The new home of Jerre Bates, a lifelong Paradise resident, has been sitting unfinished for more than a year.
Photographer: Rachel Bujalski/Bloomberg
Nearly Five Years After Fires, Recovery in Paradise Holds Lessons for Lahaina
A California town rebuilt after wildfire destruction has become an attractive home for new and old residents. But challenges with reconstruction, and trauma, remain.
The windows are gleaming, the sidings neat, the shingles flush and flat. Driving into Paradise, California, house after house shows signs of a community resurrected since Nov. 8, 2018. That day, warm temperatures, high winds and an electrical spark turned Paradise into hell, in a devastating megafire that claimed more than 18,000 structures, killed 85 people and rewrote the lives of some 26,000 residents.
But recovering from the Camp Fire — which was then the country’s deadliest in a century — is not all fresh paint and pavement. It is an ongoing, uneven process, etched by trauma and echoes of tragedy. This month, the wildfires in Maui, which surpassed Paradise’s terrible fatality record, have been a reminder to residents of what they went through. But it is also a marker of how much the town has achieved and learned. And while some residents resist making direct comparisons between the two disasters, the fitful progress in Paradise since 2018 could help a new set of survivors in Hawaii navigate the road ahead.