Firefighters burned fuel around a home in an effort to save it from the Kincade fire. Photo / Max Whittaker, The New York Times
Natural disasters are another prism through which California's vast income inequalities can be viewed.
After a wildfire razed his spacious suburban home in the Sonoma hills two years ago, Pete Parkinson set out to rebuild. This time it would be an even better one. He reoriented the house toward vistas of a nearby mountain and designed a large kitchen with hickory floors and 16-foot windows under vaulted ceilings.
"We are now living the silver lining," said Parkinson, a retired civil servant who moved into his new home 10 days ago. "It is a beautiful, brand-new home."
California's catastrophic wildfires have not discriminated between rich and poor. In recent years, tens of thousands of people lost their homes, from trailer parks to mansions. But the aftermath of the fires has produced a spectrum of misery and recovery, ranging from the wealthy, who with insurance money rebuilt houses sometimes worth more than the ones that burned, to those who lost everything and years later still have nothing.
Like access to quality education and clean water, natural disasters are another prism through which California's vast income inequalities can be viewed.
A lawyerly knowledge of the peculiarities of the insurance industry, a pool of savings to fall back on and the time and grit to deal with the state's labyrinthine regulations have helped some in California bounce back from the infernos. Others have not been so lucky.
Jenn Wilcox worked at a residential care facility in the town of Paradise until November 8, 2018, when the town was incinerated by fire. After she narrowly escaped, the uninsured cabin where she was living was destroyed; she also lost her job. Her life upside down, she split up with her boyfriend and returned to her home state of Georgia, where she is struggling to make ends meet as a home health aide.
"I'm a refugee," Wilcox said. "I'm broke."
On Tuesday, firefighters in Northern California braced for the return of strong winds, hoping to avoid the further spread of the Kincade fire, which has burned 75,000 acres in Sonoma County and was 15 per cent contained. In Southern California, the Getty fire still burned while residents braced for extreme winds expected to reach 130km/h. Thousands of structures are threatened.
Karen Orlando, a real estate agent in the Sonoma Valley, has seen the rebuilding process in Sonoma County play out in distinct ways between "the really wealthy and then those who are just getting by."
Orlando said that for those with insurance and the means, rebuilding has been a kind of therapy after the trauma of losing a home; reclaiming those spaces is a way to soldier through grief, she said.
"Some people have decided to buy a lot maybe with a better view than what they had," she said. "Some people want to rebuild on the lot but now they get the chance to build the home of their dreams. They get to pick out all the finishes and fixtures and imagine all the landscaping."
After the Wine Country fires in 2017 destroyed their hillside home with a priceless mountain view, Joan and Nick Flint received US$1 million for the rebuild, not enough to match what they once had. They ended up paying another US$1 million out of pocket.
Standing outside their new home Tuesday — white brick with an Escalade in the garage — Joan Flint said she realised how lucky they were that they could afford to do that.
"We're not a hard-luck story by any means," she said. "We feel blessed."
Fires this week in Southern California forced evacuations of celebrities like LeBron James and Arnold Schwarzenegger. James tweeted that he was driving around trying to find a hotel room after he fled his home. (His home did not burn, nor did Schwarzenegger's.)
Man these LA 🔥 aren’t no joke. Had to emergency evacuate my house and I’ve been driving around with my family trying to get rooms. No luck so far! 🤦🏾♂️
— LeBron James (@KingJames) October 28, 2019
Less visible has been the fate of those hard hit in towns like Paradise in the Sierra foothills, razed by fire last year, and Lake County, where around 2,000 homes have burned over the past four years. In both places, incomes were strained even before the fires.
Jim Steele, a former supervisor in Lake County, estimated that about 60 per cent of residents in the county lacked insurance or were severely under insured. Insurers are raising rates in areas vulnerable to fire and in some cases have declined to write policies.
"There's a lot of risk and a lot of poverty," he said. Many people were forced to move away after their homes burned down, especially older people who retired in picturesque but fire-prone hills surrounding Clear Lake.
"It has a lot to do with your age and where you are in your career," Steele said. "Retired people have trouble — they just don't have the resilience."
A report published by the federal government two years ago said people with lower incomes were less prepared for natural disasters and were more likely to live in homes vulnerable to them. Low-income Americans are also more likely to become homeless after a disaster and have more difficulty obtaining loans after one, the report said.
Another study released by the Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco, New York, Dallas and Richmond, Virginia, focused on small businesses affected by natural disasters. Insurance coverage for those businesses "appeared to be mismatched to the actual damage that occurred," the report said.
Often disasters trigger a cascade of woes. For Gina Wheeler, whose grandparents moved her family to the Sierra Nevada from the Bay Area in the 1960s, the Paradise fire sent her into depression and financial peril. Wheeler, 44, was hospitalised for intestinal surgery in the days before the disaster. Then she lost her uninsured trailer that she rented on family land in the fire.
"Every place I've ever set foot in has been touched by fire," Wheeler said. "I don't think anybody that's not gone through this will ever, ever understand what it's like to lose your entire community."
This fall, Wheeler moved into a trailer in a camp for fire survivors in the remote farm town of Gridley, where she must stretch a fixed income of US$850 a month to rebuild her life. She struggles to pay for food and gas, sometimes turning to Facebook groups for help.
"I can't even describe the empty feeling that we have," Wheeler said. "I talk friends and family members out of suicide, and they talk me out of it."
Parkinson, the resident of the Sonoma hills, says about 40 per cent of his neighbours have not started to rebuild their homes, many of them because they cannot afford to. Although his new house is more hardened to fire, the area remains vulnerable, a dozen or so miles away from where the Kincade fire is burning.
Parkinson counts himself lucky not only because he was able to construct a 2,200-square-foot dream home but because he had the mental fortitude to deal with the disappearance of all but a handful of his possessions. When he fled his home with his wife and son in 2017 he carried only electronics, two guitars, photo albums and some clothing.
"There was something about walking up to the pile of ashes that my house was reduced to and understanding the absolute finality of it," he said.
His insurance money was insufficient to completely furnish the house so he went to Ikea with a pickup truck and held a furniture-assembly party with friends.
"I don't have a lifetime's worth of stuff anymore," he said. "Everything is 2 years old and less."
Written by: Thomas Fuller, Julie Turkewitz and Jose A. Del Real
Photographs by: Max Whittaker, Jim Wilson, Salgu Wissmath
© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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