Chico, California

Our daughter Rachael, her husband Mark, and grandson Gavin packed up their dearest possessions (photos, letters, poems, guinea pig) into their car and truck.  Evacuation wasn’t mandatory, but Rachael thought the fire might spread to Chico, much like it had burned portions of Santa Rosa last year and Malibu this year.

Yesterday they couldn’t see the sun.  Rachael works for a social service agency, and a number of her clients and co-workers lost everything to the “Camp Fire,” as it has been named.  One of her co-workers who lived in Paradise came to work on the first day of the fire.  Rachael told her she should go home, but by the time she got back, the road was blocked and she lost her house, including her dog.  

You know those pictures of burned cars along the roadway?  I couldn’t figure out why so many cars were parked along the road, burt Rachael explained that people who were evacuating often had their way out blocked by fallen trees or electric poles and had to walk out.  

Honey Run Bridge, California’s oldest covered bridge which Linda and I visited a number of times, has burned, gone.

Rachael said the smoke was especially bad.  It is not only from the trees and leaves, but from the plastics and chemicals in the houses, the rubber from the car tires, the gas from the tanks.

Rachael got a call from an evacuation center that had people who were severely handicapped, including some  people who were unable to speak or were on respirators.  They needed wrist bands so the nurses would know how to treat them.  Rachael and Gavin went to Collier’s Hardware and got painters’ tape to use as wrist bands, and that worked.

Chico is full of refugees from Paradise and other small towns to the east of Chico, and the fire is now headed toward Oroville.  California’s fire fighting resources are stretched thin because of the fire that is also raging by Malibu.

Our president says this is because California doesn’t properly take care of its forests.  In the two years of his presidency this is one of the dumbest, most insulting, most insensitive things he has said.