Fire-Weary Lake County Again Faces a Tough Recovery and Questions Over Rebuilding

Jeff Stanley watched in horror as the Boyles Fire enveloped his hilly Clearlake neighborhood Sunday, consuming his friends’ homes and cars. Standing near the rubble, Stanley reached down to pick up a handful of golden, dry grass.

“If you put a match to it, it’s almost like TNT,” he said.

Fire crews stopped the fire just blocks from his home in a Lake County neighborhood painted fluorescent pink with fire retardant and charred black with the short-term memory of flames. Thirty of his neighbors’ homes weren’t so lucky.

Stanley worries that the community won’t be able to rebound quickly due to a lack of money to rebuild.

“Most of us here are on government checks,” he said. “I’m on Social Security. When a house here burns to the ground, they’ve lost everything. There’s some sad stories here.”

Two days after the fire scorched the southern edge of Clearlake, in a region that is no stranger to wildfires, authorities are strategizing how to rebuild.

The city is working with State Sen. Mike McGuire to fund temporary housing for the families who lost their homes. But the recovery won’t be easy — complicated by a potential lack of home insurance — and while the char isn’t visible from nearby Highway 53, the scar left on the community will be felt for decades, Clearlake Mayor David Claffey said.

“Every fire leaves a scar on the community, and a large part of that is because it’s so tough to rebuild here in California,” Claffey said. “Unfortunately, Lake County has experienced a lot of them.”

No other county has felt California’s wildfire crisis like Lake County, where over 60% of land has burned since the 2015 Valley Fire, according to Claffey.

The destruction from the Boyles Fire could have been worse, Claffey said, attributing brush thinning near the burned area as part of the reason the fire didn’t spread farther.

“Only losing about 30 homes is a testament to all that work,” he said.

The other helpful break: a city police officer who lives nearby saw the plume of smoke and evacuated the first family out of a house that caught fire.

Claffey said as many as 2,300 people are still under evacuation orders, staying with family and friends or at a Red Cross shelter in the nearby city of Middletown.

They include Samantha Tarver and her 17-year-old son, Jeremy Cova, who stayed at a hotel Sunday night and visited the Red Cross shelter Monday to find out what aid might be available.

“We don’t know what we are going to do if our house burns. We just rented our place in May,” Tarver said, explaining that when the family evacuated, the fire was right across the street from their mobile home. As of Monday, she wasn’t sure if her home had burned. “I don’t want to live there anymore. I want to go somewhere that isn’t dangerous.”

The city’s temporary housing plan in the works with McGuire would put people who lost their homes into local hotels free of charge, according to Claffey.

“We’re committed to getting folks out of the shelter as soon as possible,” he said. “The temporary housing could last several months or a very long time. Our goal is to get them in a more comfortable environment.”

Another issue the blaze surfaces is a potential lack of home insurance in the neighborhood. Claffey said the city is calculating how many people have insurance, are underinsured or are uninsured.

Kirsten Priebe lives several streets away from where the fire burned. Her anxiety was heightened given that Social Security checks make up most of her monthly income, and she gave up her home insurance a few years ago when the price doubled from $900 to $1,900.

“That’s two of my two checks,” she said. “I had to let my insurance go because I couldn’t afford it. So, it makes it extra scary.”

Because Priebe can’t afford home insurance, over the past few years she has prepared her home to withstand blazes like the Boyles Fire. She installed cement board siding on the home’s exterior, cut trees back, removed the grass in her yard and paved a lot of her property.

Still, the question remains whether staying in such a highly fire-prone area is feasible. UC Santa Cruz professor Miriam Greenberg, who studies the effects of climate catastrophes like fires on housing in the wildland-urban interface, cautioned the city and its residents to think about whether rebuilding in Clearlake is a good idea.

“It’s a question that should be asked sensitively because a fire may have already displaced them from an affordable housing community,” she said. “We haven’t had these conversations about fire-prone areas, but it’s beginning to happen.”

With all the issues that arise from living in a fire-vulnerable region like Lake County, Greenberg suggested considering the idea of managed retreat — choosing to leave because of the growing risk of wildfires fueled by human-caused climate change.

The idea might sound simple in theory but, in reality, is complex and can change the makeup of a community, she said, adding that for it to work, authorities must develop equitable solutions for those who want to stay and “for those individuals or families or communities that are actually interested in leaving but just can’t afford to do so.”