“Before the fire you could park a fifth wheel anywhere. Now they’ve made laws,” Munjar said. “The city, they got yuppie intentions.”

Anita Chabria, Jessica Garrison

Sun, August 20, 2023 at 1:00 PM GMT+3

Whipping winds, a sky blackened by smoke. Fear, urgency and then panic as gridlock stymied escape and flames closed in, making car windows too hot to touch.

The calamities by land and sea, the unsettled state of society, the alarms of war, are portentous. They forecast approaching events of the greatest magnitude. The agencies of evil are combining their forces and consolidating. They are strengthening for the last great crisis. Great changes are soon to take place in our world, and the final movements will be rapid ones.—Testimonies for the Church 9:11 (1909).
The time of trouble, which is to increase until the end, is very near at hand. We have no time to lose. The world is stirred with the spirit of war. The prophecies of the eleventh of Daniel have almost reached their final fulfillment.—The Review and Herald, November 24, 1904. LDE 11.2 – LDE 12.1

Barbara Bowen knows what the survivors of the Lahaina fire experienced because the same nightmare happened to her in Paradise, Calif., during the Camp fire in 2018.

“I thought I was going to have to break my animals’ necks rather than see them burn,” she said recently, remembering her harrowing journey down a traffic-jammed street with fire on all sides. In her car, along with her cats and dogs, were two men she found running down the road: Trevor Colston and the developmentally disabled man he helped care for, Dan Stoffer.

The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left. Isaiah:24:5-6

The journey to recovery for the people of Paradise: physical restoration

Five years after the Camp fire devastated Paradise in the deadliest wildfire in California history, Bowen, Colston and Stoffer have moved forward with their lives and the town is one of the fastest growing in the state, with construction on nearly every block. But the journey to recovery for the people of Paradise and the place itself has been hard and uneven. For those who left and those who stayed, the emotional trauma continues even as the physical restoration progresses.

“These kinds of fires, they erase your fingerprints on this world,”

“These kinds of fires, they erase your fingerprints on this world,” Bowen said. “The fire keeps taking and the aftermath goes on for years.”

The same difficult and inequitable future, many said, is likely for Lahaina, where the death toll continues to rise into the hundreds and talk of rebuilding has already begun. If Paradise offers lessons for Maui, they are a blend of hope and harsh reality: A new town will be different from the old one, just as the new lives of survivors will be different from what was.

Last week, the signs of recovery were everywhere in Paradise. Starbucks bustled, shoppers filled the Save Mart and school buses navigated their charges to and from the first days of classes. The town is home to about 9,200 people, said Mayor Greg Bolin, down from about 27,000 before the fire. New homes stretched for miles. About 500 were built last year alone, up from two or three a year before the fire, Bolin said.

But the thick canopy of Ponderosa pines and oaks that once made this place a shady mountain getaway — popular with urban defectors and retirees — are conspicuous in their absence. The sun beats down, unbroken by shade. As many as a million trees were burned or chopped down because they were dead or damaged. In their place are thousands of charred stumps sticking up like grave markers in empty lots and landscaped yards alike.

The privacy of the forest has disappeared:

Along with the cooling, the privacy of the forest has disappeared. Paradise is now all about views: sweeping over canyons, up mountain peaks and down to the valley below — and into neighbors’ backyards, to the chagrin of some.

At the same time anarchy is seeking to sweep away all law, not only divine, but human. The centralizing of wealth and power; the vast combinations for the enriching of the few at the expense of the many; the combinations of the poorer classes for the defense of their interests and claims; the spirit of unrest, of riot and bloodshed; the world-wide dissemination of the same teachings that led to the French Revolution—all are tending to involve the whole world in a struggle similar to that which convulsed France. Ed 228.2

The Book of Education by Ellen G White

“It’s absolutely spectacular,” said Bolin, who in addition to being mayor also owns a construction firm that has built both spec houses and rebuilds for residents.

Emma Miller, 33, who works as the operations associate at the Paradise Ridge Chamber of Commerce, said she is thrilled with the changes in Paradise.

In Search of a better future 🔮 : Let us Rebuild, Pope Francis

“The rebuild is amazing,” she said. “It’s cool to see houses being built, and people coming home, and new people moving in and taking pride in our community.”

