Ria Abernathy was driving home from her son’s home in Oroville Tuesday night when an ominous scene unfolded before her. A huge plume of neon orange smoke billowed from the horizon.
The 55-year-old appliance service manager paused to snap photos of the Thompson Fire, which will burn more than 3,500 acres of dry grass and brush near the Northern California town the next night and prompt evacuation orders for thousands of residents .
It seemed unlikely that the flames would reach Abernathy’s home, about 25 minutes away in the Butte County community of Magalia. But the photo is eerily similar to what she saw one morning in November 2018 before escaping her Paradise home during the Camp Fire. That fire killed 85 people and destroyed everything Abernathy owned.
The Thompson Fire burned near Oroville, Calif., on Tuesday, creating an eerie scene.
(played by Leah Abernethy)
“It definitely brings back a lot of bad memories, even a little bit of PTSD,” she said of the recent fires.
In recent years, Butte County has suffered one disaster after another — the 2017 Oroville Dam spillway breach led to the evacuation of 180,000 people; in 2020, a massive fire in the North Complex killed 16 people; in 2021, the scale The larger Dixie Fire burned much of the county, becoming the first fire to burn from one side of the Sierra Nevada to the other. But perhaps no event has penetrated more deeply into the region’s psyche than the Camp Fire, which remains California’s deadliest wildfire to date, leaving wounds that are difficult to heal.
“I think it’s really important for people to know that with the fires – the original fires – people were still struggling,” Abernethy said. “I lost my entire history. A lot of people lose their history and never get it back.
Abernathy, now 39, moved to Butte County from Southern California when her oldest daughter was 5 years old. She wanted to give her children a better life and was drawn to the mountain scenery, abundant wildlife and friendly people.
She knew wildfires were a risk because of recurring droughts, dense trees and winding canyons. A week or two before the Camp Fire, she had been warned she might have to evacuate from another fire, so she packed her car and was ready to go. About four days before the Camp Fire, she unloaded everything, thinking she was safe. As the flames approached her door, she was running out of time.
“I dropped everything and said, ‘Okay, we’ll come back,'” she said. “We never came back.”
Abernethy, an uninsured renter, originally moved to Corning, but said she lost that house due to miscommunication with FEMA. She ended up living in a trailer in a church parking lot for eight months.
She ultimately received an $80,000 settlement from Pacific Gas & Electric Co., whose equipment started the Camp Fire, and the company pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the fire. But after she paid taxes on the settlement and gave a third to her attorney, little was left. That’s even more so, she said, when you consider that her PG&E utility bill jumped from $150 a month to $500 a month after the fire.
“I’m pretty much being pushed out because I can’t afford to live here,” she said, adding that her landlord has had a hard time maintaining homeowners insurance on the property as insurance companies raise rates or flee the state entirely.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do because I have an 84-year-old mom and a 19-year-old grandson to take care of. I don’t want to leave here – this is where my kids grew up – but I can never stay here again. Here it is.
Abernathy’s son and wife recently bought a house in Oroville, closer to the Thompson Fire. She hoped they would have an easier time escaping the camp fire than she did – if that were the case. The town has multiple entrances, unlike Paradise, which has few roads leading outside the city.
As of Wednesday evening, the couple had not been ordered to evacuate. But Abernathy had told them to pack their belongings and pile them in the car, just in case.
