LOS ANGELES — At first glance, Jessica Allen is among the extremely lucky. Most of the houses on her street in Pacific Palisades came through the fire intact, while everything around their "little bubble" burned to the ground.

She's relieved her house was spared, as anyone would be, but she's also grieving for friends who lost everything. And she's deeply conflicted about what comes next.

By late last week, an insurance adjuster had already toured her house and told her not to sign a long-term lease to live anywhere else; she and her family could be back home in three to six months, he said.

The news left Allen gasping in disbelief, given the state of the surroundings. "It's complete devastation," she said. "My best friend's house is gone; her husband's car melted into the driveway." Even if the air inside her house can somehow be made safe, she figures she'd need "a hazmat suit" just to walk outside.

"As they begin to excavate the community, more toxins and more ash will be released," Allen said, talking fast and working through a flood of "mixed emotions" as she contemplates a daunting future.

That's the predicament facing all of the so-called survivors of the L.A. County fires, people whose houses are still standing, but whose communities look like war zones. Most want back everything they used to have: their friends, their kids' schools, the shops where people knew their names. But they worry what will happen as months of ash and rubble stretch into years of red tape and reconstruction.

It's hard to imagine what that will be like, or whether it will be worth it.

Dora Millikin doesn't have to imagine. She and her husband own the so-called miracle house of Lahaina in Maui, a red-roofed Craftsman on the ocean that was one of the few surviving structures after a wind-driven blaze tore through the historic town in August 2023, incinerating almost everything in its path and killing more than 100 people.

Watching the L.A. fires on TV from Hawaii was intensely "triggering," Millikin said, wrenching her back to the days immediately following the destruction of her town. She remembered how it smelled and the constant feeling of grit in her eyes. She remembered standing in her house a couple of weeks after the blaze and "looking out at nothing as far as the eye could see," she said. "It was nothing but ash and silence."

A year and a half later, much of the cleanup around her house has been completed, but almost nothing has been rebuilt. Out of more than 1,500 damaged and destroyed properties, only 168 have been issued permits to begin reconstruction, according to the Maui Recovers website. Only three structures have been fully restored.

It took almost six months just to get the electricity and water flowing to her house again.

"Maui County is just very overburdened. They have very few people handling so many requests," Millikin said.

And then there are the constant battles over how to proceed. Because her house is on the water, she's in a "special management area" with increased regulation. There's a running debate about how much, or even whether, to restore properties there given concerns about climate change and sea level rise.

It drags things out and turns seemingly simple decisions into long negotiations. "Having to please every group and every individual has been … difficult," Millikin said with a sigh.

The second stage of recovery — when things are cleaned up and the neighborhood turns into an enormous, noisy building site — is still somewhere down the road.

Instead, gray gravel has been poured onto the ground where homes and businesses used to stand, to keep the potentially hazardous dust tamped down. The once charming and prosperous tourist paradise perched between the lush West Maui Mountains and the Pacific Ocean looks like an abandoned parking lot in recent drone footage.

Millikin expects things will move faster in urban Los Angeles, but warns it will seem like forever to the people trying to live through it. They should be prepared for all of the normal human emotions, the "stages of grief," she said. Denial, shock and anger will come in waves.

Does she have any advice for the new "survivors" in L.A?

"I just want people to be good to themselves. That sounds kind of weird, but, you know, allow yourself some slack," Millikin said. "And if you need help, definitely reach for it."

Alexandra Clark, who has lived most of her life within about a mile of her Palisades Highlands home, has been reaching out for help since the day the fire ripped through her street. It burned two of the houses next door down to their foundations, but left hers only slightly damaged.

In an interview last week, Clark sounded strong and confident that the community she loves will stay together. Seventy percent of the people on her "survivors" group chat felt the same way, she said.

A day later, outside the Santa Monica hotel where she's been holed up with her husband, four kids and pets, she sounded less certain.

Threats of wildfire had forced her family to evacuate before, so they had a plan and packed the car carefully: cellphones, computers, jewelry, the kids' clothes and baby books, cherished letters from her parents.

They made it safely to a friend's house in Westwood and were inside getting hugged and fed while someone outside was breaking into the car and stealing everything they'd packed for safekeeping.

"Glad I provided such a carefully curated collection for them to take from," Clark said with a weary chuckle.

One of the computers had a tracking device, so before long they knew exactly where it was, in an Inglewood laundromat. Activity on stolen credit cards showed an epic online shopping spree underway — 10 Chanel bags, three Valentino bags and a pair of socks (oddly) — with the loot being sent to an address two blocks from the laundromat.

Amid all the other crises swirling around her, Clark kept calling the Los Angeles Police Department to try to get it to do something about it, to no avail.

"They had a lot going on, and they've done an amazing job, but … still," she said.

As she spoke, on the beach path near the Santa Monica Pier, Clark, 43, looked as fit and capable as any of the runners and cyclists streaming by. But the list of logistical hurdles she had to get back to navigating as soon as our interview ended was daunting.

She and her husband were trying to get an extension on their hotel stay, because finding rentals was proving impossible. Landlords had begun to ask for two-year leases, and despite warnings from state officials against price gouging, "everything is quadruple the price it was two weeks ago."

Then there was the question of whether the house would be livable while it is being repaired. The damage from the outside didn't look too bad, but had smoke contaminated the interior? And how long before they would have electricity and water?

She smiled, tight-lipped, for the camera, but the exhaustion was obvious in her eyes. That's when the doubt crept in.

"For the people that are left standing, there's no schools, no market," she said of the place she'd spent her whole life. "There's not really a town anymore."

For Clark and thousands of other people in her shoes, the waves of exhaustion and optimism are likely to continue for a very long time. But there will be high points.

On Tuesday, she texted triumphantly: "They arrested him!"

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