Back to Blog
![]() ![]() Some of those on the streets were the very same people who had just been burned out.Ī new fire in 2020 killed 16 and wiped out an additional 1,200 single-residence homes in the county. The county’s homeless population grew by 16%, including those sheltered with support from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), according to a 2019 count. Though some survivors scattered across the US, many of those affected stayed in the county. The fire had wiped out almost 14,000 homes in a county with an already limited housing stock.Ĭhico, the mid-sized valley town 10 miles down the road, was reshaped by the fire, and grew by more than 10,000 people as fire evacuees settled there. Sparked by faulty equipment on an electricity transmission line, the blaze led to the deaths of 85 people and destroyed much of the town.Īt its peak the disaster displaced over 50,000 people from their perch in the Sierra Nevada foothills, but once the flames were extinguished, another crisis began to unfold. Vest was one of thousands who had nowhere to live following the Camp fire. But the water ran out, and he was no match for flames that at one point were consuming almost 400 American football fields’ worth of land every minute. Vest stayed behind to try to save the house, and the neighbor’s, with a hosepipe, Kelsay said. It killed people caught unaware in their homes or trapped in their cars. The blaze ignited in the early morning and blotted out the rising sun. She had finally convinced him to see a psychiatrist when the Camp fire hit on 8 November 2018 and upended their lives. Kelsay, whom Vest sometimes called Aunty G, knew him to be sweet and kind, but also self-conscious and shy. Yet at her home he thrived, Kelsay said, helping her clear the house of her late father’s belongings, planting tomatoes in the garden, sketching, and restoring an old Mustang. “There are lots of things in Stephen’s life that happened that would totally push anyone over the edge,” she said. Around the time of his grandfather’s death in 2016, for reasons that are not entirely clear, Vest’s housing situation became precarious and he struggled with homelessness, and he moved in with a devoted friend, Jeannette Kelsay.Īccording to Kelsay, Vest was abused as a child, and as an adult struggled with “episodes”, in which he became paranoid and convinced other people were talking about him, and laughing at him. He was a caretaker for his grandfather – sometimes using the social security money he received after his father’s death to pay his grandparents’ bills. With its single main high school, large numbers of retirees and sun-dappled forests, Paradise was a slow, albeit beautiful place to grow up, where Vest went hiking and camping with friends. Vest had lived in Paradise, a mellow and affordable Gold Rush-era town of 27,000, for most of his life, and after his father died, when he was 12, he was mostly raised by his grandparents. Photograph: Max Whittaker/The Guardian Displaced by fire “It always disproportionately hits those who are already on the edge, who are paying too much for housing.”ĭowntown Chico, California, in September. “Natural disasters are a new ticket to homelessness, particularly in California,” said Laura Cootsona, the executive director of the Jesus Center, a non-profit homelessness services provider. This new breed of “megafires” leave a humanitarian crisis of displacement and trauma that persists for years, ensnaring people like Vest in poverty and homelessness, and raising the question of whether the country is prepared for longer-term social impacts of global heating. Wildfires are striking California, and the western US more broadly, with ever greater intensity as hotter and drier conditions bake the landscape. Vest was a fire victim – and was living on the streets after the deadliest US wildfire in a century destroyed his home town of Paradise a few years before. And then they fired their guns at him 11 times. Just outside the store, local police were waiting. He would ask a truck driver to kill him, and pursue men through a pet store. Vest was Tased and jumped on the back of a motorbike stopped at a traffic light. ![]() In the next 10 minutes, he would allegedly pull out a knife and try to stab the guard. That evening at the park in Chico, a college town of 110,000 in the far north of California, people played tennis and pickleball, after smoke from wildfires had kept many indoors the month before. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |