Grief is a Hidden Cost of Wildfire: Why Trauma Care Belongs in Disaster Recovery
From a distance, the regeneration of Altadena and the Pacific Palisades following the devastating wildfires looks swift, even miraculous. Green shoots and wildflowers break through charred roots, the staccato of woodpeckers has returned to the forest along with bears, deer, hawks, and lions. Kids have found new baseball teams, some people are rebuilding, others cannot afford to. Courageous people faced catastrophe yet remained steadfast, unbowed, and impossibly more alive. The collective resilience that has risen from the ashes has been nothing short of revelatory—a living burning bush—ablaze with resolve, majestic, and unconsumed.
But much of the post-wildfire story lives in what is unseen: Toxins hide in the soil, and deep, lasting sorrow hides in the soul.
In the days after the fires, I convened a collective healing gathering for more than 1,200 people at the Skirball with nature-based rituals of renewal for people seeking relief, orientation, and belonging. Since then, I’ve provided grief support alongside thousands of volunteers doing community-care that no disaster recovery funding covers.
One client is an elder from Altadena, her husband died a month after their home burned down, and who now—one year on—is displaced, isolated, medically overwhelmed, financially destabilized, and unable to disentangle from the strains of her stalled rebuild. Her case manager is overloaded and unresponsive. She has to translate the technical language of contractors and architects and battle the Orwellian maze of overlapping state agencies, county offices, building and safety regulations, insurance companies, soil labs, water districts—none of which is for the faint of heart. This is not a failure of her resilience—it is a failure of our systems.
Trauma hides in the body and this is a “hidden cost” of climate disasters. We are inadvertently compounding an invisible harm by neglecting the most fragile terrain: the autonomic nervous system. Each inspection and zoning setback can retrigger a threat response. Researchers in the emerging field of climate trauma report that disasters place a measurable burden on survivors' mental-health. Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor has written extensively that grief is not only emotional but biological, it embeds in the body in the form of chronic stress and dysregulation when not properly managed.
The essential work of grief support post-crisis (with few trailblazing exceptions), is carried almost entirely by under-resourced nonprofits and Herculean mutual aid networks like the Altadena Healing Village. Such efforts are made entirely of volunteers, many on the brink of burnout.
As California continues to oscillate between catastrophic fire and flood, here is one lesson for us: Hidden costs of disaster recovery must become visible. While FEMA and state recovery dollars—rightly—prioritize debris cleanup, lead testing, and rebuilding, there is a gaping hole in designated federal and state funding streams for psycho-social support, which should not be outsourced to volunteers to shoulder an unfunded mandate indefinitely.
And with scientific funding newly slashed, there is a need for thorough soil remediation before rebuilding—to avoid compounding another invisible harm. Because similar to hidden grief that is lodged in the body, toxins hide in the soil. During a recent workshop on Fires, Floods & Resilience, Maya Elson, a post-fire bioremediation scientist with CoRenewal said, “Losing a home to fire is a tragedy on many levels. There is an often overlooked secondary disaster when heavy metals and other toxins become mobilized and enter our local ecosystems and our bodies.” CoRenewal is dedicated to ameliorating the impacts of natural disasters on communities and ecosystem health.
There is an emerging parallel practice to soil remediation that also centers health, I call this soul remediation. It’s a targeted series of interventions for survivor reintegration after loss (somatic practices, listening circles, and grief rituals). These practices support a shift from hypervigilance to regulation, isolation to belonging, and dissociation back into safety, while restoring adaptive capacity. A few examples from my work this year: sitting with people sifting ash for heirlooms, where sorrow had no language. Bringing fire-impacted people and climate scientists to bear silent witness to burn scars. Convening urban retreats to make and distribute herbal medicines. Again and again, I have seen that when grief is expressed and witnessed—rather than bypassed—tenacity, beauty and hope returns to the human spirit.
If we take the burning bush as a symbol of post-fire resilience, restoring what was burned but not consumed must include grief-tending. State and FEMA funding should support long-term group trauma care, train community grief tenders, and integrate somatic practices into recovery efforts. These interventions are affordable, adaptable, and essential infrastructure in a warming world—ensuring that what is forged through anguish becomes a generational source of healing, not just another burn scar.
