A U.S. Forest Service team was deployed for support after the Camp Fire swept through nearby communities including Paradise, Magalia and Concow in Northern California in 2018. (Photo by Tanner Hembree/U.S. Forest Service)
One day in November of 2018 in a canyon at the Sierra Nevada foothills, one steel hook that held up a string of electrical insulators – little white discs that prevent electricity from moving between them – broke. The power line that was attached to the electrical insulators fell onto the nearby transmission tower, creating a continuous electric discharge that was estimated to reach between 5,000 and 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Molten metal fell from the tower onto the brush below, starting a fire at its base.
This was the beginning of what would later be known as the Camp fire, a more than 150,000-acre wildfire that swept through the rural California communities of Butte Creek Canyon, Concow, Magalia, and Paradise. At the time it was the deadliest U.S. wildfire of the 21st century, killing 85 people and destroying nearly 20,000 structures.
Paradise – one of the hardest hit towns – lost an estimated two-thirds of its population because of displacement from the fire. Before the Camp fire, 26,000 people lived in the town. Afterward, fewer than 10,000 remained.
Rural California is no stranger to the gutting a wildfire can do to its population. In recent years small towns like Greenville and Berry Creek, north and south of Paradise, respectively, have been decimated by wildfires. Drive through these places and you’ll see the skeletal remains of a grocery store, a post office, and many, many homes. Talk to any of these wildfires’ survivors and you’ll learn about the stress of evacuating, the exhaustion of dealing with insurance companies, and the grief of losing a neighbor. The rebuilding process, they’ll tell you, takes years.
Now, this reality has hit urban California.
In early January, Los Angeles caught fire. Driven by the strong Santa Ana winds that bring dry air from Nevada’s Great Basin region into southern California, several different wildfires ignited in the hills and canyons of the city’s wildland urban interface, the area where undeveloped land and human settlements meet. Neighborhoods like Pacific Palisades and Altadena and the exurb of Malibu were ablaze (as I write this, some of the fires still have not been extinguished), and an estimated 10,000 structures were destroyed. The early death count is already at 24 people.
Many of the destroyed neighborhoods were home to celebrities and social media influencers (as you might imagine, Los Angeles has far greater entertainers per capita than smaller towns in northern California). That, in combination with Los Angeles’ name recognition, meant the wildfires were the dominant world news over the last week, despite other tragedies that happened around the same time like an earthquake in Tibet that killed an estimated 126 people.
While this attention is certainly deserved due to the scale of the tragedy, it’s notable that these fires have made such news when more rural places in northern California or southern Oregon have faced similar catastrophes but received far less attention. Mention names like Greenville or Berry Creek or Talent, Oregon, and almost anyone who lives outside the region won’t know what happened there.
On the same day the Camp fire ignited in 2018, another fire, in southern California, also ignited. It was called the Woolsey fire, and it threatened many of the same neighborhoods as the ones affected by the fires raging this year. About 1,600 structures were destroyed and three people were killed – a tragedy, certainly, but one of a smaller scale than the many thousands of structures and tens of people killed in the Camp fire.
Yet, initial news reporting on the 2018 California wildfires focused on Los Angeles. When I first reported on this imbalance in media coverage, I spoke to Jennifer Anders-Gable, an attorney who helped Camp fire survivors navigate the legal processes of rebuilding.
She told me she was frustrated by the media’s focus. “I remember sitting in the old Sears building in Chico, [California], talking to Camp fire survivors every day, weeks, knowing that these very low-income people are now worse off than ever before,” she said. “Yet we were just focusing on the celebrities in L.A.”
It matters that these communities get coverage because it can affect the amount of continued support a community gets as it rebuilds. In California this is especially important because the homeowners insurance industry has dropped thousands of people’s fire coverage in recent years as the whole state’s fire risk has increased. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) can act as a stopgap while people rebuild by providing money for essential items, temporary housing needs, and personal property losses, but people often need more than what FEMA can provide.
[Note: The FEMA application for Los Angeles wildfire survivors can be found here.]
Paradise eventually did get national attention. Pacific General & Electric was found at-fault in the Camp fire after an investigation discovered the poorly maintained power lines, and the company was required to pay billions of dollars in settlement money to the survivors. These developments took five years to accomplish, which could be why Paradise and the Camp fire have become so memorable.
But overall, wildfires that destroy rural communities don’t garner anywhere near the same attention as a fire that affects a city, even if their losses are similar in scale. Just as Los Angeles deserves news coverage, so, too, do the rural communities without the same name recognition.
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.