![]() ![]() If your house burns down, your neighbors rally around you. Natural disaster, like war, can introduce immediate suffering on an overwhelming scale. She waited and she wrestled with a horrible, sickening choice: Should she smother her child now and forgo the terror and pain of burning to death? Trapped in her car, like so many others, she waited for what seemed like certain death. Or the young mother whose mind keeps returning to those frantic hours. Imagine the Vietnam veteran living here who thought he’d found peace years ago, until the war crashed back into his life with the firefighting helicopter pounding over his neighborhood. SCORCHED MONOLITHS still dot the rubble in Paradise nearly a year after one of the deadliest forest fires in 100 years. For others, smelling smoke or being caught in regular rush-hour traffic, even miles or states away from Paradise, can incite panic and flashbacks. Some people can’t bear to drive back into town, one giant emotional trigger. “So much of their lives are dominated, every minute of every day, by the fire and the tragedy and the ongoing day-to-day concerns.” His job, as he sees it, is to help people not just with this day but also with the next day, and the one after that. He has a quiet voice and a mellowness that patients must find reassuring, and dark brown hair, showing the first flecks of gray, that hangs past his shoulders. “There are so many layers and so much complexity to this trauma that it’s really hard for people to process and extremely difficult to move forward,” Dr. Meekins’s clinic is at capacity, with a list of those waiting for an opening. Underlying all of that grief and frustration is the searing trauma from a day when many in Paradise thought they would die. New homes and cars and clothes and everything else. They have had to find new jobs, new schools, new neighbors. Since the fire, the needs have ballooned as people have tried to put their lives back together. Paradise was considered underserved before the fire, with too few mental-health-care resources to treat the regular mix of life’s troubles-addiction and behavior issues, traumas and mood disorders. ![]() Meekins, 43, had been through a few hurricanes, having worked in New Orleans and Charleston, but he had seen nothing like this devastation, which went far beyond real estate. ![]() Still others are waiting to see if they want to return to what was once home. NEXT TO nothing was left in certain areas of the town. But mostly it was rubble, and gut-punched residents found little to save. Here and there, a house survived, about one for every ten that burned. The town was a quilt of dumb luck and tragedy, depending on where the wind had pushed the flames and embers. Several schools burned, and Paradise’s only hospital was badly damaged. Behind another incinerated home, patio furniture with soft, inviting cushions circled around a fire pit waited for guests.Ĭars burned to their axles littered the streets: pickup trucks and vans, economy hatchbacks and the fanciest sports cars, all hollowed out and rusty. A white picket fence hemmed in a green lawn and the empty footprint of a house. A metal staircase climbed to the second floor of nothing. When I visited Paradise this past spring, flowers had burst through the ground, but the houses they once adorned were gone. It nearly erased the town of 27,000, destroying more than 13,000 homes and scores of businesses. The inferno would kill at least 86 people, many in their houses and some in their cars as they fled on traffic-clogged roads. VEHICLES AND homes burned as the fire tore through Paradise. ![]()
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