PAINFUL QUESTIONS
Many of the dead in Camp Fire had disabilities. Now advocates are asking, could they have been saved?
Sixty-three-year old Ernest Foss had swollen legs and couldn’t walk. Vinnie Carota, 65, was missing a leg and didn’t have a car. Evelyn Cline, 83, had a car but struggled to get in it without help.
Dorothy Herrera, 93, had dementia and her husband Louis, 86, couldn’t drive anymore. And 78-year-old John Digby was just feeling sick the morning of the Camp Fire when he refused a neighbor’s offer to drive him to safety.
An unsettling picture is emerging in the fire-charred hills of Butte County: Many of the at least 85 people who perished in the raging Camp Fire on Nov. 8 were elderly, infirm or disabled.
They may not have had the physical strength, presence of mind, or perhaps the desire to save themselves — even as tens of thousands of their neighbors in Paradise and other hill towns fled as flames destroyed the world around them.
Some may have been unaware the inferno was headed their way. Others may have hunkered down, hoping the fire would spare them.
Advocates for society’s vulnerable say the emerging portrait of death in Butte County’s Camp Fire is not a surprise.
“Over and over again, it is mostly people with disabilities and aged, they are the ones being left behind,” said Christina Mills, executive director with the California Foundation for Independent Living Centers. They are the people more likely to use walkers and wheelchairs than cell phones and cars.
Could they have been saved? Will California be better prepared to help its vulnerable residents when the next fire hits?
The questions are urgent. California is dealing with killer wildfires unseen in past years as well as extended fire seasons that stretch into late fall. The next fire season is just seven months away.
In the last two years, four of those wildfires have stormed into hillside cities in their first hours, taking scores of lives. Last year it was Santa Rosa, this year Redding, Paradise and Malibu.
Death tolls skewed toward the disabled and old are not unusual. It happened in Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast 13 years ago. It’s happened in other California wildfires. But Butte County’s Camp Fire, which wiped out most of the city of Paradise, may provide an exclamation point.
Some 9,500 residents in the Paradise-area had a disability, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates from 2012 to 2016. That’s about 25 percent of the population, more than double the statewide rate.
The fire’s speed caught emergency officials and residents by surprise.
Butte County’s social services director Shelby Boston said her staff that morning quickly began dialing names on a list of about 1,500 people on the hill who were enrolled in the county’s In-Home Supportive Services program, which helps elderly and infirm people remain in their homes despite disabilities.
But the effort was hopelessly over-matched before it even started.
The fire ignited about 6:30 a.m., sweeping quickly into the hamlet of Concow and throwing embers into Paradise, igniting homes and causing propane tanks to explode.
“By the time my staff could make those calls, the fire had already run through the areas we were most concerned about,” Boston said. “You cannot plan for this sort of large scale disaster. This is beyond what anyone could have imagined could have happened.”
As the fire raged in Paradise, her staff shifted gears and abandoned their calls, focusing on helping evacuees with special needs and others who had made it out and were looking for shelter instead.
Another Butte County safety effort appears to have come up short. The county’s Special Needs Awareness Program includes reflective placards that disabled people can put in their window during an emergency to alert passing police and fire officials that someone inside needs help.
Only 300 people had signed up for the program prior to the fire, according to Cindi Dunsmoor, head of the county Office of Emergency Management. Asked last week if anyone had put a decal in his or her window that morning and been rescued, Dunsmoor said she did not know.
On the streets of Paradise, state firefighters and Butte sheriff ’s deputies appear to have been similarly overmatched.
Cal Fire spokesman Scott McLean said strike teams hit town that morning — five engines each with an SUV in the lead — with a first priority of rescuing residents. McLean himself found an elderly woman rolling down a street in a wheelchair with a puppy in her lap. He put her in his truck and drove her to a hospital.
In the chaos of the moment, though, it was catch as catch can, he said. “Everybody is a priority. No one is less of a priority.”
Some of the most vulnerable were miraculously saved, piloted to safety amid flying embers by heroic neighbors, family, healthcare providers or strangers. Good Samaritan stories abound. Media accounts have told of garbage truck driver Dane Cummings plucking 93-year-old Margaret Newsum from her wheelchair on her front lawn in Magalia and strapping her into his truck for a ride down the hill as flames consumed her neighborhood.
There have been questions and confusion, though, about what official county alerts went out that morning and to whom. Some evacuees and family members of elderly deceased people say they don’t believe their loved one got any official warning, and that no one knocked on their doors.
Butte Sheriff’s officials did send alerts in the form of calls, emails and texts to people who had signed up for the county’s CodeRed system. That system is voluntary, however and became overwhelmed early in the emergency. Butte officials this week did not respond to a Bee request for the number of Paradise residents who were on the CodeRed system. The county this summer was pushing for people to sign up.