[ The horrendous fire near Boulder, Colorado, is reminiscent of
last years disastrous Dixie Fire in Colorado. Locations are different,
but this is what the result of our climate crisis brings - up close
and personal.] [[link removed]]

HELL ON EARTH, SMALL TOWN-STYLE - CLIMATE CHANGE, UP CLOSE AND
PERSONAL  
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Jane Braxton Little
December 14, 2021
TomDispatch
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_ The horrendous fire near Boulder, Colorado, is reminiscent of last
year's disastrous Dixie Fire in Colorado. Locations are different, but
this is what the result of our climate crisis brings - up close and
personal. _

The Dixie Fire continues to burn as it moves toward the small town of
Old Station in the Lassen National Forest. As of Thursday morning, the
Dixie Fire covered 927,320 acres and was 59% contained, according to
Cal Fire., The fire, which ignited July 13, has killed one person and
destroyed 1,282 structures, including 688 single-family residences.
Photo by Matthew Henderson / Onfire Photos // The Reporter (Vacaville)


 

Half a mile south of what’s left of the old Gold Rush-era town of
Greenville, California, Highway 89 climbs steeply in a series of
S-turns as familiar to me as my own backyard. From the top of that
grade, I’ve sometimes seen bald eagles soaring over the valley that
stretches to the base of Keddie Peak, the northernmost mountain in
California’s Sierra Nevada range.

Today, stuck at the bottom thanks to endless road work, I try to
remember what these hillsides looked like before the Dixie fire
[[link removed]] torched them
in a furious 104-day climate-change-charged rampage across nearly one
million acres, an area larger than the state of Delaware. They were so
green then, pines, cedars, and graceful Douglas firs mixed with oaks
pushing through the thick conifer foliage in a quest for light and
life. Today, I see only slopes studded with charred stumps and burnt
trees jackstrawed across the land like so many giant pick-up-sticks.

Dixie did far more than take out entire forests. It razed Greenville,
my hometown since 1975. It reduced house after house to rubble,
leaving only chimneys where children once had hung Christmas
stockings, and dead century-old oaks where families, spanning four
generations, had not so long ago built tree forts. The fire left our
downtown with scorched, bent-over lampposts touching debris-strewn
sidewalks. The historic sheriff’s office is just a series of naked
half-round windows eerily showcasing devastation. Like natural
disasters everywhere, this fire has upended entire communities.

Sadly, I have plenty of time to contemplate these devastating changes.
I’m the first in a long line of vehicles halted by a burly man clad
in neon yellow and wielding a stop sign on a six-foot pole. We
motorists are all headed toward Quincy, the seat of Plumas County and
its largest town. My mission is to retrieve the household mail, a task
that would ordinarily have required a five-minute walk from my
second-floor office to the Greenville Post Office. Now, it’s a
50-mile round trip drive that sometimes takes four hours due to the
constant removal of hazardous trees. I’m idling here impatiently.

Greenville still has a zip code, but the fire gutted the
concrete-block building that was our post office. The box where I once
received magazines, bills, and hand-decorated cards from my grandkids
lies on its back, collecting ashes. Whoever promised that “neither
snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” would impede postal
deliveries never anticipated the ferocity of the Dixie fire.

Few did. That blaze erupted in forests primed for a runaway inferno by
a climate that’s changing before our eyes. Temperatures
[[link removed]] worldwide
are up 2.04 degrees Fahrenheit since 1901 and 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit
in the United States
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1970. This year is California’s driest
[[link removed]] in
a century. Only 11.87 inches of rain or snow fell, less than half what
experts deem average. Combine that with a century of forest management
that suppressed natural fires and promoted the logging of large, more
fire-resistant trees and these forests needed only a spark to erupt
into a barrage of flames that swept from the Feather River Canyon to
north of Lassen Volcanic National Park, the equivalent of traveling
from Philadelphia to New York City.

Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) almost certainly provided that
spark, as company officials told
[[link removed]] the
California Public Utilities Commission. Earlier, they had accepted
responsibility for the deadly 2018 Camp fire
[[link removed]],
which destroyed the sadly named town of Paradise, and three other
blazes. Those fires are the outsized products of corporate greed and a
gross failure to maintain the company’s electrical infrastructure.

PG&E’s negligence comes at a time when a dramatically changing
climate is wreaking havoc worldwide. For every victim of the Dixie
fire, there are thousands who were hit last November by massive
hurricanes
[[link removed]] in
North and Central America, and hundreds of thousands who find
themselves escaping rising seas
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places like Bangladesh and elsewhere in the Global South. As the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported
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April, the number of people displaced by climate-change-related
disasters since 2010 has risen to 21.5 million, most
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them in poor countries and small island states.

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe calls all of this “global
weirding
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adding, “No matter where we live or what we care about, we are all
vulnerable to the devastating impacts of a warming planet.”

