Shockingly, no one in state government could come up with an official figure. Our napkin math puts it at about $1 billion once all is said and done - through government aid, insurance payouts, lawsuits against Pacific Gas & Electric (whose power lines started the fire), corporate investment and philanthropic donations. We spent months attempting to find out how much money state, federal and local government, corporations and private entities have promised, paid or will be forced to pay to Greenville.
Those things help, she says, but “it’s just a matter of time before burn again, and the only reason the homeowners are building in the same place is because the government is paying for it.” Instead, they are actually fueling a more dangerous future by creating incentives to bolster the status quo, with little more than “hardening” efforts such as extra sprinklers, better roofing and more defensible space. Karen Chapple, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley who last year helped write a report on rebounding after wildfire, says our current policies, a hodgepodge of state and local measures, aren’t fixing problems. Gavin Newsom must take action and begin the difficult task of convening Californians to create a statewide land-use plan that will actually answer the hard questions of how and where we will live in coming years. Saving tiny towns such as Greenville is becoming both cost-prohibitive and unconscionably dangerous for first responders, and offers a false sense of security for residents even as the peril of living there explodes. If we really want to help our neighbors, we should be honest with the thousands of people like Goss and Wattenburg King who are banking on a dream that science tells us will more likely turn out to be a nightmare. The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over - building and rebuilding in areas we know are deadly - with the same result: destruction.
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Which is why California must begin a conversation now about the next towns that will burn, and on how to break the cycle. Like Paradise and Greenville, they’ll probably try to rebuild too.
Since the two of us visited Greenville in July, at least three more have joined the painful family of hashtag-strong places where Californians have been chased from their homes by flames. It’s a wheel of tragedy, triumph and bitter reality playing out across fire-prone rural Northern California, where dozens of small towns have been destroyed or severely maimed by wildfires in recent years, and dozens more are being built in dangerous territory. A place where rivers will be reduced to trickles for much of the year, and where the ownership of that water, which also feeds Southern California, is increasingly contentious. Instead, Greenville will be a hotter, drier, harsher place - one where the canopy of evergreens that once shaded its quaint downtown may never regrow, replaced instead by highly flammable shrubland. Though they, along with a few hundred others, are working ceaselessly to bring back its picturesque Gold Rush charm, climate change is working against them, ensuring that whatever returns will bear little resemblance to what was lost. The life they are rebuilding here revolves around saving a place that exists only in their imaginations. You can’t help but root for Kevin Goss and Kira Wattenburg King: Both are starting over, down-home friendly and clearly, deeply in love.īut there’s another player in their relationship - the mangled, vulnerable town of Greenville - and we worry that makes for a threesome doomed for reasons the heart can’t conquer.Īs much as for each other, Goss and Wattenburg King are head over heels for this minuscule mountain community that burned to ash in last year’s Dixie fire.
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