For the past 70 years, Fox’s Restaurant served pancakes, pork loin and catfish to the people of Altadena in Los Angeles County. That was until last week’s devastating wildfire reduced it to a charred wreck, sparing only the diner’s roadside sign.
Paul Rosenbluh, Fox’s owner, now wonders whether there’s any point in staying around to rebuild. “You can only live in a disaster zone for so long,” he says. “At one point you say, ‘I just don’t want to deal with this shit any more.’”
Tens of thousands of others across Los Angeles are facing the same dilemma — whether to stick it out in areas reduced to smouldering heaps by one of the costliest natural catastrophes in US history, or to move somewhere less vulnerable to climate change-related disasters.