Survivors reeling as California town levelled by Dixie fire
The destruction of a large swath of the California gold rush town of Greenville as the Dixie fire swept through left residents stunned yesterday and mourning all that has been lost.
Kevin Goss, a Plumas County supervisor, lives outside Greenville, in Taylorsville, but has had a pharmacy in town since 1988. The pharmacy was the oldest building in town and dated back to 1860.
Yesterday, Goss said residents and business owners were doing damage assessment. Because the fire was still active, no-one was getting near Greenville.
‘‘My pharmacy is gone, I know that,’’ said Goss, who said he was in escrow to sell it to another pharmacy. ‘‘The whole historic downtown area is gone.’’
The feeling among community members, he said, is ‘‘shock. Just shock’’. He estimates the town’s population at 1200 people.
Goss said a mandatory evacuation order had been lifted on Wednesday and that people ‘‘were just repopulating Greenville when this thing just broke loose’’.
‘‘We just weren’t sure what was going on up in the mountain . . . or else we probably wouldn’t have let people back into town,’’ he said. ‘‘We thought it was taken care of, we thought they had it controlled. They didn’t.’’
Goss had gone into town on Thursday and saw the fire jump off the hillside, raining sparks and embers around Greenville.
‘‘That’s when the fire came to town,’’ Goss said. ‘‘It came through there like a blowtorch.’’
He and his son went around to a few homes and told residents to get out ‘‘because the whole thing is going to go up’’.
Curtis Machlan alternated between past and present tense as he spoke about the town. The
58-year-old moved to the town in
2007, and it’s where he met his nowwife Kimberly, who had moved to the area in the late 1990s from San Jose.
He grew emotional as he described a town with residents of varying political beliefs, but who pitched in to help one another regardless. It was a town where ‘‘everyone knows everybody.’’ ‘‘We’d go to the local grocery store and sometimes it would take over an hour to get out, just to run in and get a gallon of milk or something, because we knew everybody.’’
Since 2015, he and his wife would spend six months living on a sailboat in the Caribbean and six months in Greenville. They would leave town in December or January and return in June.
They were out of the country in February 2020 and because of the pandemic decided to stay there instead of risk flying home. It’s where they started hearing about the Dixie fire.
‘‘I had a feeling that this was going to happen this year,’’ Machlan said, citing the driest conditions he’s ever seen in the Sierra Nevada. ‘‘After Paradise went up a couple of years ago, it was really just a matter of time until it happened to more mountain communities.
‘‘It’s the climate change,’’ he said. ‘‘Everybody who didn’t believe it in Greenville is now a climate refugee.’’
Machlan said they spoke to his wife’s family in Chester, a town 32km north of Greenville that was under imminent threat itself Thursday.
The family of his wife’s daughter, who had just a month ago moved into a home they were remodelling in Greenville, had their house burn down. The library in town where his wife once worked also burned down. The building that housed the auto parts store where Machlan once worked was gone.
Yesterday morning, he said he was 95 per cent sure his home had burned down because of its location within the fire line. Later that morning, he heard from a friend who stayed and tried to fight the fire in a pasture at the northwest end of the town. Machlan’s house was gone, he said. Neighbours’ homes were also gone. The friend described it as a ‘‘moonscape.’’
‘‘It’s tragic for so many people,’’ Machlan said.