PARADISE, Calif. (AP) — On the day Paradise burned, Gwen Nordgren stopped her car just long enough to rescue a young woman escaping by foot.

By that time on Nov. 8, 2018, the sky was black even though the sun had been up for hours. Both sides of the street were on fire as Nordgren grabbed the woman’s hand.

“Have you lived a good life?” she asked. The woman said she had.

“So have I,” said Nordgren, the president of the Paradise Lutheran Church council. “We’re going to say the Our Father and we’re going to drive like hell.”

Nordgren has told that story countless times in the five years since the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history nearly erased a quiet community in the Sierra Nevada foothills. There are thousands more stories like it, each one providing a frame for one of the worst wildfires in U.S. history.

Five years later, some — like Nordgren — are sharing their stories freely and managing their post-traumatic stress enough to return to Paradise to help make something new. Others, like Shari Bernacette, are still haunted by their memories — including witnessing the flames consume a fleeing couple, one pushing the other in a wheelchair.

“We still can’t sleep well. We toss and turn all night,” said Bernacette, who moved with her husband to Yuma, Arizona, to escape the risk of future wildfires. The couple lives in a used RV purchased with their insurance money. “We are in the desert surrounded by cactus and rocks. There is nothing that can light up. We will never live amongst the trees again.”

For people who returned to Paradise, life is about adjusting. It’s the same place, but doesn’t feel the same. Paradise was once so thick with trees it was hard to tell the town was perched on a ridge. Now, the shadows are gone as sunlight bathes the town on clear days, offering impressive views of the canyons.

Today’s population of just under 10,000 is less than half the 26,000 who lived there before the blaze.

The Camp Fire destroyed about 11,000 homes, which amounted to about 90% of the town’s structures. So far 2,500 homes have been rebuilt. About 700 are under construction at any one time, many on original lots. But just six of the town’s 36 mobile home parks that served mostly low-income and older residents have reopened.

Donna Hooton and her husband lived in one of the mobile home parks destroyed by the fire. The Hootons live off of Social Security and said they can’t afford to move to Paradise. They now live an hour away, in a small, decades-old mobile home.

“We wish we could go home but home is not there anymore,” Hooton said.

Paradise Mayor Greg Bolin says that by 2025 all of the town’s overhead power lines will be buried underground. By 2026, he says all public roads will be repaved.

“I can see what it’s going to look like. I know how nice it is going to be when it’s done,” said Bolin, who also owns Trilogy Construction Inc., one of the town’s main construction companies.

For the most part, Bolin said it is “amazing, in five years, how well people are doing.” But then a whiff of smoke will linger in the air, and it instantly brings residents back to that terrible day. It happened just last month, when Derrick Harlan — a 34-year-old Paradise resident whose business reduces fire hazards — got a permit to burn some debris piles in Paradise.

When neighbors saw smoke from the debris fire though, they called the police. The next day, the fire department showed up.

“That’s where the trauma and the PTSD comes in,” Harlan said.

Wildfires have always been a part of life in California, but they are getting more severe as climate change has caused hotter, drier summers. Seven of the state’s top 10 most destructive fires happened in the past decade. Before the Camp Fire killed 85 people, the state’s deadliest was a 1933 blaze that killed 29. More recently, a 2017 fire shocked the state as it ripped through suburban neighborhoods in California wine country, killing 22.

But the Camp Fire, the official name of the Paradise fire, marked a turning point.

Now, utility companies routinely shut off power for millions of people during wind storms in an effort to prevent fires from starting. Major property insurance companies have raised homeowners’ rates to exponential highs or dropped coverage for many in wildfire-prone areas. Other providers have simply stopped writing new policies altogether. PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter, filed for bankruptcy and announced plans to bury 10,000 miles of power lines. The town has installed warning sirens and is working to create more evacuation routes.

But just when it seemed safe to think that what happened in Paradise was a once-in-a-lifetime fire, it happened again — this time thousands of miles away in Maui, Hawaii. It meant April Kelly, who grew up in Paradise and lived in Maui for 16 years, lost both of her hometowns.

“I can’t believe I’m going through this a second time,” she said.

Finding ways to cope with that grief has become a shared part of life in Paradise. The local theater saved Judy Clemens, giving her a space to channel her passion for live performance after the blaze. The Theatre on the Ridge opened to host its first show on Valentine’s Day in 2019.

“If the theater had gone, too, I really would have been lost,” Clemens said.

For Samuel Walker, making peace with the fire meant making peace with God. The pastor of the First Baptist Church of Paradise was wracked with guilt over the death of Bob Quinn, a church member who Walker likened to a second father. On the day of the fire, Walker drove by the street where Quinn lived and for a moment, thought about checking on him. Instead, he rescued his parents, who would not have been able to escape the fire on their own.

