Heartbroken and homeless on the charred hills of California

Living in the rugged hills of Southern California, Theresa Bulla-Richards has seen her share of wildfires. But after the power went out, as she felt her way through the darkness for whatever few family photos and mementos she could gather, she knew this one would be different.

Ms. Bulla-Richards and her husband, Gary Bulla, have lived in the picturesque hills outside Ojai, north of Los Angeles, since 1973. They were the first full-time residents of Camp Bartlett, an oasis of 12 homes built in the 1960s by wealthy families as a vacation retreat.

Over the decades, the camp, nestled beside a creek in a lush canyon teeming with wildlife, had become a tight-knit community and a gathering place for the Bullas' friends and family. Mr. Bulla, a professional woodworker, had crafted many of the home's doors and windows and some of the furniture himself.

Yet as the Bullas knew well, the steep, lush terrain that had made dwelling on the edge of the vast Los Padres National Forest so magical was also what made it dangerous. Living in the mountainous and forested terrain of the Southern California countryside inevitably meant being at the mercy of Mother Nature.

Fire was such an ever-present threat that inside the home, the couple had hung a picture their daughter, Aja, had painted as a child of flames rolling down the hillside. Ms. Bulla-Richards remembers evacuating from three major wildfires and staying put through several smaller ones over the years. As they built onto their home, the Bullas added fireproof shingles and a new fire-resistant deck.

But when two separate blazes erupted around her in the early evening of Dec. 4, Ms. Bulla-Richards heard the trees at the end of her long secluded driveway cracking under the gale-force winds. If they fell, she would be trapped.

Mr. Bulla raced toward home from work when he learned of the fire. During past blazes, he had stayed at home to hose down the property and keep the approaching embers at bay. But by the time he reached the highway, police had already closed the road. Home alone, Ms. Bulla-Richards grabbed what little belongings she could find in the dark and fled.

"It was a really very, very different kind of fire than the fires we faced 20 years ago," Ms. Bulla-Richards says. "It was a firestorm. It's not something you live through."

Even so, the Bullas never really thought they would lose the home. Now, all of it was gone: burned to the ground in one of the largest wildfires to tear through California in recent memory.

In California, where wildfires are so common that they have almost become an annual ritual, 2017 is likely to go down as among the most destructive fire years on record. Five of the 20 largest wildfires ever recorded in California happened in the past 12 months. More than 40 people have died, and more than 10,000 buildings were destroyed. Insurance companies have received nearly $12-billion in claims from the October fires in Northern California's wine country, a figure that is likely to jump dramatically once this month's Southern California wildfires are taken into account.

California's worst wildfires, in charts

The growing threat of wildfires is prompting hard questions in California about how to rebuild communities that have been levelled by this year's blazes – or whether to rebuild at all. That's particularly true in neighbourhoods such as Bel-Air in Los Angeles and in Northern California's Santa Rosa, where homes were destroyed by blazes that traced nearly identical paths to previous fires.

California's wildfires are getting bigger and moving faster than before, fuelled by extended high winds that gusted up to 145 kilometres an hour. The strong Santa Ana winds – which blow hot air from the state's arid interior toward the coast – are a regular occurrence. But the conditions typically last only a few days. This year, the Santa Anas have raged on and off for nearly two weeks.

In Ventura County, north of Los Angeles, those winds helped push the Thomas fire to the fourth largest blaze in state history. Two people have died, including a firefighter killed on Thursday. Now at nearly 100,000 hectares and still burning, the fire was at one point expanding at a rate of more than 20,000 hectares a day.

Boundaries

County border

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Lassen

U.S. National Forest

Urban areas

Glenn

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Tuolumne

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Alameda

Sacramento

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Ventura fire

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Dec. 8

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Oxnard

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: MAPZEN;

OPENSTREETMAP; NATURAL EARTH;

WHO'S ON FIRST; U.S. FOREST SERVICE;

U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY

Boundaries

County border

State border

Lassen

U.S. National Forest

Urban areas

Glenn

Lake

Sonoma

Tuolumne

Napa

NEVADA

Alameda

Sacramento

CALIFORNIA

Detail

San

Diego

0

250

MEXICO

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Ventura fire

perimeter

Dec. 5

Dec. 8

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National Forest

Dec. 14

Santa

Barbara

Ventura

Los

Angeles

Oxnard

0

25

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: MAPZEN; OPENSTREETMAP;

NATURAL EARTH; WHO'S ON FIRST; U.S. FOREST SERVICE;

U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY

Boundaries

County border

State border

U.S. National Forest

Lassen

Urban areas

Glenn

Lake

Sonoma

Napa

NEVADA

Tuolumne

Sacramento

Alameda

CALIFORNIA

Detail

San

Diego

0

250

KM

MEXICO

Ventura fire perimeter

Dec. 5

Dec. 8

Dec. 14

Los Padres

National Forest

Santa

Barbara

Ventura

Los

Angeles

Oxnard

0

25

KM

THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: MAPZEN; OPENSTREETMAP; NATURAL EARTH;

WHO'S ON FIRST; U.S. FOREST SERVICE; U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY

"I've been a firefighter for 16 years and if I had that once in my career, I'd be astounded," says Michael Chiodini, fire battalion chief with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management who has battled a dozen blazes this year, including the Thomas fire. "We're getting it ever single year. It's challenging for us and it stretches us thin."

