Californians return to post-Camp Fire ruins
For some, the trip is a form of therapy
MAGALIA, Calif. — What mattered most to Iva Shettlesworth as she drove up to the house where she had lived for the past decade was her mother’s wedding ring.
She and her fiancé picked through the ash. And there, where her room had been, were the remains of the metal box that held her mother’s jewelry. The ring was partly melted, but recognizable as the one her mother wore before she died five years ago.
“The rest is a mess. But we found what we wanted,” said Shettlesworth.
Just beyond the edge of Paradise, which burned from end to end, the first people who fled their homes three weeks ago are being allowed to return and rummage through what remains of where they lived.
The fire burned more than 10,000 buildings in north central California, most of them homes in the Sierra foothills. At least 88 people were killed.
Compounding the loss for the thousands of evacuees has been the wait to return. Search and rescue workers, utility companies and other cleanup operations have been trying to make these ruined communities safe. In Magalia, next to Paradise, the sanctioned return began Monday. For some, it is a search for keepsakes; for others, a form of therapy to put an image to the imagined destruction.
For most everyone, it is simply sad.
Lack of warning
“We’d seen in a video that the house was gone, but we’re back to see what mementos … we still have,” said Aliza Wieger, 19, who with her boyfriend Tommy Goucher, toured the ruins of the home she grew up in.
Nothing remained of the triple-wide trailer, and Aliza wept quietly as she walked through the site holding the home’s charred street number.
Goucher held two rocks — one painted with flowers, the other with a coiled snake. Wieger’s grandfather had painted them and they were on a small list of things that she wanted to recover, if possible.
“This is the only salvageable stuff — rocks,” Goucher said.
The two do not plan to rebuild here. The chaotic evacuation is a memory that angers Goucher, who said he learned about the approaching blaze from a community Facebook page. Only those who signed up for cellphone alerts received them.
Proposals to strengthen fire protection, and examine the liability of Pacific Gas & Electric and other big utility companies are priorities for the newly elected state legislature in Sacramento. So is getting the warning system right.
Michael, who declined to give his last name, was looking over his father’s home.
His first car — a 1988 Porsche 944S — sat burned out in what had been the garage. Michael was storing it there when the fire came. He said he did not know if his father would rebuild, but he hoped seeing it would settle his mind.
“I can’t stop thinking about it … ,” Michael said. “But now I’ve seen it, so I hope that helps.”
‘We’ll recover’
For Jerry Ginter, the return to his home of 12 years was a chance to find his knives.
Ginter was a meat cutter and, though he knew the fire had gutted his double-wide, he hoped his expensive knives had survived.
“Look what it did to this,” Ginter shouted to Mimi, his exwife, who was helping him with the search. The blade had melted into a U shape. He couldn’t find the boning knives and his cleaver was a charred ruin. “Now that upsets me,” he said.
Ginter is living with his daughter in Lancaster, a five-hour drive south. He is also insured and he smiled at the debris in front of him.
“This is a small inconvenience, or maybe a big inconvenience. But we’ll recover,” he said.