Volunteers dread what they may find searching for the missing in the ashes of the Camp Fire
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
PARADISE, Calif. — They are tacked to bulletin boards and trees. They fly across the web — from Twitter, to Instagram to Facebook. They fill long sheets from a legal tablet, 22 pages in all, taped to a church bulletin board. They are the names of the missing and they go on and on.
The fire that roared through the Sierra Nevada foothills just before the first chill of fall has killed at least 76 people, a grim record in the history of wildfires in America. But even harder to fathom might be the number listed as missing — 1,276 as of Saturday night , though no one can be sure if that is close to the real number.
Some names might have been double-listed, with information crisscrossing so many channels. Others may have been located, but the information not yet passed on to authorities. A final accounting appears months away.
It’s been eight days since the Camp Fire flew down a ridge line through this tranquil town and still, no one has heard from Jackie Parker, 101, the oldest of those listed missing, or from 21-year-old John Tyler Scarbrough, the youngest. No one has heard from a beloved octogenarian, known as Aunt Evie, or from a home health care worker, Sheila Santos, or — for a long time this week — from a half-dozen relatives of Vietnam veteran Randy Somerby.
On Friday morning, Somerby, 65, scanned the long roster of the missing on the whiteboard at the Neighborhood Church in Chico, his home of the last week.
“They’re all gone,” he said of the stepfather, mother and brother who he had been unable to reach. “I’m the only one left.”
With the 146-000-acre fire zone closed to everyone but firefighters and recovery workers, Somerby and all the others were left mostly to wait. Working up the mountain to provide some answers are more than 600 firefighters, sheriff’s deputies, National Guard members, forensic anthropologists and search and rescue volunteers from dozens of California counties.
No victim in the Butte County fire zone has been found alive for more than a week. And much of what is left to be found is likely to be bone, teeth and prosthetic devices, a few of the searchers said. Yet the teams, including civilians more accustomed to hunting down missing hikers, dutifully trudged from one gutted property to another this week, continuing the bleak accounting.
With 9,700 homes and 144 apartment and condo complexes destroyed, the work has only begun. Officials here won’t say how many structures they have been able to inspect or how long the work will take. But it’s likely less than 20 percent of leveled homes have gotten even a first inspection for remains, said a Butte County official, who asked not to be named because he had not been authorized to speak on the topic.
Enrique Bergzinner served with the Marines in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. He huddled with the rest of a search and rescue team from nearby El Dorado County, at the Tall Pines Entertainment Center, the Paradise bowling alley that is now the command center for the search.
“This is total destruction — total,” said Bergzinner, who can’t recall anything like it, even during his time in Fallujah and Anbar Province. “You are walking on what used to be someone’s roof and now it’s just five inches of ash. There’s nothing left.”
Yet Bergzinner and hundreds of others volunteered to join in the work. Among his comrades: a horsewoman in her 70s, a retired school superintendent, a tax accountant and a massage therapist. Each morning since the fire passed, they, or volunteers like them, have donned white hazmat jumpsuits and grabbed rakes and shovels.
In the unrecognizable heaps that were once houses and mobile homes, they combed gently through ashes, from 8 a.m. until sundown. County officials divided Paradise and surrounding mountain towns, like Magalia, into evacuation zones for such an emergency. And the search crews had divided those blocks — more than two dozen of them — into yet smaller quadrants to organize their work.
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I am not sure how they are going to find all the dead. But, oh what a beyond nightmarish job.
Evening....Yes a nightmare job but slow and steady as you go...Our Black Saturday bushfires, we lost 197 souls..in very similar circumstances to California....Everything was melted, incinerated and obliterated..It was Hell on earth....But with courage and persistence every single person was identified. It went on for weeks and weeks another soul identified another family informed (if there was anyone left) another soul mourned. Yes relatives will demand all sorts of things and why is it taking so long, frustration and anger will boil over...But as with everything it all comes down to "time"...The smallest of finds can unlock the details of the lost souls....But ever so slowly another name will be released and the daunting figures of the lost, grows...You will wonder when will it ever end..But for the survivors and relatives it truly is a living nightmare...We look across the Pacific and we see, what you see. We to, have been there and will again. It is the Nature of the Beast. The blackened and scotched earth..Air heavy with the smell of smoke and ash....But also remember time does pass and life will and does return...A simple green leaf, in a sea of black on a gumtree in the bush here....brought that simplest and strongest of human emotions..."Hope"...
It seems to me that it has to take a lot of courage to live in California. Horrible forest fires like this one, earthquakes, smog in L.A......
It will be a long and painstaking journey to get back to anything ''normal''....But it will happen, the human spirit will shine through in due time.
I am watching Monday Night football and before the start of the Rams game they held a ceremony to recognize the first responders. They marked it by lighting a torch.
Who thought it was a good idea to mark the tragedy of the wildfires by lighting a torch.
Maybe I'm becoming cynical but it almost seems as though American's enjoy a good tragedy so they can put on a good show.
They were honoring the first respondents to the mass shooting in Cali a few weeks ago and the torch lighting was for the officer that was killed responding to the shooting. The officers wife and son were part of the dedication as were 3 other officers.
Ah...okay. I thought it also had something to do with the fires.
My comment still stands on the grief shows. America has become desensitized to death. Shooting....hold a dedication, victims of wildfires....hold a dedication, floods/hurricanes.....hold a dedication.
Let's stop singing songs and start putting policies into place to proactively deal with these issues.