Diego Pacheco escaped a nightmare in the early hours of 9 October, when a raging inferno swept through the Journey’s End mobile home park where he lived. Safe from the flames, he found himself with nothing more than his wallet and the clothes on his back.
The 78-year-old retired carwash worker had kept his life savings in cash at home. The money, along with the home, are almost certainly gone.
“I have too many problems,” Pacheco said in Spanish on Sunday, as he stood in line at the Fema emergency assistance center in Sonoma county, tears streaming down his face. “I can’t even think right now. I don’t know what’s going to come next.”
As weather conditions finally shifted in their favor over the weekend, firefighters in northern California made significant progress in containing the series of wildfires that began ravaging the region on the night of 8 October. More than a dozen fires erupted that night amid unusually heavy winds, and the flames remained almost entirely uncontained for much of the week.
The fires have thus far burned over 213,000 acres and destroyed approximately 5,700 structures, according to the state fire agency. Forty people died in last week’s flames, making it the deadliest week in California wildfire history. On Monday, another fatality was reported after a driver delivering water to the fire lines was killed when his truck overturned.
About 100 people remain unaccounted for in Sonoma County, where more than 1,700 were at one point listed as missing.
“The weather has not been in our favor over the past week in general, but we are still marching forward with our progress,” said Daniel Berlant, spokesman for the California department of forestry and fire protection.
One glimmer of hope is a forecast for rain by Thursday. “Any sort of moisture is welcome at this point,” said Scott Rowe, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. “In terms of fire, the weather outlook is looking to be improving.”
The struggle ahead
Residents had no warning when the fires swept into their neighborhoods.
“I was barely able to pull on my pants and grab my wallet,” Pacheco recalled of his escape from his smoke-filled mobile home. “There were flames everywhere. We had to drive through them.”
Other survivors echoed Pacheco’s tale of fleeing for their lives without receiving any warning from officials. “If it weren’t for the dogs, I might have been barbecued,” said Robin, a Santa Rosa resident who asked not to be identified by her full name because she was a survivor of domestic violence.
Pacheco and his roommate found their way to a Walmart parking lot, where a woman offered him a room to stay in, but he had left behind his phone and the little book where he recorded his family members’ phone numbers. After days of searching hospitals and parking lots, his nieces and nephews convinced a local television station to run a report on their missing uncle, leading to their reunification.
On Sunday, Pacheco’s family accompanied him to Sonoma County’s newly organized emergency assistance center, which was set up Saturday as a one-stop shop for government aid.
“The biggest challenge for us is the sheer number of people who need help,” said the center’s director, Michael Gossman, who is usually an administrator with the county water agency but took on a new role to help with the relief efforts. About 500 fire victims had been served by the center by midday Sunday.
“We have people in there who are going to sit down with you and find out what you need,” a county probation department employee, Tom Gerstel, told those still waiting in line. “We have a list of needs you might have that you haven’t even thought of yet.”
Pacheco, who worked at a gas station parking lot in Santa Rosa for 17 years before retiring in 2015, doesn’t want to tell his family members exactly how much money went up in flames. “He had little hide-out spots” for his money, said his niece Adriana Rios, 21. “He was just old-school and didn’t ever deposit or think he had to.” The family is fairly sure that he did not have renter’s insurance to cover his belongings.
The wildfires did not discriminate by class. In Santa Rosa, the region’s largest city, flames devoured almost 3,000 buildings, from the upscale homes of Fountaingrove – a neighborhood where many of the city’s wealthiest lived – to the humble mobile home park catering to retirees, and the middle-class subdivisions near Coffey Park.
In all, about one in every 20 homes in the city were wiped out over the past week, a crisis that will only exacerbate an already tight rental market. The city’s rents grew 50% over the past five years, the fastest growth in the country, according to a Bloomberg analysis of Zillow data.
But recovery will probably be significantly more challenging for renters and low-income people, especially if they did not have insurance.
Pacheco’s family helped him apply for Section 8 housing vouchers and rental assistance, but Rios said that they had been informed it could take months for the applications to be processed. Relief workers also distributed a list of current apartment vacancies in Santa Rosa, but most were renting for $1,200 to $1,600 a month, well above the $700 rent Pacheco paid at the mobile home park.
For the time being, Pacheco will stay with family members, Rios said, but none of them have a lot of extra cash on hand.
“It’s going to be difficult,” said Rios, a program assistant for a mental health agency. “We all have bills and we all have families. I think it’s going to be a strain but we can pull it together.”
