LOS ANGELES _ Every day for a year, Marsha Maus has trekked up Mulholland Highway to tend to her garden.
Her yard _ so green it looks neon _ overflows with towering sunflowers and creeping vines. Her plot looks down on the 1960s-era section of Seminole Springs Mobile Home Park, a tidy subdivision tucked high in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Above it lies a wasteland.
"All this was torched _ there was nothing left," Maus, 75, said as she surveyed the Janus-faced landscape from her burned-out lot. "Every day I come up here, it tears me up. We get a glimpse of hope, but then it's gone."
For victims of the Woolsey fire, recovery has been agonizingly slow. The blaze charred 151 square miles and 1,600 structures when it ripped through Malibu, the Santa Monica Mountains and eastern Ventura County a year ago, consuming mobile homes and movie stars' mansions in what would become one of the most destructive wildfires in California history.
In Seminole Springs alone, 110 homes burned. But unlike their neighbors in Malibu or Westlake Village, some of whom have turned to modular units as a quick way to rebuild, fire victims here have barely set foot on the road to return.
That's because the park lost not just homes, but the entire network of infrastructure that ran underneath them. Streets, storm drains, sewer systems, water mains, gas and electric lines _ all were damaged or destroyed in the fire and its aftermath. Replacing them could take up to a year and would cost $10 million.
"We're still in the same place we were a year ago _ there's nothing done," said Ester Marantz Bruce, a burned-out victim and a member of the park's embattled board of directors. "Insurance gave me money for a year of rent, but that money is over. We now need to rent homes for another year, and we all don't know how we will pay."
