“Made homeless by flames, Camp fire evacuees face hardship, disease and desperation”
By Nicole Santa Cruz , Maria L. La Ganga and Marisa Gerber, for the Los Angeles Times, Nov. 15, 2018
Don Hardin burrowed between blankets in his SUV, and switched on the heater whenever the shivers returned. Even during the day Thursday, the 81-year-old Camp fire evacuee, who has arthritis, struggled to stay warm. When temperatures dropped near freezing Wednesday night, Hardin popped a sleeping pill.
Nearby, a woman bear-hugged her grandson for body heat and, inside a small green tent, a man had nightmares of his escape from flames — he flashed back to the car he watched drive into the fire, wondering if he could have saved the people inside.
It had been one week since the Camp fire destroyed everything they owned and respite still seemed out of sight. In a region that was facing a housing shortage even before the fire, some survivors were forced to seek refuge in a tent city outside a Walmart in Chico. For others, evacuation centers established outside the burn zone have become breeding grounds for disease. On Thursday, Butte County health authorities warned that an outbreak of norovirus was spreading with alarming speed, and appeared to have sickened survivors in at least four shelters.
In the days since sheets of flames sprinted through Paradise, killing at least 63 people and decimating the entire town in minutes, evacuees have endured hardship and sorrow in a surreal state of limbo. Some sleep in their trucks to keep warm and swallow tears as they imagine the shells of their homes. Others pray that unanswered texts to missing friends don’t mean what they think they mean, and they feign normalcy for the sake of their children.
“Rain is coming and these people need a shelter over their heads,” said Debby Barbero, a volunteer who has been coordinating donations at the tent settlement. As a group, the volunteers decided that Sunday at 1 p.m., they would need to shut down the makeshift donation center and tent city and try to help people find shelter in the meantime. “This is unsustainable right now,” she said, adding that it has been difficult to find shelter space for evacuees.
Matters weren’t much better for those who had managed to find space in the evacuation centers. By Thursday, an outbreak of the highly contagious norovirus had spread to several shelters. At the evacuation locations, 145 people had come down with vomiting or diarrhea, said Lisa Almaguer, the public information officer for the Butte County Department of Public Health. Twenty-five people had been hospitalized, she said. “The number of sick people is increasing every day,” Almaguer said.
Outside Walmart on Wednesday, volunteers weaved through tents, handing out homemade muffins and warm towels, which people used to clean their faces. A man who had just spent $30 inside the store offered toiletries and kept his eyes peeled for the perfect family. [….] The rest of the article is here.
Comment: Given the money and resources monopolized by the military, as well as the enormous amount of wealth (even if most of it is in the hands of the rich and richest) in this country, this state of affairs is absolutely inexcusable. There is no good (or justificatory) reason for these evacuees to have their suffering enhanced and prolonged in this manner.
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