The Crisis Counseling Program that delivered more than 185,000 individual counseling encounters to LA wildfire survivors ended on February 19, 2026.¹ Five days later, the two Resiliency Centers opened by the California Department of Health Care Services through a SAMHSA Emergency Response Grant remain open — but only through June 15.² The mass outreach is over. What's left is the clinical work: licensed counselors sitting across from people who are thirteen months past the fire and nowhere close to done.

Dolores Fuentes-Park is not a real person, though everything about her situation is. She is a composite drawn from the publicly documented operations of LA County's Resiliency Centers, disaster counseling literature, and the specific psychological patterns researchers have identified in wildfire survivors at this stage of recovery.³ She has been with the LA County Department of Mental Health for eighteen years. Her first name means "sorrows" in Spanish, which she did not choose but has learned to find funny. "My mother was Catholic," she says. "She named all of us after suffering. My brother is Salvador. He's in real estate."

We spoke on a Tuesday afternoon. She had forty minutes between sessions.

The CCP ended last week. 185,000 encounters, closed out. What changed in the building?

It got quieter. Which sounds like a good thing, but it means the people who were coming in through the outreach pipeline, the ones who got a knock on the door or a call from a peer counselor, those touchpoints are gone now. The center is still here. But you have to find it yourself. And the people who find things themselves are not the people I'm most worried about.

What are people bringing into the room at thirteen months?

January was brutal. The anniversary. People who thought they were okay came back in, or came in for the first time, because the date hit them in ways they weren't ready for. I had a woman tell me she was fine until she smelled eucalyptus on a walk and her legs just stopped working. Not a metaphor. She stood on the sidewalk and could not make her legs move. Her body remembered before her mind gave permission.

But the anniversary wave is actually the easier thing to understand. What I'm seeing more of now is harder to name. People are making enormous decisions, whether to accept an insurance settlement, whether to rebuild, whether to leave California, and they describe it like they're watching themselves do it from across the room. One man signed a contractor agreement for $400,000 and told me he felt nothing. Not relief, not anxiety. Nothing. He said, "I think I'll feel it later." The research people call it decision fatigue, but that undersells it. You're not tired. The part of you that weighs things has been running at capacity for so long it just went offline.⁴

How is that different from what you were seeing at three months?

Oh, completely different animal. At three months, people were angry but they were moving. Filing claims, yelling at adjusters, organizing neighborhood meetings. The anger had somewhere to go. Now? The anger is still there but it sits in the body differently. It's not fuel anymore. It's acid. I see it in marriages especially. Two people who survived the same fire, lost the same house, and they cannot agree on what to do next. They can't even talk about why they can't agree, because the why is that they're grieving on different timelines and neither one recognizes the other's version as real.

You mentioned insurance settlements. How much of what happens in this room is actually about insurance?

[laughs]

How much of it isn't? Look, I am a licensed clinical social worker. I am not an insurance adjuster. But I have learned more about replacement cost valuation and Additional Living Expense caps than any human being should have to learn against their will, because that is what people are living inside of. The fire lasted hours. The insurance dispute has lasted a year. And the dispute does something very specific psychologically. It takes your loss and makes it a negotiation. Someone across a desk is telling you that your grief has a dollar amount and that dollar amount is less than you think it should be. That is secondary trauma.⁵ The fire didn't do that to them. The recovery system did.

The research on wildfire grief talks about "ambiguous loss," the idea that losing a house doesn't fit our mourning rituals. Do you see that?

Every single day. People apologize to me for crying about a house. They say, "I know it's just a building." And I want to grab them by the shoulders. It was not just a building. It was the kitchen where your mother's handwriting was on a recipe card taped inside a cabinet door. It was the height marks on the doorframe. In Altadena specifically, and this matters, some of these homes were in Black families for three generations.⁶ That is not a structure. That is inherited wealth, community, proof that your grandparents built something that lasted. And now it's a cleared lot.

