Catherine Rusoff
Paradise, California — Extreme weather has devastated major streets across the United States, and in the past five years, at least five cities in four states have been nearly wiped off the map, all after Paradise in Northern California it fell.
“At first I thought we were going to, you know, maybe evacuate for a day or two and then go home,” Justin Miller told CBS News.
Justin Miller’s childhood home in Paradise was among the nearly 20,000 homes and businesses destroyed by the Campfire 2018, which killed 85 people. He is one of many who chose not to return and now lives in nearby Oroville.
“At first, we were thinking, you know, after the land was cleared, we could rebuild there,” Miller said. “But…then we realized that the town would take a while to rebuild, so it would be easier to move somewhere like here in Oroville.”
Last year alone, extreme weather forced about 2.5 million Americans from their homes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. To look for from Realtor.com released in March found that 44% of all American homes are threatened by climate change.
“Paradise was that place for my family in the ’90s where they could afford their own little house,” said Ryan Miller, Justin’s older brother and a geography Ph.D. candidate now studying climate migration.
“Why were we in a situation where the accessible location was also the location that presented this enormous danger?” Ryan asks. “And so, it made me really start to see Paradise through the lens of these broader issues around housing affordability and exposure to climate-driven hazards.”
Ryan and his team at the University of California, Davis, used postal records to track where people moved after the fire. What they found was that, in many cases, a move didn’t solve the problem, but put people back in danger, with families moving to areas also threatened by other types of disasters, such as hurricanes and tornadoes.
“We may be in a situation where more and more people are finding that in their search for affordable housing, they have to live in an area that is exposed to one of these climate-driven hazards,” Ryan said.
“We will see more potential havens happening where we will have these communities exposed to this threat that the community may not be prepared to face,” Ryan adds.
Paradise residents Kylie Wrobel and her daughter Ellie remained in paradise after the fire, largely picking up the pieces themselves, removing dead trees and vegetation from their properties as they applied for and hoped to receive federal aid.
They say home now has a new meaning for them.
“Home to me was kind of where you live, but home will always be wherever my mom is,” Ellie said.
Five years later, the families of Paradise have scattered, the fabric of this small town has been torn apart. But don’t tell that to the Wrobels, pioneers of a new American community they hope will be resilient to climate-driven storms.
“Seeing the city grow and build, my heart needed that,” Kylie said. “A lot of people don’t want to come back here. I had to stay here.”
Jonathan Vigliotti
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