PARADISE — Tamra Fisher forced herself to stop watching the harrowing videos of the wildfire racing through Maui. The sense of doom was overwhelming her.
She has videos of her own terrifying escape from fire, the ones her trauma counselor has urged her to avoid. Nearly five years ago, from the driver’s seat of her bright yellow VW, stuck in paralyzed traffic, her phone camera captured the smoke turning day to night as she fled the deadliest wildfire in California history, the Camp Fire in her hometown of Paradise. It recorded her chilling screams — “Move! Move!” — that no one could hear, and the man named Larry in a big white truck who rescued her and her three elderly dogs panting in the back seat.
This week, when she watched the video of two men fleeing Lahaina in their car, the smoky skies, the sheets of glowing orange embers, the driver gasping and honking, she knew it had to be her last.
“I was panicking for him. I wanted to put my foot on the gas for him,” Fisher said in an interview Friday with the Bay Area News Group. “Your whole car is going up. You can’t touch windows. And they didn’t know what was happening. Just like I didn’t know what was happening.”
But no one knows better what the survivors of Hawaii’s deadliest natural disaster are going through — and what lies ahead — than the thousands of Californians who have endured the same.
“This whole town of Paradise knows exactly what they’re feeling,” Fisher said. “It was fast. It was brutal. They just had to go with their gut. And some didn’t make it.”
Deja vu
Three of California’s top five deadliest wildfires occurred since 2017. Seven of the state’s top 10 most destructive wildfires have occurred since 2015. None was deadlier than the Camp Fire.
In the ridge-top town of Paradise, 85 people died in 2018 when the inferno ripped through without warning on the morning of Nov. 8, 2018, just as bus drivers were dropping off children at school. Of the 18,000 homes, only 2,000 survived. A town once home to 27,000 people now has no more than 9,000 — the stalwarts who returned and rebuilt, even though the commercial corridor remains nearly empty and officials from the local hospital that was destroyed announced they won’t build a new one.
The official death toll in Maui, where winds from a distant hurricane fanned the flames, climbed to 80 late Friday night and was expected to grow. Many died fleeing in their vehicles. Dozens plunged into the ocean for safety. Nearly the entire ocean-front town of Lahaina, a historic district and tourist mecca known for its ancient banyan tree with arms spanning an entire block, has been leveled.
And the smoke still hasn’t cleared.
In the hearts and souls of many Paradise survivors, it may never. Residents often talk about sleepless nights and nightmares, intense anxiety and anger, guilt, depression and claustrophobia.
Carole Wright had to leave church early one Sunday when everyone around her rose to sing a hymn, but she felt boxed in and panicked.
“I nearly was leapfrogging over these benches,” she said. She, too, had been stuck on the main road out of Paradise, with the fire around her so hot, the heat seared her skin and deflated her tires. She considered getting out and running but decided to stay in her car. If she was going to die, she told herself, she hoped she would pass out first. She drove out five hours later on metal rims. When she saw daylight piercing through the smoke, she remembers, she started to cry.
“My fear isn’t fire,” she said. “It’s getting trapped.”
Her husband, Travis, who was at home that morning, narrowly escaped on a four-wheel ATV. But he carries guilt about the death of one of his neighbors, who rode alongside him with his wife on their own quad but was overcome by fire.
His own house, made with cement shingles and protected by other neighbors who saved it to save themselves, survived.
“I could have just told everyone to stay at our house,” he said.
It needed significant reconstruction — the shingles remained but the walls inside burned — and their once wooded property with 160 Ponderosa Pine trees is now so sunbaked they had to purchase blinds for every window.
“People try to make us feel better and say, ‘Oh well, at least you have a view now,’” Carole said. “But I liked my view before.”
Recovery
In their rebuilt house across town, Richard and Zetta Gore now have a view from their front porch of Butte Canyon, where they abandoned their truck and the two Bibles inside on that apocalyptic morning and slid down the side of the bluff to escape the flames. Turkeys and deer ran alongside them as they fled. They have returned several times with family to show them the route of their 7-mile hike to safety and wonder, “Did we really do that?”
They replaced their two-story handcrafted home with a simple, one-story one on the same spot. It’s as much as their insurance claim would allow.
Still, they are grateful. “Every time we leave the house we pray, ‘Lord, take care of our house’ because we’ve learned — you leave, and you don’t know if you’ll ever see it again,” Zetta said. “It’s true. It has affected us in that way.”
And it makes them especially empathetic to those suffering in Maui.
“There’s so many points that were identical to what happened here in Paradise,” Richard Gore said. “But we do know that they will rise again because Paradise has. They’ll get through it.”
Civic groups from Paradise, including the Rotary Club, have already reached out to Maui with offers to help. Town Councilman Steve “Woody” Culleton wrote an email to Maui’s mayor and sent it Thursday morning.
Culleton choked up when he read it aloud.
“As a resident of Paradise CA and a survivor of the 2018 Camp Fire storm I and our community know what you folks are going through,” he wrote.
His family ran for their lives that November morning — he and his wife were stuck in separate cars miles apart — and lost everything they owned.
But there’s a reason to have hope, he wrote.
“The truth I can share is that even though it is devastating when everything you own and your home and routine and community are destroyed,” he wrote, “it is possible to come back and rebuild.”
Two weeks ago, Fisher began doing just that. She and her boyfriend moved back to Paradise. They bought a lot with a converted garage that had been spared by the 2018 fire and hope to one day build a house where the old one stood.
Maui holds a special place for her. The last time she saw her father, two years before he died, they had rented a condo in Lahaina in 2011. The day she left, father and daughter enjoyed a picnic under the sprawling banyan tree.
She is taking her therapist’s advice to avoid fire videos, but still she scrolls through Facebook, where she read a plaintive post from an old Paradise High School friend who moved to Maui years ago.
“Please pray for me,” it said.
“It’s hard not to think about other people’s pain and suffering, but I’m trying to pull myself away,” she said. “And then I will wait and I will ask my friend what can I do to help her because I do want to help a fire survivor. That’s what we do.”
