Uncovering the hidden burdens of long-term disaster recovery
What 115 Los Angeles wildfire survivors taught us about designing more humane recovery systems and technology that strengthens human support.
The After Collective was born in 2025 from a bold but simple belief: disaster recovery can work better for survivors. With grant support from OpenAI Mental Health and Direct Relief, and in partnership with survivor networks and Stanford University, we began where every meaningful solution should: by listening. We asked survivors what recovery really demands, where existing systems fall short, and how they want to be accompanied.
The Headlines Moved On. The Long Road To Recovery Continues.
The cameras leave, the news cycle turns, and for most people, the fire becomes a memory. For survivors, it's still Tuesday. More than a year later, most are still living in temporary housing, still fighting with insurance, still waiting on the systems that were supposed to help them. That gap - between how fast public attention fades and how slowly recovery actually moves - is where survivors say they feel most overlooked.
But it is also an opportunity to reimagine what long-term recovery can look like: to build systems that stay engaged in the long tail of recovery, center survivors' voices, and ensure that support evolves with communities as they rebuild, recover, and move forward.
Recovery Is an All-Consuming Second Job At the Exact Time the Brain Is Overloaded.
Recovery is often described as a journey. But for many survivors, it can feel more like taking on a second full-time job: one they never applied for and cannot afford to step away from.
Survivors must manage insurance claims, housing, public benefits, financial decisions, health concerns, rebuilding, and family disruption. They described competing deadlines, fragmented systems, and routine collapse as major sources of overwhelm. What makes this especially challenging is the timing: disaster exposure itself affects memory, attention, and decision-making, so recovery demands the most focus and organization at exactly the moment survivors have the least to give.
Mental Health Cannot Be Separated From Practical Recovery.
Nearly three-quarters of survivors named emotional and mental health stress as their leading recovery challenge: ahead of insurance, financial strain, and rebuilding. Yet the hardest moments often didn't arrive immediately after the fire. They tended to surface later, once the adrenaline wore off and the logistics finally slowed down enough to feel again.
Mental health support is essential, but for survivors, time is the most precious resource of all. Recovery demands hours spent navigating insurance, securing housing, rebuilding livelihoods, and caring for family, leaving little time to process what happened, seek support, or simply begin to heal.
Paperwork Is More Than a Hassle. It Can Stand Between Survivors and Recovery.
For most survivors, "paperwork" doesn't mean a stack of forms: it means hundreds of unpaid hours spent decoding insurance policies, chasing missing documents, and figuring out which agency needs what and by when. It was exhausting not because any one task was hard, but because there were so many of them, constantly shifting, with real consequences for getting something wrong. Survivors described bureaucracy, unclear next steps, fragmented agencies, and competing deadlines as stress amplifiers.
When paperwork stalls, everything behind it (the claim, the payment, the housing, the sense of moving forward) stalls with it. Participants believed workflow support could also improve mental health.
Survivors Are Open to AI. But Openness Is Not the Same as Trust.
Most survivors have already used AI in some form, and a solid majority said they'd be open to using it for recovery.
But that openness comes with conditions. Accuracy was the top concern by far, followed by data privacy and a fear of losing human connection: a reminder that for people making high-stakes decisions about their homes and finances, "good enough" isn't good enough. Survivors don't want AI to replace human judgment or relationships.
“AI for emotional recovery would feel like clicking, not connection, and would not survive contact with real human pain.” — Eaton fire survivor
“I would never seek out recovery help from an AI tool. This is literally one of the hardest things we have ever experienced. Humans learn best from other humans.” — Palisade fire survivor
Survivors Do Not Want More Information. They Want Help Making It Usable.
Survivors weren't asking for more resources: they already have too much information and not enough time or bandwidth to use them all. What they wanted was help acting on what they already know: filling out a form correctly, finding the one resource that actually fits their situation, or simply knowing what to do next. The recurring theme wasn't "tell me more." It was "help me use what I have."
The Future Isn’t AI Instead of People. It’s AI That Helps People Help Survivors.
Survivors said fragmented, impersonal systems deepened their distress, so more automation without a human anchor risks compounding the same feelings of overwhelm that already wore them down.
The more hopeful pattern in the data is that survivors saw AI’s clearest potential was in freeing up time and cognitive bandwidth spent on paperwork and tracking, potentially leaving more capacity for the people and support that actually helped them heal.
AI works best here not as a replacement for human care, but as a force-multiplier for it.
