When the Camp Fire raced into the Northern California town of Paradise on Nov. 8, destroying nearly 19,000 structures and claiming 85 lives, Chris Beaudis narrowly escaped. He drove out of the Sierra foothills in his Ford Bronco with only his pit bull. He lost everything and has no insurance.
"It's been really stressful at times," he says. "You think that it's the end of the world, especially when everything you have is gone."
All Beaudis has for now is a 300-square-foot FEMA camper trailer. It is wedged into a corner of the fairgrounds in Yuba City, in the valley about 50 miles south of what's left of Paradise. His is one of about 7,200 Camp Fire survivor households relying on direct federal aid, according to FEMA.
"Thank God that I was finally able to get on the help list and receive help," Beaudis says. "Since then it's just been the biggest stress reliever of my life."
With nowhere else to go, Beaudis is likely to stay in this trailer for another year before he can rebuild.
But that help list that Beaudis was able to get on is emblematic of a bigger problem in the way we respond to natural disasters: Disaster strikes, emergency help is deployed, checks are cut, communities are rebuilt — even in high-risk places. Many say that reactive response has to change.
Thus far, the federal government — through FEMA — has paid out more than $85 million in emergency aid for survivors. An additional $370 million in loans has been distributed by the Small Business Administration.
As disasters like wildfires, floods and hurricanes are increasing in size, severity and frequency, experts who study our response to them are warning that events like the Camp Fire should be a wake-up call. One of the early lessons from Paradise is that we need to radically overhaul how to prepare for and respond to disasters in the era of climate change, they say.
"We have been very reactionary," says Josh Sawislak, a climate resiliency adviser in the Obama administration. "The problem is that we've kind of gotten away with it for a while."
FEMA will typically respond to a disaster, arriving immediately on the ground, and then spend the next 18 months or so cleaning up, aiding communities and making the recovery process as easy as possible for disaster victims who want to rebuild.
In Paradise, that mission started with cleaning up the rubble from destroyed homes, strip malls, gas stations, and the torched frames of cars being scooped up and hauled away.
Debris removal alone is estimated to cost upwards of $1.7 billion, again mostly paid for by federal taxpayers.
"The quicker we remove the debris, the faster reconstruction can start," says Bob Fenton, FEMA's Region 9 administrator, overseeing the California wildfire recovery.
Clean up the debris and rebuild — this has been the mindset for disaster recovery in the U.S. for decades, according to experts like Sawislak, who has worked in disaster relief and now studies the industry. We wait until something happens and then come in and fix it. This model is outdated and broken, Sawislak says.
"We're spending more and more money and it's going to get even worse," he says. "Climate change is going to force our hand to be smarter about how we do this."
Sawislak says it is standard operating procedure to cut checks after a disaster declaration. Just last week the Senate passed a $19.1 billion dollar disaster relief package to aid farmers and communities as they recover from floods, hurricanes and wildfires. But every year the U.S. seems to be experiencing the biggest hurricane, the deadliest flood and the most catastrophic wildfires — like the Camp Fire — burning into whole cities that are built in and around overgrown, dry forests.
Behavioral scientist Kathleen Tierney says a lesson from Paradise is that staying the current course will bankrupt the federal Treasury.
"We may be able to slow down the losses, but we can't stop them," she says. "This is the legacy; this is the bill that has come due."
Optimism bias
Tierney spent her career advising communities after disasters as the former director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware and the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado. She says it's a basic human instinct to want to rebuild, to return to normal after a traumatic event, even if it's going home to an area we know is risky.