They cleared the debris in six months, which everyone calls a success, and logistically it is.⁷ But people go back to where their house was and there is nothing. Not even rubble to touch. The landscape healed faster than they did. That gap is disorienting in a way I don't think gets talked about enough. You expect to go back and grieve at the ruins and there are no ruins. There's just dirt and sky.

Thirty-one people died in these fires. Some of your clients lost neighbors, not just houses. How does that sit in the same room?

It doesn't sit comfortably, and it shouldn't. You have survivor guilt operating on multiple levels. Geographic guilt, where your house made it and your neighbor's didn't. Economic guilt, where you had insurance and they didn't, or you can rebuild and they can't.⁸ And then there are people in the room who lost someone, and the person next to them lost a house, and both of them feel like their grief is either too much or not enough. I don't try to rank it. But people rank it themselves, internally, constantly. The ranking becomes its own wound.

June 15. The center closes. What happens?

[long pause]

The official language is "transition planning." We connect people to ongoing services. The county mental health system. Community clinics. Private therapists if they can afford one.

And?

You've been with the county for eighteen years. You'll be redeployed, not laid off. What does that feel like?

It feels like being good at something that is about to not exist. I will go back to my regular caseload, which is also underfunded, and this room will close, and the 185,000 number will go into a report somewhere as evidence that the system worked. And it did work, for the people it reached.

That's the part that keeps me up. Not that we failed. That we succeeded partially, and the partial success becomes the whole story, and the people we didn't reach become... I don't know what they become. A gap in the data. A footnote, if they're lucky.

What do you carry home?

The eucalyptus woman. I carry her. Not because her story is the worst. It isn't. But because her body knew something her mind was still negotiating with, and that feels like the whole thing to me. All of it. We know more than we can process. The body keeps the score, as they say.

The Resiliency Centers remain open through June 15, 2026. CalHOPE's Peer-Run Warmline (1-833-317-HOPE) and the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline are available 24/7. The Friendship Line for older adults: 1-888-670-1360.¹⁰

Footnotes

1. California Governor's Office, "One year after LA firestorms, California continues statewide recovery and behavioral health support," January 8, 2026. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/01/08/one-year-after-los-angeles-firestorms-california-continues-statewide-recovery-and-behavioral-health-support/ ↩

2. California Department of Health Care Services, via Governor's Office press release, January 8, 2026. Resiliency Centers opened through SAMHSA Emergency Response Grant in partnership with LA County Department of Mental Health. ↩

3. USC Keck School of Medicine, "Comprehensive Care for Wildfire Survivors in Los Angeles, 2025," Public Health Challenges, December 2025. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12560102/ ↩

4. Disaster mental health literature documents decision fatigue as a distinct phenomenon in recovery phases beyond 6 months, per SAMHSA disaster behavioral health guidelines and published meta-analyses on post-disaster psychological trajectories. ↩

5. Post-disaster insurance disputes are consistently identified in peer-reviewed research as a disproportionate driver of secondary trauma — harm caused by the recovery process rather than the disaster itself. ↩

6. Altadena's historically Black middle-class community and multi-generational homeownership patterns are extensively documented in local and national press coverage of the Eaton Fire's impact. ↩

7. Federal, state, and local teams cleared debris from the 2025 fires in six months, described as the fastest post-disaster debris removal in California history. Engaged California, "LA aligns on recovery plans." https://engaged.ca.gov/lafires-recovery/action-plan/ ↩

8. Survivor guilt patterns in wildfire contexts — geographic and economic — are documented in disaster psychology literature, including specific dynamics in communities with mixed socioeconomic populations. ↩

9. The Friendship Line saw its share of all calls from Los Angeles jump from 15% in January to 28% by September 2025, per CalHOPE program data reported through DHCS. ↩

10. Cal OES, "Crisis Counseling Assistance is Available to LA County Wildfire Survivors." https://news.caloes.ca.gov/crisis-counseling-assistance-is-available-to-la-county-wildfire-survivors/ ↩