Excellent and sobering story about the aftermath of the Paradise fire and the life of ‘fire nomads’ in the shadow of the PG&E settlement. Multiply this picture 100x everywhere for general climate change impact
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“Out of the 10,707 residences lost in town, 946 houses and 168 multifamily units have been rebuilt. In the unincorporated areas, 3,239 homes were destroyed, and 249 new ones have been completed.”
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“There are two other major factors at play in pushing people out: Fire insurance is very expensive in the unincorporated area, $8,000 to $10,000 a year for a modest home, residents say, and building supplies everywhere have tripled or more in cost. A piece of plywood can run $75”
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“[PG&E] agreed to put $13.5 billion into a trust for victims of the Camp fire, the 2017 North Bay fires and a 2015 fire in Butte County. But as of April the trust reported it had paid out only $195 million, about 1.4% of what it pledged.”
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Basically nobody looks good here:
- PG&E has old lines in high fire-risk areas that start fires
- CA property taxes drive built environment sprawl towards wilderness periphery
- Fire insurance is obviously too expensive
- Govt backstops with more building code regulation
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And on top of this fragile stack in places that should never have been populated at all, and infrastructure built very carefully, you have a bunch of government-skeptical backwoods soft-sovereign citizen types larping “off the grid” lifestyles while being heavily dependent on it
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The story is written to paint a sympathetic portrait of this last group. Every other actor is obviously an unsympathetic corporate-bureaucratic villain (PG&E, insurance, state and fed agencies) but these people who choose to live in these areas are portrayed as hero-victims 🙄
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Their plight is bad and I do feel sorry… but their whole damn lifestyle is so NOT off the grid, their posture of fiercely independent backwoods people is sheer hypocrisy. They run on generator power, cheap Walmart camping supplies, RVs, various government support systems…
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Ie they’re as complicit in the state of affairs as those of us living in less risky areas. They’re not living hunter-gatherer off-grid lives.
I’m kinda glad rebuilding has been slow and high friction (for the wrong reasons… state and PG&E). These areas should NOT be rebuilt.
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The only responsible path forward is to limit human presence in wildfire risk areas to a) minimal advanced infrastructure that necessarily must pass through (upgraded high safety power lines) and b) wilderness management agencies who are hopefully learning better forestry by now
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Forcing “off the grid” people to meet ridiculous building codes in places nobody should build in the first place is paving the wrong cowpaths. Move the damn cows to safer places.
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In general, this is an early case study in what climate change related politics and displacement will look like. And I’m well aware that LA is nearly as ridiculous a place to live, cf water scarcity, etc.
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But given a global population pushing 8 billion, some high-risk areas are going to have to be occupied. The American southwest in unfortunately one of them.
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I have no real skin in this CA fire situation since I’m a renter and will likely not live in CA long term (doing some hard and unsuccessful thinking about where to move to next and hopefully for the last time — “retire there” intent move), but drawing some real lessons here.
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Climate resiliency is now in my top 5 factors to consider, making “where to live” an even more insanely hard problem. It wasn’t even on the list a decade ago. And it’s compounded by the fact that my horizons have lengthened. Tired of moving around.
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Nomadism has lost its appeal. I’d like to settle down somewhere, which pushes my horizon 20-40y out instead of 2-4. This post I wrote almost exactly 10 years ago feels like from another planet 🤔
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Ironically these fire-risk people live in RVs and move around a lot, orbiting their burned properties, waiting for an OPM-funded rebuild. But they’re not nomads, they’re extreme settlers. They don’t even want to move from counties. “Fire nomads” is a poetic but misleading label.
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I grok but dislike their autochtonic location-attached lifestyle sensibilities. Most of my family is that way too. Though I’ve never lived out of an RV, I’m probably more of a real nomad (22 apartments, 8 cities/7 states/t cultural regions in 24 years as an indie adult in the US)
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But ironically, now that I’m finally attracted to “settling” somehow, the state of the world may turn us all into “fire nomads”
On a long enough time scale, most parts of the world are like fire-trap-California 🤣
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Top 5 factors I hope I’ll be able to hit within the next few moves/years (hitting this in 1 move seems unlikely)
1. Local culture we can tolerate
2. Quality healthcare
2. Affordable
3. Climate resilience
4. Decent density and proximity to airports/roads
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But looking at this list, I feel a bit more sympathy for the fire nomads. If I can’t seem to figure out this equation with all my experience of moving, privileges and free variables (no kids, more income/wealth/marketable skills than these people)… I suspect most can’t.
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