Walker learned of Quinn’s death three days after the fire, while he was in Fresno with his family. Thieves had just broken into Walker’s car and stolen the only things his wife and daughter had saved from their house — including photos, an iPad and a knitting machine.

He was angry about his situation, everything that had happened and all of the people who had died or been hurt. For a pastor, being mad at God is a bigger problem than most.

“How am I going to minister to a congregation with all of these people with all of their issues, if I’m still trying to get through mine?” Walker asked.

He finally found peace after a trip to the hospital, of all places. Walker injured his arm after a fall while taking out the trash. In the hospital, he immediately thought of a Bible verse from the New Testament that says: “The Lord disciplines everyone he loves.”

“It was almost kind of a healing point … to say, ‘OK Lord, I’m going to let this go. I’m going to stop being angry and get back to what you have me here to do,’” Walker said.

Businesses are returning to Paradise, with recent openings of a Big Lots and Ross Dress for Less sending ripples of excitement through town. Town leaders plan to begin installing a sewer system next summer for the business district, which would allow more restaurants to operate.

That will help Nicki Jones’ restaurant, a deli and wine bar called Nic’s. Jones first came to Paradise 25 years ago. She called it a “fluke,” a place to retire with her husband. The town quickly became much more than that. She opened two businesses: a candle shop and a women’s clothing store. Both burned in the fire, along with her home.

After the fire, there was no time for rest or reflection. She had a community to rebuild. With a background in accounting she knew what to do. She started by calling her insurance companies. Within 30 days of the fire, she was able to buy a building. Within a year, she opened a restaurant called Nic’s, what she said is the first new business to open in Paradise after the fire.

“Everybody reacts to whatever tragedy there is — and we all have them — but my way has always been to jump in. How can I fix it?” she said. “I wanted a place where everybody could come and feel comfortable and feel normal.”

The best time to go to Nic’s is for “Wine room Wednesdays,” when lots of locals stop by for a drink and a hug. That sometimes includes Adam Thompson, who is not from Paradise. After the pandemic, Thompson and his family were looking for a quiet community in the foothills to raise their family. In 2021, they moved to Magalia, just outside of Paradise.

If the town is to grow, it needs new people. But newcomers face a daunting question: How do you assimilate into a community defined by a shared tragedy?

Thompson said his family was quickly accepted. His kids are enrolled in a local school. They play Little League baseball and perform in the local theater.

“There’s a humility and a resilience here that I don’t think would be in a town like this had they not gone through the fire,” he said. “I’ve never once felt excluded up here. I’ve never felt judged. I’ve only felt love and welcome from literally every single person I’ve met.”

April Kelly, who hails from Paradise and Maui, is now the general manager at Nic’s. She is on the board of directors for a parent support group called Mom’s on the Ridge. Samuel Walker is still the pastor of Paradise Baptist Church, now living with his family in nearby Magalia.

Before the fire, Paradise was viewed as a retirement community with mostly older residents. But that’s changing. The Paradise Little League has had so much interest it’s warned parents that kids may be turned away next year.

The town’s rebirth has amazed Don Criswell, a Paradise native who moved back to the area in 1998. Wildfires burned his property in 2008 and again in 2018. Both times he stayed to fight the fires himself.

The Paradise of his memory has been erased. Personal landmarks — the house he grew up in, his elementary school — are gone. Most of his childhood friends and neighbors have since moved away.

But he hasn’t gone anywhere. Instead, he has planted trees and a garden. He donates vegetables to a free community lunch put on by his church. He even plays the piano for people who come to eat.

“I’m so sorry that (the fire) happened. There’s nothing I can do about that,” he said. “I can try to make it a good, fun and beautiful place to live again. I think we’re doing that.”

___

Rodriguez reported from San Francisco.

Follow @ktar923

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PHOENIX (AP) — The Arizona Legislature could soon approve changes to the teacher certification process designed to address a shortage of classroom instructors by allowing more people without regular teacher training to lead a class.

The Republican-backed proposal has already passed the Senate and was given initial approval after a vigorous House debate on Monday over objections from Democrats, who said it will allow unqualified people to teach.

The proposal would expand a 2017 law that allows people with experience in the private sector to get a “subject-matter certificate” to teach in grades 6-12.

The change removes the grade restrictions, allowing someone with outside experience and a college degree to also teach kindergarten through grade 5.

Arizona, like many other states, has an ongoing teacher shortage and backers say the proposal is one more tool to address that problem.

“This is not about watering down the standards to become a teacher and to receive a certificate,” Mesa Republican Rep. Michelle Udall said. “It’s about additional pathways to get people into the teaching profession that are passionate about the subjects that they teach.”

