Camp Fire survivors struggle with overwhelming loss and grief as the staggering body count rises
CHICO >> At every community meeting since the start of California’s deadliest wildfire, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea is the last one to speak. The worst news is always saved for the end.
“I’m the sheriff and I’m also your coroner,” he will say to the fire refugees filling the auditorium. “Unfortunately the news I have for you is not good.”
And so it goes each night as the 25year veteran lawman announces how the Camp Fire’s grim death toll has grown more impossibly difficult to comprehend. On Sunday, it was 29. Monday,
42. On Tuesday, it grew to a staggering
48. And today? Thursday?
As they do every night, those in the audience gasp.
How much suffering, how much grief, can one small community endure?
How do you even begin to plan 48 funerals?
“You don’t know what you’re coping with. I mean, what is that loss?” said Tammy Mezera, 49, who has been living in a tent in a Walmart parking lot in Chico for the past five days. “It’s just earthshaking for all of us, you know?”
The wind-whipped inferno that tore through the foothills east of Chico on Thursday, virtually wiping out Paradise and incinerating people in their homes and cars, has the ignominious distinction of being both the most destructive and most deadly wildfire in California history.
“It’s not even like we can have 42 funerals next week,” Stephen Terry, a volunteer firefighter and chaplain, said Monday night, before the body count rose by another six. With the remains burned beyond recognition and DNA analysis needed to identify them, “It’s going to take I don’t know how long,” he said. “It just magnifies the tragedy. It’s all so deep. It’s almost more than someone can wrap their mind around.”
In Chico, where many of those who survived the fire fled Thursday morning, humanity is laid bare in rows of cots at Red Cross and church shelters around town and at the
tent city and donation center springing up at the edge of the Walmart parking lot.
Mel Contant, who drove up from her home in Antioch to volunteer and has become the de facto organizer of this tent city and the donation center next to it, said it’s painful to watch.
“They’re looking at me but not seeing me,” she said of the evacuees. “People are talking and they’re not there.”
It took four days, she said, but by Monday, “The emotions are coming up and out.”
The tears are starting to pour, she said, and “If these people are this emotional now, how are they going to be tomorrow?”
Arthur Lee, whose mother and stepfather are still missing after six days, said he’s “holding up by threads.”
A search crew went through what was left of their two-story home in Paradise on Monday, and he said he learned through the grapevine Tuesday that “It was so hot that they couldn’t really find anything. One guy said it was so hot it melted rock.”
Lee, who lives in Sacramento, said he still doesn’t know whether his mom, Dorothy Lee Herrera, and her husband, Louis Herrera, left the house or fled. His 90-year-old mother walks with a cane.
“It’s beyond words, really,” he said. He almost can’t bring himself to provide hair and saliva samples to the DNA laboratory that is trying to match the ashen remains with relatives.
“I go so far and then I stop,” he said.
The town of Paradise was home to a mostly elderly population — and some of them, including Jackie Wineland, 74, and her caregiver, Lisa Wise — are now sharing a tent next to the Walmart. The temperatures drop into the 30s overnight. And on Tuesday morning, they stood shivering in donated clothing. Port-a-potties are on site but portable showers are still on the way, so neither had bathed in nearly a week.
“There’s no sense in getting all shook up about it,” said Wineland. “You take it as it comes.”
It’s a frontier spirit — or a wisdom that comes with age — that folks in Butte County are proud of. But
it’s hard to hold.
“I’m trying to comprehend it,” said Doug Anderson, 54, who doubts that the house in Paradise where he rented the basement survived. “If everything is lost, where do I go from here?”
At a Chico hotel on Tuesday morning, Linda and Eric Sargent, who lost their home in Paradise, are focusing on something they can control: finding a place to live and planning the holidays.
“We’re visiting our son in Wisconsin,” Eric Sargent said. “We bought a one-way ticket.”
Funeral homes are bringing in extra staff and working long hours to help with preparations for funerals sure to come. They also are supporting displaced families
who lost loved ones before the fire and have had to put the funerals on hold until they pull their lives together.
“We’re fielding phone calls, taking care of a lot of people we had before the fire and anticipating what’s going to be happening,” said Bob Bracewell, who is running his family’s Chico mortuary after he had to flee the sister funeral home in Paradise. It survived, but the hearse and the warehouse in the back were destroyed. Some of his employees lost their homes.
“We’re doing all we can to support and protect the families that we have,” he said.
At the packed auditoriums — at the Oroville State Theater one night, at Chico
State the next — the sheriff has received standing ovations when he takes the stage and when he leaves it.
He’s been sheriff since 2014, but he’s had folk hero status here since he made the tough call last year to evacuate the town of Oroville when the spillway at the nation’s tallest dam was in imminent danger of failing. More than 188,000 people were stuck in traffic gridlock as they fled town — just like they were in Paradise last week.
“You’re all my people,” he said at a Monday night meeting. “I care deeply about you and I want to protect you.”
His daughter is a police officer in Paradise and was working the morning of the fire. “I was scared to death I’d never see her again,” he told them. “I understand how devastating this has been and how impactful it is.”
The fire destroyed more than 7,600 homes and 260 commercial buildings. And, they know, the death count is expected to rise.
For now, in the tent city and in the community meetings and in the evacuation center, they are trying to hold on. Mezera has already formed a circle of lawn chairs and cots next to her tent with old neighbors and others they’ve welcomed in.
“My community is holding me up,” she said. “The meaning for us is to hold together and be together so no one is alone through this.”