line, Pascoe said, and some aren’t even at the starting line.
Pascoe lost her home and hasn’t begun to rebuild because of the gap between what her insurance company will pay and the cost of rebuilding. She said she thinks she’s in the majority of fire victims in that regard, noting that some people are still wrestling with their insurance companies, even as the state’s lax regulation of the industry has been exposed.
“There’s a group of people where there’s absolutely no money,” Pascoe said, pointing out that the Palisades was home to a lot of middle-class residents who can’t afford to cover the gap. “There’s a group that’s really so traumatized that they don’t know what to do. And there’s a group of seniors asking, ‘Do you want to rebuild at 80 years old?’”
Forrest and his wife, former journalist Ulrica Wihlborg, used personal assets to supplement their insurance payout and complete construction. He owns Branding Studios, which crafts promotional products to help companies market their brands, and he and Wihlborg own a yoga studio in her native Sweden, where their kids have lived for part of their lives.
That experience might have helped the teens adapt to living in five temporary locations in the last year.
“We’ve always been people who can adapt to different cultures … and living in different environments,” Axel said.
While chatting outside the new house, which was built with fire-resistant materials, we gazed up at the ridge where the fire started. Fierce winds sent it racing down the hill in their direction. Only Forrest and Gustav were home at the time, and they scurried through the house to grab what they could.
Gustav got his sister’s computer, some clothes and a stuffed animal — a dog named Trevor — that she’d had since she was 5. He also grabbed a stuffed tiger Axel had kept from his childhood in Sweden. The rest of their possessions were destroyed.
“Everything we ever had in the house was just ash,” said Axel.
“The hardest part over the months was remembering little things … that burned” said Liv. She misses a favorite hat she’d had for years, along with a pair of shoes Axel bought her as a birthday present. “But you know, you’ve just got to accept it.”
Just the other day, Craig Forrest figured it was time to get out the Christmas tree ornaments. Then he remembered they don’t have any.
“It’s just physical things,” said Gustav. ”I haven’t grieved that much over the house being gone. I’ve just been excited about moving into the new one.”
To help them through the past year, Craig Forrest said, he involved his kids in the rebuild, letting them help make design choices and reporting back to them on hurdles and progress. He brought them to the property frequently so they could witness the transformation of the blueprints into the bones of their new home.
The teens said that for all the second guessing there has been about how the Palisades fire started and whether it could have been prevented or knocked down soonerwith better pre-deployment and smarter strategies, they aren’t inclined to point fingers, nor will they worry about the possibility of another firestorm.
Sure, it’d be wise to focus on prevention in the future, Liv said, “but you can’t live in constant fear of things you can’t control. Every place in the world has a risk of something going wrong, like a fire or a tsunami, hurricane or whatever it is. … You can’t just live like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’”
Liv said she thinks she gained something in struggling through loss.
“This definitely put things into perspective in a maturity kind of way,” Liv said. There were lessons in “how to deal with things that are hard, and how to push past it.”
Just what her father had intended.
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