_Ten minutes pass._

The bored man with the stop sign pounds it onto the pavement like a
squirrel defending its nuts. Waiting here in a quest to retrieve my
mail is the least of the indignities of living in the scar of the
Dixie burn. In fact, I’m among the fortunate. Although the fire did
destroy my office in downtown Greenville, the erratic winds that
bamboozled firefighters for months inexplicably shifted flames away
from my house and the surrounding forestland.

Two neighboring communities had already gone up in a firestorm of
torched trees and burning embers after a pyro-cumulous cloud collapsed
above them on July 24th. Ten days later, it took less than 45 minutes
for fire to reduce Greenville’s tarnished Gold Rush charm to
smoldering ash.

The town has now lain comatose for more than four months. Those of us
whose houses were spared drive through it white-knuckled, stomachs
churning, compulsively reciting the names of our neighbors whose
ruined homes we pass. Like the victims of climate disasters
everywhere, such former residents have scattered to the — I’m
sorry to even use the word — winds in a diaspora that’s shattered
our community and left those of us who remain wondering how we can
possibly rebuild our town.

Greenville has always been the stepsister of Plumas County, the least
affluent of its four major communities, the least politically
significant, and the first to be threatened with school closures. It
lacks even one rich philanthropic resident. In fact, its median income
declined 15% in 2019 to $26,875. Try supporting a family on that even
without a major wildfire. It’s no surprise, then, that this neediest
of Plumas County communities is suffering the most. As Solomon Hsiang
reported in 2017 in _Science_ magazine, climate change inflicts its
heaviest economic impacts
[[link removed]] on the poorest 5% of the
population, reducing average incomes post-disaster by as much as 27%.

When California Governor Gavin Newsom visited Greenville shortly after
it was devastated, he mentioned getting calls from friends at Lake
Almanor, a wealthy, well-connected enclave 15 miles to the north —
but not from our town, of course. The state authorized an immediate $5
million for disaster relief. But the response of county officials has
been anemic at best. County supervisors have done little more
proactive than declare a disaster. The county school district,
responsible for the virtually undamaged Greenville elementary and high
school campus (talk about survival miracles!), took no initiatives to
turn its abundant facilities into safe, warm, functioning spaces for
Dixie victims. Only recently has it agreed to house a resource center
providing them with everything from blankets and jackets to soup and
cat food.

At the most local level, the Indian Valley Community Services
District, with bankruptcy looming, is struggling with how to collect
the usual fees for water and sewer use from a town with almost no
residents. The local chamber of commerce is in complete disarray.

Those of us who still have our houses live with reduced services.
Frontier Communications, the only telephone and primary Internet
provider, has always been known for its piss-poor service in this
backwoods region of California. Four months after Greenville burned,
we still have no landlines, no Frontier Internet, and no promise of
either one for months to come. PG&E provided immediate electricity
through diesel-belching generators, a service we accepted with
gratitude, but gasoline, pharmaceuticals, and the mail I’m trying to
retrieve remain a 50-mile round trip on distinctly clogged roads.

The anguish of living in a burn scar takes a toll. My dreams are
littered with drifting pages of burned books bearing faces I no longer
see here: a blue-eyed woman with a voice like a code-red alert, a
clerk with straight black hair cascading down his back. We lock eyes
before they sink into the dark.

_Twenty_ _minutes pass._

The stop-sign guy no longer needs to wave his sign to alert
approaching vehicles. The line is now a quarter-mile long — too far
for the drivers just pulling up to see him. He turns his back on us,
releasing a puff of vaporous steam. Who could blame him for an
occasional toke on a day when his most exciting activity is likely to
involve turning his sign from “stop” to “slow”?

In October, heavy equipment began moving into Greenville: backhoes,
bulldozers, dump trucks, stump grinders, and PG&E’s unmarked fleet
of white extra-cab pickup trucks. The whine of chainsaws began to
pierce the deadly quiet, while androgynous figures in white hazmat
suits swarmed through the rubble. By early December, more than 150 of
the town’s 800 destroyed structures had been cleared of debris,
leaving lots as smooth as cemetery lawns awaiting possible rebuilding.
Many of their former occupants, however, are gone, some having used
instant insurance cash to buy houses in the neighboring, unburnt towns
of Quincy and Chester. Others have moved farther away: Idaho,
Kentucky, Missouri, Utah. Some are still here, sleeping in tents
despite 20-degree nights.

Hopelessly haunted by the devastation all around me, I find myself
revisiting the rubble. On one compulsive trip, I met a sweet-faced,
curly-haired young man changing the tire of an aging, mud-spattered
SUV. Its battery was dead, he told me with a wan smile. Since his
house burned down, this has been his home. He looks weary but is
amazed when I tell him about the resource center 10 miles down the
road where he can pick up clothing, a sleeping bag, and food.

