Click here if you are unable to view this gallery on a mobile device.
PARADISE — Inside Mary and Ravi Saip’s two-story home, French doors lead to a landscape and a life forever changed by the Camp Fire.
Eight months after California’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire tore through their town of Paradise, the Saips are back home in one of the few houses still standing on their street, surrounded by “lumps and clumps of rusted brown.”
“It looks like it’s the bottom of the ocean,” Ravi Saip, 57, said of the place they have called home for almost five years.
The couple is among about 3,000 people living again in this Sierra Nevada foothills town that will forever be known for the historic firestorm that killed 85 people and destroyed more than 14,000 homes. They’ve inherited the daily challenge of getting back to normal while getting stuck in construction traffic or getting lost without the familiar landmarks. Friends are traumatized by every windy day, and conversations always turn to insurance or why the tap water still isn’t safe to drink. With all the toxic debris removal in town, Mary’s doctor told her nobody should be living in Paradise.
“It just feels like everybody’s in crisis,” she said. “That environment, it’s getting very hard to be around it. I know I’m not the only one who’s feeling this.”
No longer lucky
The residents whose homes and businesses somehow survived November’s blaze used to be considered the lucky ones. But Darren Hovey, an insurance broker who lost his Paradise home, says nobody believes that now.
“I would feel more bad for a friend who didn’t lose their home than a friend who did,” said Hovey, who works at Chico-based Nevin and Witt Insurance and Financial Services.
“I mean I feel bad for all the family photos and that stuff (so many people) lost. But it’s almost easier to just start clean. …There isn’t a policy you can get for, you know, ‘I want to be covered in case my whole town burns down but my house doesn’t.’ ”
So far, just over 10 percent of Paradise’s 27,000 residents have returned. About 150 businesses, including a few coffee shops, a doctor’s office and car repair shops, have reopened, including Christina Burton’s dance and yoga studios. Her classes have become a source of therapy for many of those who have moved back home. So has the Paradise Alliance Church, one of the few large buildings left in town that now hosts everything from town council and irrigation district board meetings to comedy nights, Thursday night dinners and FEMA meetings. The church also plans to have laundry facilities available by the end of July.
“We still believe there’s hope for Paradise,” the church’s outreach pastor Ryan Wright said, “and we want to be the … center of hope.”
‘Watching slow death’
Mary and Ravi Saip moved to Paradise to get out of the “valley and dust” in the nearby farming community of Durham after their younger son, Zack, graduated high school. They had little doubt that their house was gone when they woke up Nov. 9 in an unfamiliar bed the morning after the inferno forced tens of thousands of residents to flee through flames and smoke so thick it made day feel like night.
As they lay in the darkness of a friend’s house 15 miles from home, they whispered all the possessions they had surely lost: a cherished painting by Ravi’s mom of his childhood toys sitting on the dresser he had as a baby. Wedding photos. Mary’s “crazy Christmas decorations.”
But then a friend who worked for Pacific Gas and Electric called. He had seen their home standing. “We had no idea how devastated the community was and, you know, just how small of a statistic we were,” said Mary, 54.
The Saips moved back into their home in March after living in a trailer in Chico for four months while the smoke was cleaned from their house and fire-damaged pool was removed. Since then, it’s been impossible to put the fire out of their minds. The ordinary sounds of people visiting the park and pond across the street have been replaced with the sound of construction during the day and silence at night. They have started connecting with neighbors they only knew by face, not name, before the fire, attending local meetings about the recovery, driving to nearby Chico more often and listening to stories about coping after the Camp Fire week after week.
“It’s not a survivor’s guilt. It’s just a strange guiltiness feeling, awkwardness, of having your house and everybody lost their homes,” said Ravi, who knows wildfires all too well: He manages a company in Chico that flies the air tankers that fight fires from the sky.
It’s been an emotional battle. Mary ended up in the hospital in early May when her heart started racing. She believes it’s from the shock of the changing landscape she now lives in. The pain grows as she watches crews chop down tree after tree that posed a hazard after the fire. PG&E alone has removed 91,000 trees, spokesperson Paul Moreno said. That doesn’t include trees removed by the city, county or property owners.
“I feel like it’s watching slow death, you know, it’s just, it’s death on top of death,” Mary Saip said. “It’s getting to me.”
Adding to the emotional stress, the Saips — like everyone in Paradise — have had to negotiate with their insurance company to get money for things such as landscaping, a new refrigerator and a shed that burned down with Ravi’s tools. They found out on June 4 that their insurance company will not help pay for a water filtration system or a water tank.
What comes out of the tap now isn’t safe to drink. Much of the town’s water was contaminated with the cancer-causing chemical benzene after the fire melted many of the water system’s meters and pipes. So authorities are distributing free bottled water for drinking, cooking, making ice and brushing teeth. The Paradise Irrigation District has a $53 million recovery plan to rebuild the town’s water system, but it will take until 2021.
Nearly every person affected by the Camp Fire, whether they lost their home or not, also is absorbing the shock of rising premiums to insure their homes. The Saips were able to renew their policy for an extra $200 a year, which brought their annual premium up to $1,300, but they worry State Farm may not cover them in the future. Who will? And how much will it cost?
“When will this end? You know, it just feels like it’s hard to see when it’s going to end,” Mary Saip said of the stress for those who have returned. “I know it will. I’m not without hope. It will change.”
Healing through aerial yoga
Both of Burton’s dance and yoga studios on Skyway survived the fire. Her house, which she and her clients call the “Good Vibes Mansion,” made it, too.
“I had a lot of survivor guilt for a while, and everyone I know that had a standing house feels the same way,” said Burton, who opened Positive-I Dance and Circus about 10 years ago. “I think now, at this point, I can’t live in the past and wonder why anymore.”
Business owners in Paradise, including Burton, had to deal with the overwhelming tragedy of the town burning and the practical consequences of an immediate halt to business.
“We went from making thousands of dollars a month to nothing,” she said, “and then begging and yelling at these insurance companies, ‘How do we live?’ ”
At her studio, students practice dance, yoga and aerial yoga, which is practiced using bands that hang from the ceiling to perform different yoga poses. At the height of her business, she had a huge warehouse for 26 weekly classes. Now she offers four weekly classes in a smaller studio.
The children’s dance classes have been especially therapeutic. After they dance and stretch on hammocks, an instructor lights candles and gives the kids massages to help create a soothing atmosphere.
“These kids drove through fire — literally flames — for their life,” Burton said. “Dance, aerial yoga, they love it. It makes them feel happy. They’re laughing. There’s been classes in the past couple months where kids will just start crying, and they’ll talk about how they lost their home and everything in it. It definitely helps them to talk about it, to get it out, to be around people that experienced it too.”
Center of hope and community
Steve Bolin sees that desire for community, the urge to cling to one another, in the residents who have returned. He serves as Paradise Alliance Church’s disaster director.
His home burned down in Paradise, so he and his wife, Hope, and their two children, Asher, 8, and Bodey, 5, are living in a trailer in the nearby town of Magalia, which also was ravaged by the fire.
“You don’t recognize anything,” he said. “Nothing feels normal, and it’s hard to imagine what it’s supposed to look like.”
As the disaster director, Bolin identifies needs in the city and county that the church can meet. The Thursday night community dinners, which are put on in partnership with a local faith-based nonprofit called Alliance Kingdom Builders, came from hearing stories of people who were living in Paradise.
“They’re extremely lonely,” Pastor Wright said. “They’re living in a neighborhood (where) almost the entire neighborhood went down in flames, and they’re the only house in the area that survived.”
Regular Sunday attendance has dropped by about 300 people. There is only one service now instead of two, which has made getting volunteers to help with the church’s ministries more difficult. Sermons have been centered around grieving and finding hope again. People stay for hours on Sundays, craving connection.
“If this church can be used to help people,” Wright said, “or help hurting people or help lonely people, struggling people, we want to be that resource.”
For Burton, it’s been especially difficult to cope with the contaminated water and dense construction traffic in Paradise. As frustrating as it is, she is thankful. She knows it means her town is recovering.
“I mean it’s not easy to stay here,” Burton said. “It’s not easy to live here, but it’s beautiful and our hearts (are) in Paradise.”
Ashlyn Rollins returned home to Butte County to report on the recovery efforts in Paradise after the Camp Fire for her Master’s thesis in Stanford University’s graduate journalism program.