The scope of the devastation from one of California’s most destructive wildfires is becoming clearer and so too is the size of the humanitarian need in one of the state’s poorer counties.
More than 1,000 homes have been confirmed destroyed and the number likely will go higher as assessment continues in Lake County, 90 miles north of San Francisco. Many others are damaged or don’t have power, leaving thousands in need of shelter.
“The biggest challenge is there aren’t enough hotel rooms in Lake County,” Jim Comstock, county supervisor, said Monday. He lost most of his 1,700-acre ranch to fire but kept his house.
Comstock said options for housing are limited in the rural county of small towns linked by winding roads. The Twin Pine Casino and Hotel in Middletown has set up beds in its event center, but hotel rooms are reserved for displaced tribal members and employees.
An evacuation center at the nearby Napa County Fairgrounds is housing about 500 people in tents and campers, he said.
Kelly Huston, deputy director with the governor’s Office of Emergency Services, said officials may need to haul in trailers as the state helps clear out tons of wildfire debris.
“In other disaster areas, people can go down to the local Days Inn, but here people are coming back to their homes and it’s nothing but ash,” he said.
The fire that started on Sept. 12 has burned more than 117 square miles, destroyed at least 1,050 homes and killed three people. At its peak, up to 15,000 people fled their homes.
Firefighters have made significant progress and many evacuations have been lifted. But schools in the Middletown Unified School District are closed for a second week and one in the community of Cobb won’t reopen for months due to fire damage.
Downtown Middletown was spared, however. A bank, auto repair shop and massage parlor were open for business Monday. At the south end of town, insurance companies have set up in tents or large RVs.
Elsewhere, people who had lost their homes or whose homes were too damaged to occupy continued to double up with friends and relatives or stay in trailers.
Annette Lee, a 43-year-old executive dean of Yuba College in Lake County’s Clearlake, said she is staying at her late grandfather’s vacant home in Nice, on the northern edge of the county.
Her home in a neighborhood of 5-acre lots called Hidden Valley Ranchos was scarred, but OK. Her husband, Shane Lee, spent the day cleaning the refrigerator and meeting with insurance adjustors while she returned to work.
“People have been in survival mode all week, and the shock has kept everyone going,” she said. “There’s a lot of resiliency, but at the same time, it’s overwhelming.”
Not so lucky was the home her parents had built 30 years ago, also in the Ranchos. All that remained was melted metal and ash, nothing like the gracious two-story home Lee said she could still envision, with its fruit orchard and a vegetable garden prized by her mother.
“I see the house in my mind so vividly, and when I look at what it is now, the reality doesn’t even comprehend,” said Lee. “It’s so surreal.”
Krystal La Plante, 25, said she and her boyfriend were staying in a trailer in Napa County before bunking with a friend nearby in Lake County. They returned to their three-bedroom rental home in the Anderson Springs area of Middletown on Saturday. She found a ceramic drip coffee pot and one of her pottery pieces.
Otherwise, her little “piece of heaven” flanked by trees as high as she could see, was gone. “I kept walking around asking, ‘Where is my home?’ I don’t understand why it’s not here, this isn’t where I live,” she said Monday.
At least, La Plante said, she had a moment to say goodbye before she fled with two dogs and two cats and some clothes.
“I stood there for like a minute and I started crying,” La Plante said. “I know I’m talking to a house here, but I said I hope I come back.”
