San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Wildfire leaves little for those it spared
Customers, jobs gone for those untouched by Camp Fire
MAGALIA, Butte County — The red and green tables and chairs outside Jaki’s Hilltop Cafe were brand-new. The restaurant, known for its biscuits and gravy, and stuffed French toast, had a fresh coat of beige and brown paint just in time for its reopening.
Just 15 months earlier, the cafe was destroyed by a kitchen fire that ignited after a car show and barbecue. It reopened in October, exactly one month before the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history tore through the area.
The Camp Fire skipped or circled around some homes and businesses. It left a storefront here and a house there, as it gobbled entire neighborhoods on its unprecedented path of destruction through Butte County.
Miraculously, it missed Jaki’s Hilltop Cafe. But it doesn’t matter. There are no customers to serve.
The luck of the draw isn’t very soothing to the property owners who were spared by the capricious flames. With everything around them gone and most commerce shut down, their futures are, for the most part, in just as much doubt as those of the people who lost everything.
“This is an apocalypse,” said Jaki Snead, the 60-year-old owner of the Hilltop, noting that the hair and nail salons next to her restaurant had burned to the ground.
“It’s been two tragedies really close to one another,” she added.
Her cafe didn’t have a fleck of ash on it, not even on the paperback books piled on a pink bookshelf next to the front door, but she knew that the future of her popular cafe and hangout spot was bleak.
The fire destroyed 528 businesses and 13,972 homes in the Sierra foothills towns of Paradise, its neighbor Magalia and several other wooded communities. The bad news got worse last week when the pounding rain caused flooding in the burn zone, forcing more evacuations. Although Snead’s business survived, her house 2 miles away was one of the casualties.
“I don’t have a home anymore. I don’t know if I’ll reopen (the restaurant),” she said. “This is really hard.”
It could take years to rebuild Paradise, Magalia and the other small communities that were devastated by the fire. Without homes, there isn’t much business, and without business, there isn’t much work. Many of the elderly property owners are expected to move away, and nobody knows who will take their place or what kind of community will be built.
Karpathia Herzbrun feels fortunate that the fire somehow looped around her Magalia neighborhood, but said she feels like she is stranded on an unburned island. Because Paradise, just down the road, is still closed to traffic, she has to drive 1½ hours on a winding mountain road just to get food. With snow, that route will soon be impassable, she said.
“We needed Paradise, but Paradise is gone,” said Herzbrun, who had to evacuate 25 animals, including two dogs, two rabbits, a horse and a goat from her Woodward Drive home the day of the fire. “It’s like you’re in a wild animal park, and you’re the wild animal . ... It’s too much. It’s an overload of feelings.”
Outside their two-story cedar home, along Centerville Road in a long valley bisected by Butte Creek, Doug and Gayle Edgar hugged each other last week, thankful that a fire crew saved the house — complete with swimming pool and tiki bar — that he built 25 years ago.
They couldn’t save his workshop, which was full of memorabilia and a pristine HarleyDavidson motorcycle, but the Edgars aren’t about to complain. The octogenarian couple next door lost everything.
“It wouldn’t even be fair if I complained,” said Doug, 58.
But the Edgars’ lives have been thrown into turmoil in other ways. Offices and part of the Feather River Hospital, where they both worked, were damaged or destroyed, nearly taking out several of their co-workers as they scrambled to evacuate patients. Administrators said recently that the damaged hospital buildings in Paradise, where as many as 1,000 people were employed, may not reopen.
“It’s certainly life-changing,” said Gayle, 45, who wept as she recounted how her neighbors and co-workers lost their
homes and livelihoods. “It’s what everybody around us lost. Our co-workers at the hospital were calling their loved ones and saying goodbye. They watched cars burn up and had to run for their lives.” The Camp Fire, which was contained last Sunday after burning 153,336 acres in 17 days, killed at least 88 people. Officials warn that the death toll could still rise.
Fire officials expect to allow many evacuated residents to return to fire-ravaged areas in the next couple of weeks, and Butte County is offering those who lost homes or loved ones services, including grief counseling, child care, and tax and disaster relief.
As the burned areas are reopened, property owners will be provided with re-entry kits with information about debris removal, safety and health, said Kelly Hubbard, a spokeswoman for the Butte County mutual aid and recovery system. She said the packet will include full-body HazMatstyle suits, rubber gloves and N95 masks.
But the emergency is such that the people whose homes were spared must find their own way through the grief and confusion, at least for now, Hubbard said.
“We don't have the resources to be tracking those who are OK,” Hubbard said. “The focus right now is on search and recovery.”
What’s left for people like Shane Smith, whose Sunnyside Lane home survived virtually unscathed, is survivor’s guilt. At least four of his neighbor’s homes were destroyed, while not even the lemon tree in his front yard suffered damage.
“I feel gratitude that I have a home, but all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I feel sad and get teary-eyed,” said Smith, a 41year-old chiropractor who, with his wife and three children — one with Down syndrome — moved in with another family in Chico while the electricity to the family home was shut off and workers cleared the smoke from inside the house.
“My town is gone. All my friends’ homes are gone,” Smith said. “I feel frustrated because I have a home, and yet I can’t help other people.”
Meanwhile, local real estate agents are packing up because there is nothing to sell.
It means businesses like Jaki’s Hilltop Cafe is in limbo. The cafe was a community hub, a place for people to hang out, but the employees can’t afford to wait around for a new town to be built out of the cinders.
“I don’t have a plan for anything right now,” said Susie LaDue, a 20-year cafe employee who, without work, can’t afford the $600 in rent she pays for herself and her 17-year-old daughter. “I am just living day by day.”
Pat Bronson, 66, a shift manager at the cafe, said she has no choice but to leave town.
“There’s nobody that is going to rebuild in Paradise right this minute,” Bronson said. “It’s never going to be the same as before. Everyone has to start a new normal.”
Bob Smalley, who owns Smalley General Contracting, in Paradise, has turned his business into a kind of halfway house for employees who lost their homes. Smalley, whose Magalia home was destroyed, lives in a room in the building and eight of his employees live in campers and recreational vehicles in the parking lot.
“I'm going to say (this fire) is going to be good for my business,” Smalley said. “It’s bittersweet because I lost my house and all my foremen lost their houses too, and that’s affecting us to some degree, but we're still fortunate to be able to conduct business.”