Makeshift shelters:
Displaced residents face a long wait.
CHICO — Tents sprawled in a parking lot. Cots jammed side by side at a fairgrounds. Desperation on the faces of the parents and children with nothing but smoking ruins to go home to.
The devastating Camp Fire that wiped out the town of Paradise and savaged neighborhoods for miles around in Butte County has shoved 52,000 people out of their homes. And with roads closed and flames still devouring area forest lands, there is no timetable for when they might be able to either go home or find some semblance of normalcy in a new place.
Already, 1,400 people have jammed into nearly a dozen shelters sprinkled from Quincy in the mountains of Plumas County to the college town of Chico. The Red Cross reports that they may have to stay open for months, and the agency stands ready to open more shelters.
The situation is already markedly different from that faced by the multitudes displaced last year by the Wine Country fires — and it looks likely to hold a more tightly focused, longer-term pain. The conflagrations that burned Sonoma, Napa, Lake and Mendocino counties forced 5,000 people into shelters — but 20 days later, fewer than 175 needed the beds.
Nobody’s predicting the Camp Fire’s hardy, more rural crowds will be in more permanent housing in anything close to 20 days.
“This will probably stretch on longer than it did last year in Sonoma and Napa, and not just because of any difference in demographics,” said Bryan May, spokesman for the state Office of Emergency Services. “We are in an entirely different situation this time.”
The face of that different situation can be found in any of the pop-up shelters — which began to fill so quickly that an impromptu tent city of nearly 100 people has sprouted in the parking lot of the Walmart store in Chico. Tammy Mezera is one of them.
She had moved to Paradise from Illinois just two months ago, overjoyed at finding a beautiful, safe place to live. It had been turmoil before that. In just one year, her relationship crumbled after a dozen years. Her children moved away. Her dog died. So did her cat.
In Paradise, she’d found peace. But now, even that was gone. Her rental burned to the ground, as did Paradise itself. Incinerated like logs in a fire.
“I loved the town,” said Mezera, 49, who had worked in emergency management years before and expected to get back into the field. Now, Mezera sat smoking in a lime-green camp chair outside of a tent she’d pitched in a field by the Walmart parking lot alongside dozens of others who’d fled the conflagration. In Paradise, she said, “I felt a sense of security.”
Nearby sat her silver Nissan Altima, which she’d jumped into nearly a week before when ash began falling around her house like rain, and she saw the red glow of the encroaching fire to her left.
Gazing at the car, Mezera wiped away tears. “That’s my house now,” she said. “And if I can’t make my car payments, I’ll lose that, too.”
Red Cross spokesman Tony Briggs said his shelters can take more people, “but we can’t force anyone to go there. We will just be here for anyone who wants to come.”
He said there is no estimate for how long the agency will need to shelter and feed people. Or for the cost.
“We’re at the ‘let’s get people taken care of ’ stage,” he said. “We’ll talk about numbers and costs later. But I think it’s safe to say we’re going to be here for a while.”
The Camp Fire burn zone has an older, poorer population that is less able to nimbly relocate than the one in Wine Country — and the situation blocking people from returning to flamedamaged areas is more complicated. Paradise, for instance, has a median age of 50 compared with the median age in Santa Rosa, the worst-hit community last year, of 38, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The median household income in Paradise is $48,000; in Santa Rosa it is $63,000.
Before the fire, Butte County officials reported a rental vacancy rate of as low as 1.5 percent. Now it is zero.
Adding to the complications, many of the roads people need to use to get back home to unburned areas are closed, with no end in sight. And the search for remains is proving to be intricate and slow.
Over at the cavernous Fellowship Hall in Chico’s Neighborhood Church, about 80 Red Cross cots were set up, dormstyle, and they were situated for the long haul. The place was full — not only with some of the neediest victims of the conflagration, including the elderly, the poor and several children, but with nearly a dozen family dogs and at least one cat. Evacuees also endured an outbreak of norovirus this week.
Norris Godsey, 82, had been there for a week, since deciding, sometime in the afternoon of Nov. 8 after all his neighbors had fled, and after fruitlessly hosing down the house across the street, that he might as well leave, too.
“It got so hot,” Godsey said, his voice tinged with a Texas accent even after 22 years in Paradise. He’d been a jackof-all-trades who fled a bad marriage and fell in love with the “countrified atmosphere” of Paradise.
A financial institution owned his house because he had taken out a reverse mortgage. But it was home, and now there is no replacement. On Thursday, he sat on his cot, a 1-inch-thick green pad covered in three Red Cross blankets, reading a mystery from the shelf in the hallway, waiting for time to pass.
He last spoke with his three daughters in Texas about five years ago, “and they basically told me to bug out,” Godsey said.
“I’m just very hopeful I can work something out for the future,” he said. “If that’s not possible, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
Casey Hatcher, a Butte County spokeswoman, said the county has convened a housing task force, but officials don’t yet know how many residential vacancies are available to meet the need. What they do know, she said, is that “there’s no way our current housing stock can ever accommodate the number of people displaced. That is the task before us.”
Back at the Walmart parking lot, Brian Taylor, 60, walked through the tent encampment this week handing out flyers for a Saturday meeting of fire victims being convened by lawyers preparing to sue Pacific Gas and Electric Co. He was living with a friend, but said he’s eager to resume his solitary life with his bulldog Frenchy. He said buying a camper might be the only way to do it.
“There’s nothing going to be available to rent for a long time,” Taylor said. “Not with 50,000 people who need lodging.” Hundreds of those people visited the U.S. post office in Chico on Wednesday, starting at 7 a.m. and standing in a line that snaked around the corner and continued down Broadway. Postal workers walked the line, handing out magenta sticky notes for everyone to write their name on so their mail could be properly set aside.
Some, like Bill and Charlotte Wilson, were there to request a change-of-address form. They were among the lucky few who had already found a new place to live.
For the Wilsons, of course, lucky was a relative term. Their four-bedroom home on Xeno Place, on a half-acre of prime Paradise real estate, had burned to the ground. So did three of the four rental properties they owned, including one without insurance.
But even as they fled the flames, the Wilsons were thinking about the next roof over their heads. While others may have grabbed beloved items in the minutes they had to decide, the Wilsons snapped up their bank records and a stack of bills, and tossed them into the car. They would need them to rent a home fast.
And two days later, on Saturday, “we went crazy looking for a place to live,” said Bill, 62, a retired driver.
They found one: in a notorious college dorm known as the Zoo, owned by Chico State. They took it sight unseen.
It turned out to have thick layers of paint and serious remodeling needs.
“We were like: We need a secure place because places are going to fill up — so we jumped on it,” Charlotte, 53, said before melting into tears. Bill embraced her. As Charlotte composed herself, she said, “We’re lucky to have a place.”
“We’re people taken at the care ‘let’s of get ’ stage. We’ll talk about numbers and costs later. But I think it’s safe to say we’re going to be here for a while.” Tony Briggs, Red Cross spokesman