Rebuilding a house after a fire is the hard part. Getting the lights turned on was supposed to be the easy part.
Jack Nguyen moved his family back into their Pacific Palisades home on Sunday, after January's fire destroyed the house they had lived in for 22 years. The new house is finished. What it does not have is electricity, beyond the low-wattage temporary construction power that ran the tools during the build.
Temporary construction power is not a substitute for a service connection. It is enough to run a saw. It is not enough to run a household.
The wait
Nguyen's account, as reported by ABC7, is that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has been unresponsive since July 2. That is roughly seventeen days of silence ending with a family moving into a finished but unpowered house.
The utility's response does not address his case. "Restoring power remains a priority," LADWP said. "Each customer's power request is unique and, for privacy reasons, we cannot comment on that specific situation without the customer's authorization."
That is a defensible position on privacy and an unsatisfying one for a reader trying to work out where the delay sits. Energizing a rebuilt property is not purely a utility task: it typically involves permits, a completed electrical inspection and sign-off, and sometimes work by third parties. A delay can originate at any of those stages. Neither ABC7's report nor LADWP's statement establishes which stage this one is stuck at, and we are not going to assume it is the utility's fault simply because the utility is the one with a name on it.
Not an isolated case
What lifts this above one family's frustration is that it does not appear to be one family's frustration.
ABC7 reports that it has heard from multiple residents having trouble getting power turned on after finishing their rebuilds. State Sen. Ben Allen has acknowledged awareness of the problem affecting residents in the area.
That matters because of what is coming. The Palisades rebuild is at the stage where completions start arriving in volume rather than one at a time. A process that takes too long for one house in July becomes a queue in the autumn. If there is a bottleneck in energization, the moment to identify it is before several hundred households reach the same point.
What a homeowner can do
For anyone approaching the same stage, a few things are worth knowing.
The energization request is a distinct step from the building permit and from the final electrical inspection, and it generally cannot proceed until the inspection is signed off. Confirming that the sign-off has actually reached the utility, rather than assuming it was transmitted, is worth a phone call.
Keep a written record: dates of submission, reference numbers, names of anyone spoken to, and copies of the inspection documentation. If a case needs escalating, whether to the utility, a council office or a state legislator's staff, that record is what makes escalation possible.
And ask directly which party the request is currently sitting with. "Where is it now" is a more useful question than "when will it be done," and it is the one that identifies whether the problem is the utility, the city or the contractor.
The open question, and the one worth putting to LADWP and to the council offices covering the burn area, is how long energization is currently taking in the rebuild zone and how many completed rebuilds are waiting. Neither figure has been made public.
