Stunned

Stunned residents start returning to Paradise in fire’s terrible aftermath

By Trisha Thadani, Evan Sernoffsky and Jill Tucker

A handful of residents returned to their homes in the burn zone Monday, among the first allowed back since the Camp Fire tore through town Nov. 8, some walking up to unscathed houses while friends and neighbors stood in disbelief in front of piles of ash and twisted metal.

The area off Neal Road, which once had beautiful, sprawling views of the hills and the rest of Paradise, was reduced to blackened grass, dead trees and a few standing homes after the flames pushed through.

Officials lifted the evacuation order Monday for the area at the edge of the burn zone, although much of Paradise and neighboring communities were still off limits. The search for human remains is ongoing in the area — 79 have been found so far and six have been identified publicly, a challenging process that involves collecting DNA from relatives — and crews continue to remove downed power lines and damaged trees.

Bob Smalley returned to his business, Smalley General Contracting, on Monday and it was unscathed. Even a pile of wood in front of his building was untouched.

“We got really lucky,” Smalley said.

Few residences in the area survived, but there was a randomness about which ones it took and those it left unscathed. Most of Smalley’s employees lost their homes, he said, so he’s hoping to bring RVs onto the property to house them. Smalley also lost his home in nearby Magalia.

Down the road, the Wiggins family returned to their 6-acre property on Goa Way Monday afternoon to find a pile of charred, unrecognizable debris.

They stared at the rubble for over an hour, remembering all of the time and money they spent on the three-bedroom, two-bath home, which they’d finished painting a pale yellow this month. They had just rebuilt the house after losing its predecessor in a 2008 fire that also devastated the region.

“It was a very pretty home, very pretty with my plants, my back porch, the front porch,” Catherine Wiggins said, her voice trailing off. “But that’s OK. We’ll have another pretty home.”

The mood was surprisingly light as Catherine, John and their 17-year-old son, Dominic, joked and teased each other in front of the remains of their house. They had been through this before, John said, and what else could they do?

“It was a lot of money and work,” John said, laughing. “That sucks.”

Higher up the hill toward the center of Paradise, the area was still closed to residents as search-and-recovery teams stepped up efforts to locate bodies in the rubble before a storm that was forecast to hit the region starting late Tuesday.

While the wet weather will help douse the still-burning flames, it could make it harder to find additional remains in an ashy sludge. The impending rain also prompted the National Weather Service to issue flash flood watches late Monday for the Camp Fire zone and other recently burned areas in the state.

More than 300 searchers were going house to house with cadaver dogs Monday throughout Paradise, including a group who picked through the rubble on Newland Road as the sun poked through charred trees.

The neighborhood was gone, reduced to rubble. The searchers raked through debris as cadaver dogs sniffed for signs of human remains.

Nearly 700 people were still considered missing Monday evening, although officials were whittling down the number as they checked back with family and friends to confirm whether those initially unaccounted for had been found.

But local authorities expected the number of dead to continue to rise past the current total.

Butte County officials have tentatively identified 64 of the victims, but because the bodies were burned so badly, they have launched an unprecedented effort to name the victims through their DNA.

With victims burned beyond recognition, other means of identifying a body — such as through fingerprints or dental records — are not possible.

Roman Digby knows his 78-year-old father died in his Paradise mobile home. Recovery teams found a body there, and his father lived alone. But without DNA, the coroner can’t officially identify the body.

“At least knowing that he passed away is better than the uncertainty,” Digby said of his father, John Digby. “I’ve never had to finalize someone’s affairs before, so I’m starting to do that, but I can’t move forward without a death certificate. I’m just waiting for that.”

Digby, who lives in Owatonna, Minn., had to go to his local police department to submit his cheek-swabbed DNA through the mail.

To help make a match, Butte County officials have enlisted the help of ANDE, one of the few companies in the country that can develop a DNA profile in less than two hours with a fully automated process and little expertise from the user.

But collecting DNA from blood relatives of the victims is challenging, officials said. Paradise had a large number of seniors living alone or in retirement communities, with family members scattered around the country.

“We’ve had a tremendous response getting DNA from the remains, and they’re in the database,” said ANDE spokeswoman Annette Mattern. “But we need blood relatives to contribute their DNA. We’re working for a way to do that” for people out of the area.

Meanwhile, the search continued for victims among the 11,713 homes destroyed.

Officials said it’s unclear whether Wednesday’s rain will help or hinder the effort to find bodies. It depends on the intensity of the weather system that could either uncover bodies and bones or cover them up with an ashy sludge, said Lt. Paul Liskey, emergency manager for the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, who is aiding Butte County’s search-and-rescue efforts.

“We definitely want to do as much as we can before the rains come in,” Liskey said. “We can’t stop the rains. We’ll have to adapt and overcome.”

Precipitation will undoubtedly help douse the fire, provide air quality relief and clear up the dust, but an outright downpour could also stall the recovery operation, Liskey said, although the rains may prove beneficial for the canine members of the search teams.

For cadaver dogs, “the scent is the scent, with or without rain,” he said. “It might even help them because it will spread the scent or maybe … embed it into the soil.”

Even before the rain appeared on the horizon, the deadly and destructive path of the worst wildfire in California history had slowed considerably despite a red flag warning Sunday, which included 40 mph gusts and low humidity — the kind of weather that generally fuels infernos.

By Monday morning, the Camp Fire had burned just 1,000 additional acres to grow to 151,000 acres total, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Officials reported the blaze at 70 percent containment and 151,272 acres Monday night.

The Camp Fire is now the fourth-deadliest natural disaster in California’s recorded history, behind the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, in which more 3,000 people died; a 1933 earthquake in Long Beach; and a 1938 flood in Los Angeles.