Camp Fire Refugees

The people still trying to get their shattered lives back together, nearly 3 years later:

Inez Salinas, a single mother, is raising her 5-year-old daughter, River, in a 160-square-foot “tiny house” trailer. She owns her land but doesn’t have a permit to camp there. Even if she did, she’s on notice that she has to leave by the end of the year unless she installs a well and septic tank, and gets designs and applies for a permit for a permanent home. She figures to get to that point would cost her $40,000. She’s struggling just to keep gasoline in her generator to run two box fans on 95-degree days.

Salinas, 36, is racked with guilt for surviving a fire that killed 85 people. And she is terrified of being evicted. A neighbor has called code enforcement on her several times, but so far the officers have been sympathetic and let her off with a warning. She prays every day they don’t come back.

“I have off-the-charts anxiety,” Salinas said. “I feel like a failure as a mother that my daughter doesn’t have basic needs.”

The Camp fire most notoriously tore through the town of Paradise, but half the people who lost their homes were deeper in the woods, in poorer, more isolated places on the buttes, such as Concow, Jarbo Gap, Pulga and Yankee Hill. Many had no fire insurance. They often lived up dirt roads in houses that were built without proper permits. Some had no electricity or running water.

...The most vulnerable of them don’t fit well in the confines of flatland society. Many simply feel claustrophobic in the city.

“We’re hillbillies up here,” said Mike Nimz, 57, who has lived “on the mountain” for most of his life.

Nimz is a “bootstrap” general contractor with a wiry build, a grizzled beard and a fierce distrust of government that is a common sentiment up here. He’s been burned out twice before and landed on his feet just fine. But more than 2½ years after the Camp fire, he’s stuck, living on soon-to-expire permits in a 20-foot trailer with his wife and 15-month-old daughter.

When the state declared the entire burn zone a public health hazard, he had to wait two years for FEMA contractors to clean his three-acre property — including demolition of two concrete foundations, which he said was ridiculous. Until the crews were done, Nimz couldn’t move any debris on his property or live within 100 feet of it, meaning he had to park his trailer on a bald, sun-blasted spot next to Highway 70, where he remains today. 

He’s waited even longer for PG&E to put up a power pole for the permit he pulled to camp on his property, so he doesn’t have to spend $600 a month on gas running his generator. He says he was last promised it would be up this past March.