Dixie fire survivor training points the way to long road to recovery
A hillside scorched by wildfires. Photo: Hannah Dancy/NCDP
Nestled deep in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Greenville is a town of about 1,100 people in northern Plumas County, California. It was established during the Gold Rush era – a mining settlement turned logging settlement turned historic landmark, known for its well-preserved 19th century storefronts and century-old ranches. That said, Greenville isn’t on the map until summer 2021 because it’s for something else: a town destroyed by the Dixie Fire.
Now, a year later, the community of Greenville is trying to rebuild. Experts from Columbia Climate Institute on July 13 National Disaster Prevention Center (NCDP) visited Plumas County to help understand their recovery efforts and co-hosted an in-person training on “Post-Major Disaster Transition and Long-Term Housing Planning.”
The training was organized and conducted in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES), the Plumas County Department of Planning, the Dixie Fire Partnership, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). It is also coordinated by the FEMA State Executive Training Focal Point. It focuses on providing additional resources for community stakeholders and emergency service practitioners to facilitate disaster recovery, including the implementation of federal assistance and coordination with external partners. Following the training, there was a panel discussion with local and state subject matter experts.
a troubled town
For Plumas County, the Dixie Fire is a worst-case scenario for unusually dry, headwinds and extremely dry vegetation. The fire started when a tree touched a power line owned and operated by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E). It took firefighters three months to put out the fire, and more than a million acres were burned—an area larger than Rhode Island. About 1,200 buildings, including more than 650 homes, were damaged.
The NCDP team traveled to Plumas County the day before training to visit some of the burn sites and talk to people who still live in Greenville. The town itself is located in a relatively remote part of California, about a two-hour drive from Reno, Nevada. Almost no reconstruction took place last year, in part because building materials and manpower were not readily available. Many residents are also in limbo, waiting for a final settlement from PG&E before selling their properties. Those who want to stay are struggling to learn the process and paperwork to qualify and get available disaster recovery funding from a variety of sources.
“Disasters change the overall dynamics of a community,” says Jeff Schlegelmilch, NCDP director and one of the training instructors. “Greenville is working hard on planning, but there are still a lot of questions about what can be rebuilt and how.”
Schlegelmilch describes meeting a business owner in town who went further than most. At a picnic table, the man listed all the different paperwork he had to complete—11 forms in all. Each form represents weeks or even months of work and awaits sign-off before rebuilding begins.
“This is one of the best visualizations of what survivors have to go through and why we see such differences in coping abilities,” Schlegelmilch said. “Those who are the most marginalized, those who may have the least resources, are being asked to do a great deal.”
adjustment technique
Part of the training provided by NCDP in conjunction with FEMA is to help minimize the impact of bureaucratic burdens on communities at risk of a catastrophic event by preparing the community in advance of the disaster. However, training in Plumas County differs from the NCDP’s normal process.Instead of equipping the community with the tools to cope future Disaster events, disasters have happened – and are still happening, say Hannah Dancy, the program coordinator of the NCDP. Destruction of forests near Greenville also affected infrastructure. The loss of vegetation makes landslides and flash floods more likely. Survivors are dealing in real time with the trauma of losing their livelihoods.
Cal OES Housing Recovery Lead Coordinator Robyn Cole first contacted the NCDP team to provide post-disaster training. Not only does she want to support Plumas County’s recovery efforts, she also wants to foster interaction between counties impacted by the Dixie Fire. With this goal in mind, Dancy has worked closely with Cole and other local stakeholders to change the structure of the existing NCDP training model and ensure the right people are involved. Participants completed several course modules online before attending in-person sessions, freeing up the second half of the day for more specific incident conversations about the Dixie Fire and how to deal with its aftermath.
“The goal of this class is really to have a discussion among the people who have been working to restore these communities,” Dancy said.
Photo: Hannah Dancy/NCDP
instead of asking participants what they would do when faced with an imaginary disaster, as is common practice in other NCDP trainings, the facilitator asks the participants about their current needs. Representatives from other recovery communities, such as Paradise, which was destroyed by the Camp Fire in 2018, also attended and were able to share their knowledge with representatives from Plumas County.
“A lot of our role is to understand the dynamics, to support as much as possible, and then to know when to step back and let these conversations happen,” the NCDP lecturer said. Vanessa Lindley.
One of Schlegelmilch’s favorite training moments was when Lindley presented a module on developing leadership within the community. Instead of explaining what the participants were supposed to do, she named a few people in the room who were already doing it—invigorating and celebrating their dedication to Plumas County recovery efforts. At Greenville Elementary School, now surrounded by clearing and charred mountains, it serves as a reminder of what – and who – brought them together that day.
One A whole community approach to recovery
In every training they organize, the NCDP considers how to ensure that the federal government’s intent and provided resources are realized at the local level.
“I kept thinking: Are we getting more value left than we got?” Schlegelmilch said. “Would those hours be better if participants had time to deal with paperwork at their picnic table?”
Schlegelmilch noted that the NCDP team did receive a lot of positive feedback after the training. The team quickly attributed this response to their partnerships with local and state emergency response practitioners, whose meaningful relationships with the communities they represent helped build successful training.
“Having decision makers, stakeholders and those with resources [in the room] Added another element of hope and an opportunity to create solutions,” Lindley said.
Plumas County’s multi-level coordination provides a glimpse into what an effective community-wide approach to disaster recovery might look like. The training also highlighted the potential benefits of investing in a disaster case manager (the designated person responsible for managing the logistics of the recovery process) and creating a network of peers to exchange resources and first-hand experience.
As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of extreme weather, these support systems, as well as trainings like those held in Plumas County, will only become more important. “The disasters we experience in the future are going to be very different from what we’ve seen in the past,” Dancy said. “We need to focus not only on how to rebuild communities faster, but also on how we protect them and make them more resilient so that we minimize the rebuilding process in the first place.”
The training was organized and conducted in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES), the Plumas County Department of Planning, the Dixie Fire Partnership, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). It is supported by Cooperative Agreement EMW-2019-CA-00049 and administered by the US Department of Homeland Security. The views or opinions expressed in this document are those of the author and do not represent the official position or policy of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
