Camp Fire, like most disasters, hits disabled, elderly hardest
There are no children on the list of dead from the Camp Fire. No teenagers or even young adults have been identified as victims of the disaster.
The 46 named victims so far were, on average, 71 years old. The youngest was 39; the oldest 95.
Many had physical disabilities and couldn’t flee. Some refused to leave, unable to see, hear or smell the impending danger, or lacking the cognitive abilities to acknowledge it.
They were among the 85 people who died in the Nov. 8 blaze, some in their beds, others just outside their front
doors. A few made desperate phone calls to family, friends or emergency responders, begging for rescue.
One by one, as officials confirmed the identities of the dead, their stories offered a tragic but familiar narrative, one of older, infirm or disabled loved ones disproportionately dying in a disaster.
Andrew Downer, “a big teddy bear” who collected marbles, had lost a foot to diabetes and didn’t have a car, said his sister-in-law, Leslie Clarke. His longtime girlfriend was out of town.
“He was trying to be rescued,” Clarke said. “He called 911.”
The 54-year-old died just outside his home in Paradise.
“I think the fire actually got him about 10 minutes after my husband got off the phone with him,” Clarke said, as her 5month-old son, named after his Uncle Andrew, gurgled in the background.
About a 12-minute drive up the Gold Country foothills, 75-year-old Sara Magnuson had lived alone in Paradise, with no car and rare contact with family. As the fire approached, two neighbors begged her to leave with them.
“She refused to leave,” said her brother, Bill Randols, who lives near Phoenix. “She had a lot of issues, some of them mental health issues, and I don’t think she realized the severity of things.”
As the fire hit the small community of Concow, TK Huff — a 71-year-old amputee — tried to fight the fire from his wheelchair, hosing down his house from the garden to keep the flames at bay, his granddaughter, Jordan Huff, said.
They told him to leave, and he said he would. His body was found inside the home, his wheelchair still by the back gate.
“He was literally the strongest, toughest, best person I’ve ever met in my life,” Huff said.
Their deaths, said UCSF Dr. Christine Ritchie, are both “heart-wrenching and altogether not surprising.”
Older adults and those with disabilities are at a high risk when disaster strikes, said Ritchie, a professor of medicine who specializes in geriatrics and palliative care.
Consider Hurricane Katrina, where nearly half of the 1,000 victims were 75 years or older, and the average age was 69.
In the 1991 Oakland firestorm, the average age of the 25 victims was 55.
“This has been a source of concern for me for quite some time, especially living in the Bay Area where we’re always theoretically preparing ourselves for an earthquake,” Ritchie said. “It’s really incumbent on us as a community and society to think about how we can take care of those in our community, especially those who have physical difficulties and needs.”
In San Francisco, disaster planning includes training of residents to participate on a Neighborhood Emergency Response Team, which includes assessment of the needs of local residents, including those in senior care homes, she said.
In addition, Ritchie’s UCSF department keeps a record of patients based on their risks in a disaster, identifying those who can’t independently evacuate or who would need immediate medical care or equipment in the event of a power outage or other emergency.
“This is an area where we’re really trying to put an increasing amount of emphasis,” she said.
After the 2017 fires in Sonoma and Napa counties, the issue took on even greater urgency, said Michael Helle, UCSF director of clinical programs for the Office of Population Health.
The average age of the 42 people who died in those fires, including the Tubbs blaze in Santa Rosa, was 73.
“People had a lot of lessons learned from the previous year,” he said. And then, this year was worse.
“We’re two years in a row of this,” he said.
Seniors, even if not disabled, are often at a higher risk because of declines in their senses and decision-making abilities, Ritchie said.
They often can’t see, smell or hear as well as younger residents, making it harder for them to anticipate the danger of a wildfire. Then add on cognitive challenges, like insight and judgment, or the kinds of issues that make them susceptible to elder abuse.
They might not be able to discern immediate danger or know what to do in an emergency, Ritchie said.
It is a “perfect storm” of risk in disasters like the Camp Fire, she added.
Victoria Taft, 66, was at her Paradise home where she lived with her daughter, Christina, when the fire broke out. A neighbor told them to leave, but Victoria refused.
“She didn’t think it was going to be that bad, and she didn’t receive an alert from any authority,” Christina said. “We never got an official evacuation order.”
As the Camp Fire spread throughout Paradise and the surrounding towns, engulfing homes and schools, officials did not send Wireless Emergency Alerts, or WEAs: Amber Alertstyle evacuation notices to all area cell phones. But even if they had, many of the area’s older residents used landlines, and cell service in Paradise was spotty.
Officials did use the CodeRed system to reach people who had opted in to get emergency alerts, sending about 5,000 emails, 26,000 reverse-911 calls and 5,400 text messages.
Christina, 25, decided to leave at about 10 a.m. Her mother, who suffered from blindness as a result of her glaucoma and had arthritis and neck and back problems, wouldn’t go.
“I have to live with that,” Christina said.
Victoria’s body was found in the living room in front of a window.
“Even though she was sometimes critical and had high standards, she was unconditionally loving and would forgive any fight that we’d have,” the daughter said. “She would always volunteer at my schools growing up and would always go to my events and care about everything I did.”
Another Paradise victim, 88-year-old Julian Binstock, was probably among the first to perish on Nov. 8.
He lived in the Feather Canyon Retirement Community, an independent living community for seniors, at the edge of a heavily forested canyon where the fire first pushed through into town.
The community was evacuated, but somehow, Binstock remained behind. He was found in his independent-living bungalow with his border collie, Jack, by his side.
His grandson, Julian Lamb, believes he might have been asleep and didn’t wake despite evacuation efforts by staff who pounded on doors.
“As far as we were told, they had made an attempt, then the fire advanced rapidly,” Lamb said.
Binstock had been a film executive before settling in the region 30 years ago.
“He was a phenomenal guy,” Lamb said.
Despite the disproportionate number of older adults and disabled among the list of dead, Cal Fire Deputy Chief Scott McLean knew it could have been worse, much worse, given the number of retirees in the burned out communities.
Of the 26,000 residents in Paradise, 25 percent — or around 6,500 — were older than 65 in 2017, according to a U.S. census estimate. By comparison, 14 percent of California residents were older than 65. Nearly 1 in 5 Paradise residents under 65 lived with a disability, almost three times the share of disabled Californians under 65.
The dozens of senior homes and communities had evacuation plans in place and successfully transported most of their residents to safety, he said.
And amid the tragic deaths, there were many unbelievable stories of survival, he said.
As the fire raged through Paradise, McLean was there, helping evacuate residents when he saw, through the smoky darkness, a figure in the distance, perhaps an animal, he initially thought.
It was an older woman in a wheelchair, a fluffy dog in her lap, rolling down the road.
“She had thrown her wheelchair out the door, crawled out, grabbed the dog, grabbed the purse and she was leaving town wheeling down the hill,” he said.
He loaded her into his truck and took her to Feather River Hospital, where she would be safe.
“She called me the other day,” he said. “We’re going to go get dinner.”