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. Proverbs:16:18

Miller, who grew up in Paradise, was living in Texas at the time of the fire — she and her husband had moved there six months prior for his job. Their old home, which they had sold to friends, burned to the ground, as did her parents’ home.

But the disaster in Paradise enabled her family to come home, she said. Her husband got a job working for a contractor. Her 5-year-old daughter will go the same elementary school he attended.

“I feel like the millennial generation is moving here,” she said. “You get more land for your money here. Having that white picket fence dream is possible in California. Definitely different from L.A. and S.F. and even Sacramento.”

That Paradise exists today is due largely to state and federal aid. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has spent millions of dollars and years cleaning up, and in 2019, the state worked to make Paradise and surrounding communities eligible for more than $500 million in federal funding to rebuild single-family homes in disaster areas.

In 2021, on the third anniversary of the fire, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced that it had removed tens of thousands of dead and dying trees and cleaned thousands of properties. In 2022, his office announced an additional $200 million in state block grant programs for recovery in Paradise.

On top of all that, Bolin said the city has netted, after expenses, about $220 million from a settlement with Pacific Gas & Electric, whose power lines ignited the fire, killing 85 people.

But for town councilman and former Mayor Steve “Woody” Culleton, it’s the regrowth of the “spirit of the community,” that makes him most proud of Paradise, and why he never considered leaving after the fire. He came to this town decades ago strung out on drugs and alcohol, he said. He had a history on the wrong side of the law and had burned nearly every personal relationship in his life.

In Paradise, he found acceptance and redemption, he said. Where once he was riding in the back of the town’s police cars in handcuffs, he wound up in the front seat with the chief of police, he joked.

Everything is Connected to Laudato Si

“This is where I was reinvented. Everything has come together for me here,” he said. “People care about each other.”

But not all Paradise residents feel the inclusive warmth of community.

Like many who fled during the Camp fire, Joshua Stokes, 40, has watched the images of Maui with a mixture of deep sympathy and reignited trauma.

“When I saw Maui, it just took me back,” he said, suddenly breaking into tears.

But when Stokes saw that the town of Paradise had placed a note on its Facebook page for the people of Lahaina, he was outraged.

we are in your town: town officials are harassing them, threatening them

“You did that for likes,” he said. “If you really cared, we would be taken care of, and we are in your town.”

Stokes said he and many other residents are living in trailers or campers on their own land while they wait for settlement money from PG&E to build. But town officials are harassing them, threatening them and, in some cases, making it impossible for them to stay, he said.

“They are forcing people to be homeless,” he said. “I don’t want to leave this town, but they are forcing people like me out.”

Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence. John:18:36

The issue, he and others said, is how long people should be allowed to camp on their own land in vehicles without building. Many residents, including dozens who have joined a Facebook page titled Fighting the Town of Paradise While Rebuilding, say the town leaders are insensitive to the fact that people cannot rebuild until they wait for the lawsuits over the fire to pay settlements.

“The mayor said, we don’t want this looking like a trailer park,” Stokes said. “But you know, until people get their money from PGE and can rebuild, that’s how it’s going to look.”

Walt Munjar lives in a trailer park off the main road through Paradise, not far from its City Hall. He had a stroke shortly before the fire, and a more serious one a few months ago, and now uses a walker.

Like Stokes, Munjar said he felt unwelcome in the town he grew up in.

“Now they’ve made laws,”

Climbing unsteadily down the rickety metal steps of his battered Coachmen Catalina, Munjar said he paid $600 a month to park the metal recreational vehicle on this gravel lot with no shade.

“Before the fire you could park a fifth wheel anywhere. Now they’ve made laws,” Munjar said. “The city, they got yuppie intentions.”

Munjar

Bolin said the accusations that town leaders are trying to drive out poor residents are “very hurtful because that’s not the case at all.”

Bolin said the town has done everything in its power to help lower-income residents, especially those still waiting for payouts from PG&E. Grant money is being used to build senior and low-income housing, and some apartments are already up.

He also believes the camping can’t be tolerated forever.

“This is not a town where we want to continue to have people live in trailers,” he said. “It’s just very tough. I’ve lost a lot of friends in this situation. You just have to keep doing what’s right for the majority of the town.”