Many warn that things will only get worse as the fire season expands, driven in part by climate change. This year, California officials counted a record 129 million dead trees, many of them killed in a drought that lasted six years. In Southern California, many worry that the next cycle of drought is already here. Before the fires, the region had gone more than 200 days without a drop of rain. "We're facing a new reality in this state where fires threaten people lives, their property, their neighbourhoods and of course billions and billions of dollars," Governor Jerry Brown said as he toured the devastation in Ventura.

Richard Halsey is a trained wildland firefighter and director of the California Chaparral Institute, which works to protect the highly flammable native shrubs and plant life that extends through much of the Southern California landscape.

He believes the state should go further than just warning of the ongoing threat of global climate change and push back against developers looking to build in known fire zones. "It's a really horrible thing to say and nobody wants to say it, but I think ultimately down the road it's going to have to happen: people are going to have to move."

Municipalities should be liable for the costs of fighting fires when those neighbourhoods burn, he says. Meanwhile, government grants for programs that can help homeowners in the most high-risk fire regions retrofit their properties to install fireproof roofing, outdoor sprinkler systems and water tanks, would likely have been far cheaper than the billions in insurance claims from lost homes.

The status quo "is putting these people in harm's way," he said. "And there's ways we can fix that pretty easily."

These debates will likely only grow louder as the state continues to grapple with a growing population and a severe housing shortage that is pushing developers to build further into fire-prone areas. This year, there were as many as 600,000 houses in areas deemed to be at high risk of wildfires. By 2050, one study estimates that number could be as high 2.6 million.

Already, the fires have exacerbated the state's affordable-housing crisis, pitting some displaced homeowners against displaced renters in the battle for affordable temporary housing.

"There was nothing available to rent before, so I can't imagine what it's going to be like now," says Mark Chesney, who retired in September as the manager of one of the few affordable rental apartments in downtown Ventura.

The building burned to the ground in the Dec. 4 fires. Mr. Chesney fled in the middle of the night with only the clothes on his back, his cellphone and a list of his most important passwords. With no insurance, he doesn't know what comes next. "I don't really care about the stuff that much," he says. "I care that I've lost my life. A life I was happy with."

His neighbour, Creek Harris had looked into tenants insurance, but was told it would cost more than $500 a month because the apartment building was in a fire zone. Now, Ms. Harris, a makeup artist, and her husband are weighing whether they can even afford to stay in Ventura. "I need affordable rent and all those places are snapped up and gone," she said. "We're faced with the thought of not knowing what to do. Should we leave California? Go to a different city? I don't know where to go."

For those who can and want to rebuild, the process will be long, arduous and expensive.

Jan Perry and Jim Boyer were among the lucky ones. The fire that swept through their Coffey Park subdivision in Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco, in October, levelled much of their neighbourhood but left their home unscathed.

Still, the couple, who are in their 70s, have spent the past six weeks living out of a hotel while cleaners hauled all their belongings into storage. Crews have scraped down their ceilings, washed their walls, ripped out all the carpeting and even power-washed their fake grass to get rid of smoke damage. "Every item in your house has to be specially cleaned," Ms. Perry said last week while shopping for new doors. "It's just unbelievable what all has to be done."

Cleanup crews are still clearing the debris from the homes that burned. Many neighbours have put their homes up for sale. Others are rushing to buy rebuilding supplies now to put in storage until they can get permits, which could be more than a year away. "It's sad to look across the street and see what's not there any more," Ms. Perry said. "You figure they can build it back and that's it. But nothing will ever be the same again."

To help protect communities from massive fires, governments need to put more money into so-called hazardous-fuel reduction programs, which thin out much of the "fuel" or thick dead growth that is the highest risk of fire, said Mr. Chiodini, the firefighter. Funds for such prevention programs have dwindled as land-management agencies have devoted a growing share of their budgets fighting the expanding array of wildfires. "We haven't received that funding in a three years and that hurts us because we can't change the terrain, we can't change the weather, but we can change the fuel," he said.

For now, Ms. Bulla-Richards is focusing on small signs of hope: the tomatoes in her garden that didn't burn; the graft she had taken of a rare species of apple tree that is still standing; the fish and birds that somehow survived the fire.

She knows that whatever they built will likely be more modest than what she had before – and more fireproof. She worries about how much their insurance will cover and how much they will have to spend on temporary accommodations while they wait. But she feels a deep connection to the land, strong enough that moving somewhere else is not an option.

"It really does feel like home to me, even standing here right now," she said as she surveyed the charred landscape. "I feel brokenhearted. And I also feel like I'm home."