Democrats point to low teacher pay, large class sizes, micromanaging by the Legislature and the politicization of classroom curriculum for qualified driving teachers from the profession. Arizona has some of the lowest teacher pay in the nation despite big raises in recent years and this year the GOP-controlled Legislature is advancing policies to increase scrutiny of school library books and boosting the rights of parents to review materials used by teachers.

Democratic Rep. Reginald Bolding, the minority leader, said creating more “flexibility” for aspiring mid-career professionals to step into the classroom to address the teacher shortage won’t help.

Democratic Rep. Kelli Butler agreed, noting that there are 180,000 qualified and certified teachers in the state who are not in the classroom because of the low pay, class sizes that are the highest in the nation and other issues. Adding unqualified teachers will make the problem worse, she said.

“The solution is not dumbing down the standards,” Butler said. “The solution is doing what is needed, using the money that we have to make sure that our teachers are qualified teachers and in the classroom teaching.”

gov. Doug Ducey pushed the special certification for teachers in higher grades in 2017, saying it would add to the pool of people able to teach. But the proposal did little to solve the teacher shortage.

The bill also adds some new teacher training programs. It awaits a formal House vote before returning to the Senate because of minor changes. It passed the Senate with no support from minority Democrats.

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Millbrae City Council believed it was safe to have a biotech company near the airport and passed a resolution to consider overriding the San Mateo County Airport Land Use Commission of the San Mateo County Airport Land Use Commission, who sided with SFO to raise safety concerns.

Ann Schneider

San Francisco International Airport officials sent a letter to Millbrae officials back in January expressing concerns about a proposal to allow biotech companies to occupy commercial developments in the area-specific plan for the Millbrae station.

Airport officials alleged that their presence on the flight path of a popular airport could increase the risk for local residents in the event of a plane crash, as biotech companies routinely work with hazardous materials.

“The city should carefully examine the health, safety and well-being of its citizens in the event of an airplane accident,” said the letter signed by Nupur Sinha, acting airport planning director.

In January of this year, the council passed a resolution to overturn C / CAG’s decision that the Millbrae Station Area Specific Plan or the MSASP changes for Biosafety Level 2 Uses in the SFO Airport Land Use Compatibility Plan or ALUCP Safety Zone 2 were inconsistent the transit-oriented development or TOD zone. It also adopted a resolution amending the MSASP to allow these uses.

Biosafety Level 2 includes clinical, diagnostic, educational, and other laboratories that work with medium-risk indigenous pathogens that are already present in the community, such as influenza, HIV, Lyme disease, and salmonella.

“The diseases at this level are diseases that already exist in the environment. This does not mean that no precautions can be taken. And all of this can be worked into the actual plans of the buildings themselves. So it is quite possible to keep things under control, ”said Mayor Ann Schneider.

She is optimistic about the future and eager to see how it will help the city thrive.

“When you’re a company like Biotech, a lot of your employees need to be on site. And that means these employees eat in local restaurants and hopefully shop locally. Diversifying our business premises is good for Millbrae, ”she said.

The city will initiate a 45-day review period by first submitting the letter of intent to the ALUCP and Caltrans Aeronautics departments to review the override. ALUCP and Caltrans have 30 days to respond and then the Council will take final action at a public hearing to override the final results in September.

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Attended college / university at
by anza

Major in
Automotive engineering

Postgraduate education or training
Computer technology; many, many vocational training classes; public speaking.

Places lived in the USA
California, Oregon, Washington

Locations outside of the US
Just during the army, Vietnam

Current jobs / past jobs
Previous professions are: gas pumps, auto mechanic, construction machinery mechanic, cook, real estate agent, chimney sweep, truck mechanic, automobile manager, air ground support equipment manager, etc.
Last before leaving: Head of Maintenance Truck Fleet

Industries in which I have worked
– Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting
– utilities
– construction
– Retail trade
– Transport and Storage
– Real estate rental and leasing
– Management of businesses and companies
– Administration and support services
– Disposal and remediation services
– Other services (except public administration) (e.g. repair, salon, political / labor organizations, etc.)
– Public administration (e.g. government, police, judiciary, etc.)

Did your training prepare you for your career or your job?
Yes, it helped, but without further training I would have fallen by the wayside.

Has your education or your professional career ever changed? As?
Not in the long run. I made some changes (real estate, chimney sweeps, cooking) but kept coming back to my true love of working on vehicles and equipment.

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LOS ANGELES – San Francisco largely beat the coronavirus pandemic by avoiding it, while Los Angeles was nearly beaten by it during a deadly winter surge.

But both emerged simultaneously on Tuesday as the first urban areas in California to hit the least restrictive corporate reopening level.

California’s iconic cities have hit infection and vaccination thresholds to allow indoor bars to welcome people back, to cheer for Major League Baseball Dodgers and Giants, and to expand capacity in restaurants, cinemas, amusement parks, gyms, and other facilities.

