Workers stay behind amid wildfire

STATELINE, Nev. — From the casino where she works, Nathalia Bonifacio watched the world flee. Thousands of tourists, homeowners and workers who keep the economy humming along Lake Tahoe streamed out of town in the last two weeks as a wildfire roared closer through the Sierra Nevada.

But not her.

Where could she run to? Bonifacio, 21, a college student from the Dominican Republic, had landed in the United States three months earlier to work at one of the high-rise casinos that flank the Nevada shoreline of the mountain lake. She had no family here. She could not afford a hotel room in the nearby towns, jammed with more than 20,000 evacuees.

So as ash from the Caldor fire snowed on Lake Tahoe, Bonifacio and a handful of other workers stayed behind. They have since become an unsung pit crew working the country’s highest-priority wildfire, feeding and refueling thousands of firefighters arriving here to battle a blaze the size of Dallas.

Eight miles from charred front lines of the fire, a cluster of Vegas-style hotels on the California-Nevada border has morphed into a base camp for emergency workers. With boutique hotels and alpine lodges shuttered on the California side of the border, fire trucks now occupy valet parking spots in the Nevada-side casinos. Exhausted fire crews accustomed to camping in the woods trundle takeout pizza up to their rooms.

While hundreds of hotel employees joined the evacuation from Tahoe, skeleton staff who decided to stay now serve quesadillas and iced coffee to hundreds of emergency responders filling the rooms. They check in guests and pick up trash. They send up clean sheets and towels to replace linens suffused with ash. They endure the smoke wafting through the hallways like some phantom guest.

“It’s a disaster,” said Bonifacio, whose asthma is aggravated by the smoky air.

Some of the remaining staff are managers and lifelong residents from Tahoe and surrounding towns. Others are immigrants from Southeast Asia and Latin American college students on temporary visas who come to do the unglamorous work of washing dishes and changing sheets.

The signs thanking firefighters in people’s yards around Tahoe do not mention the backstage support from workers like Bonifacio. But she and others who stayed said the past week stuck in a fire zone had made their workaday routines more meaningful.

“Rescuers, firefighters, police — we’re helping these people,” said Odan Maria, a Dominican college student who works as a dishwasher.

Firefighters have made steady progress containing the fire with the help of lighter winds, and Sunday night, lifted evacuation orders for South Lake Tahoe, California. The fire, which has destroyed more than 750 homes, was about half contained Tuesday, Cal Fire reported.