Rebuilding Paradise: A year after the Camp Fire, one couple finds healing in starting over

PARADISE, Calif. — “There's hundreds and hundreds of reasons why we shouldn’t build, why we shouldn’t come back,” Bert Clement said as he sat beside his wife, Jo Lynne, in an RV parked in the driveway of the home he lost a year ago in the Camp Fire.

Given the trauma that was unleashed on the approximately 27,000 residents of Paradise on morning of Nov. 8, 2018, it’s no wonder. The windows of the Clement house had been covered for repainting on the morning of Nov. 8, but Bert realized something was amiss when he stepped outside at 6:30. The same high winds that brought down a PG&E electrical transmission line and sparked the fire in the town of Pulga, 10 miles away, now thrashed the tree line above the Clements’ home.

“The flames were like a demon. They were just crazy,” Bert said as if seeing it all over again. “It was just a completely different kind of a flame. It was a flame of … of … it just scared you. Because it was so … it was so alive.” At 9:45 a.m., the wind stoked flames on either side of the road. Like gunfire, propane tanks exploded all around them, the truck’s engine began “bonging,” Jo Lynne remembered. Fortunately, the road to Chico was mostly downhill, and she coasted in neutral as much as possible. Finally, nearly three hours later, they pulled into a Valero gas station at the bottom of the hill, Gracie Layne still sound asleep.

Blanton’s house, like most of the homes in his residential neighborhood, was reduced to pile of rubble and corroded metal. Blocks away, two buildings where he ran his business were also gone, as were most of the new homes his company was in the process of building. But even after tallying all that he’d lost, he and his family decided to stay in Paradise.

Finally, nearly two months after the flames chased them down the ridge, the Clements drove up to their property. ‘The scary part right now’By the time Paradise began issuing building permits that spring, the population of the town had fallen to just 2,000 residents. Whole blocks, retirement communities, hospitals, liquor stores, fast food restaurants and much of the downtown were wiped from the map. But Forest Lane illustrated the haphazard pattern wildfires often leave behind.

“The mailman claps when they see this,” Bert said. “We’ve had a couple of policemen come up, and they actually come and, you know, and they thank us, and they take pictures. They do selfies and they put it on Facebook because they’re grateful that we’re coming home.”

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