It’s a notable turnaround for LA considering it was the epicenter of the virus outbreak in California just a few months ago.

“It was awful,” said John Pryor on Sunday after one of his few trips to the recently reopened Angeleno Wine Co. near downtown LA. “It’s crazy that we were in the worst place in the country and now suddenly we’re the best.”

California has the lowest infection rate in the country. Los Angeles County, home to a quarter of the state’s nearly 40 million residents and suffering a disproportionate number of the state’s 60,000 deaths, did not have a single COVID-19 death on Sunday or Monday that was likely due to an incomplete weekend reporting but still remarkable.

A total of seven of the state’s 58 counties are now in what is known as the yellow tier, which is the final stage of a phased reopening plan before an expected return to normal business operations on June 15. The other five counties are all remote areas of northern California.

On a map showing each county’s status, LA and San Francisco are yellow islands in an orange sea, the second least restrictive level. There are 39 counties in the orange row, where 60% of the population live. A dozen counties, mostly in the agricultural Central Valley, are in the second strictest category and none remain in the strictest category.

San Diego and the state’s other most populous counties, which fared better than LA during much of the pandemic, remain at least two weeks away from a wider reopening.

Signs of life are returning in streets that have emptied, shops and restaurants that have closed, and office buildings that went dark after a nationwide shutdown in March 2020.

Highways are congested, workers return to offices, and people gather for drinks and dinner, much of it still outdoors.

On Sunday, drivers circled the block in search of parking spaces in downtown LA’s vibrant Arts District, where colorful murals cover former industrial buildings. The guests filled the sidewalk tables in the sausage kitchen, ate sausages and drank Belgian and German beer.

Standing in line with people waiting for a table at Angel City Brewery, which stretched down the street, Chris Sammons said he felt it was a civic obligation to support businesses.

“It almost feels like a chore to be involved with the city,” said Sammons. “We have to bring LA back to life.”

It was the first outing for his friend Stephen Tyler, who had crouched for so long and had recently been vaccinated.

“It’s just good to be back in town, to be around people,” said Tyler. “Even that doesn’t bother me standing in line. Everything is somehow new again. “

In San Francisco, business has grown at Mixt, a popular lunch spot for salad lovers in the financial district. But it’s not pre-pandemic levels with lines spilling outdoors, said Leslie Silverglide, the chain’s co-founder and CEO. She plans to open two more stores in the city center in the coming weeks.

“It seems like people are coming back,” she said. “You are looking forward to having lunch with colleagues again.”

The fear of infection with the virus led to a sharp decline in the number of passengers in local transport. But Jason Alderman said he felt like a kid on his first day of school taking a S-Bahn to San Francisco in late March when his company reopened its headquarters.

“Instead of feeling like a hollowed-out ghost town that people were quick to leave, it felt like there were green shoots of life,” he said. “I felt a stab of energy that was there earlier.”

When the lockdown order came, an estimated 137,500 workers for San Francisco companies, including Google, Facebook and Uber, disappeared seemingly overnight.

Moving trucks brought households to more spacious suburban homes, and younger people just packed up their cars and left as they could work from anywhere. Apartment rents have plummeted, but now they’re rising.

The office vacancy rate in San Francisco is 18% compared to 10% last year, said John Chang, senior vice president at Marcus & Millichap, a commercial real estate financing and advisory firm. In Los Angeles the vacancy rate is 17.5%, compared to 13.5% in the previous year.

Perhaps more revealing, only 14% of key cards are used to enter offices in San Francisco, compared to 24% in LA. At the other end of the spectrum is Dallas, where data showed that 41% of the cards were used, reflecting the different approaches to the virus across the two states.

Chang said workers suddenly left San Francisco when the original closure order went into effect. He assumes that the return will be gradual.

At its worst, California was killing more than 500 people a day, and hospitals in the LA area were barely able to handle the overwhelming influx of patients.

In total, Los Angeles had 11,633 cases and 233 deaths from COVID-19 per 100,000 population, while San Francisco had 4,095 cases and 61 deaths.

San Francisco briefly hit the Least Restrictive Level for a short period in October, the only urban area to do so before an alarming surge in cases forced a retreat. LA never got out of the most restrictive level until March.

Under the new rules, many establishments, such as Angeleno Wine Co., can double the capacity of the tasting room to 50%.

The little wine bar reopened to the public last weekend after having been closed for but two weeks in the past 13 months.

Co-owner Amy Luftig Viste said she got emotional when she reunited old friends for the first time in a year as lively conversations flowed from the tables between the barrels of stale wine and echoed off the brick walls.

“It felt like the winery had come back to life,” said Luftig Viste. “It’s a great honor to be where people come to break the seal when we get out.”

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