I wander off to the burned-out shell of the sheriff’s substation,
once a copper-roofed bank owned by a woman who managed to nurture it
through the Great Depression of the 1930s. No more. The hulking
remains of a vault is perched awkwardly in the open amid the ashes of
a sergeant’s wooden desk. My office was next door. No longer. I turn
my back on Main Street and weep – for the history lost, the
curly-headed youth with a charred future, all of us touched by this
fire and the horrific costs climate change levies.

_Thirty-two minutes_.

The stop-sign guy has suddenly come to life. Strutting to his post in
the center of the highway, he gives me a nod, turns the sign to
“slow,” and directs me to follow the pilot car up the highway and
over the grade. It’s a short-lived reprieve. Ten miles further on,
we’re stopped again, this time next to piles of woodchips four
stories high. The grief of witnessing entire mountainsides denuded of
every tree, living or dead, is deepened by seeing potential timber and
firewood ground up and hauled off. How many hundreds of houses could
have been built or warmed by those piles of dead wood?

In spite of the devastation and in defiance of approaching winter,
clusters of green shoots have nonetheless emerged from the charred
soil beside the road, bearing leaves that wave in the breeze as we
wait. We, too, are slowly emerging from the bleak, post-fire
desolation. It was an all-out celebration when Evergreen Market,
Greenville’s only grocery story, reopened on October 1st. I again
shed tears in the check-out line as the owner overcame his shyness and
greeted me with a handshake. The fellow who owns Riley’s Jerky,
Greenville’s only locally made product — a dried-meat snack —
has announced that he’ll rebuild at triple the former size. A
realtor’s trailer occupies a cleared space near the grocery store,
while in a food trailer next to the ruins of a former gas station,
Mary’s German Grill is serving bratwurst and potato pancakes spiced
with Mary’s cheery greeting: “So how’s the apocalypse treating
you?”

_Fifty-seven minutes_.

A neon-clad clone of the first stop-sign guy turns his sign to
“slow” and once again we creep down the road. I’m now nearly
halfway to Quincy. No one died in the Dixie fire, a credit to the
aggressive evacuation strategy quickly put in place by Plumas County
Sheriff Todd Johns. But the shock of losing a home and the stress of
moving multiple times as smoke and flames advanced have been
devastating. Teachers who formed their identities around generations
of Greenville students have lost them. Business owners who held forth
behind well-worn wooden counters are broken. And now, the trauma of it
all is beginning to pick us off one at a time in unheralded deaths
that will never be counted among the costs of the Dixie fire.

Like people wracked by climate-disaster recovery everywhere, we’re
facing a boot-strap recovery and a generational challenge. People in
high places with money to share are not riding over the ridge to our
rescue. Instead, we’ve been turning to one another, relying on our
mutual commitment to the place we’ve long called, and continue to
call, home. There’s a buzz of enthusiasm about the possibility of
rebuilding an all-solar town and kissing PG&E goodbye. Others are
researching how to use the locally made bricks that survived the fire
in new construction to honor the town we lost. A group called the
Dixie Fire Collaborative is working to coordinate a host of
independent initiatives.

Strengthening us is the resilience of Native American Maidu tribal
leaders and the experiences that kept them on this land. They stood up
again and again after the destruction of their communities and they
remain standing today. “This is a time of renewal, a time of immense
opportunity,” says Trina Cunningham, executive director of
the Maidu Summit Consortium [[link removed]]. 

_One hour and 45 minutes_.

After one more tree-removal stop, I finally arrive in Quincy to find a
postal box crammed with slick flyers from attorneys promising to
recover my monetary losses. Call it cruelty or irony, but among the
envelopes is a bill from PG&E. I fill up with gas, still not available
in Greenville, and face what could be another two-hour drive back
through that same scarred landscape.

It’s dark by the time I arrive in Greenville. The lights still on in
Evergreen Market are welcoming, but most of the town has no
electricity or even poles to mount street lights. The only true
intersection, at Highway 89 and what’s left of Main Street, is
illuminated by a generator when it’s working. It’s a little
chancy, but I take a shortcut on a side street past burned-out
residential debris looming in the dark. And there, suddenly, are tiny
lights spiraling improbably into the night on a 10-foot Christmas
tree. Just beyond it, multicolored lights outline a set of stairs to a
house that’s no longer there. Who knows where those lights will lead
us?

_[JANE BRAXTON LITTLE, a TomDispatch regular
[[link removed]], is an
independent journalist who writes about science and natural resources
for publications that include the Atlantic, Audubon, National
Geographic, and Scientific American. She moved to Plumas County in
1969 for a summer that has yet to end.]_

_Copyright 2021 Jane Braxton Little. Cross-posted with permission. May
not be reprinted without permission from TomDispatch
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