California Today: Reporting on Wildfires Felt ‘Like a Country at War’

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Thomas Fuller, the San Francisco bureau chief for The New York Times, describes his experience covering the fires in Northern California.

I keep a satellite phone in the trunk of my car, the same one I used to cover disasters and insurgencies in places like Myanmar and Nepal. But I never thought I would need it in Napa Valley, not for a wildfire anyway.

During a week spent covering the fires in Northern California, I fell back on my training as a foreign correspondent: finding the satellite on the smoky horizon, locking in the phone’s antenna and dictating paragraphs to patient editors.

But this was not a foreign land. It was my own country, and the conveniences that we take for granted had collapsed. Traffic lights went black and commerce shut down.

Streets that were normally filled with tourists in the charming towns of wine country were deserted except for crews of exhausted firefighters, sheriff’s deputies and a few reporters. In the evacuation zones, rows of destroyed houses made it feel like a country at war, emptied of its civilian population.

Small fires seemed to pop up everywhere. As I raced down narrow country roads to meet deadlines, I caught glimpses of smoldering embers on tree stumps a few feet away. I felt vulnerable while driving through tunnels of vegetation — it would be easy to be surrounded by fire and trapped.

Everything smelled of smoke: my clothes, my car, my bag, my fingers.

I feel enormously grateful to the dozens of people who took the time to articulate their grieving, some while standing in the rubble of their homes. The fires stripped away their privacy. Their kitchens, their exercise equipment, their hobbies — their lives — were in cinders at our feet.

I think back to meeting Lisa Layman, her azure eyes staring at the ashes of her home at Coffey Park in Santa Rosa. She was recovering from cancer and recently had a kidney removed. The night before, she had escaped with her Bible and a scrapbook of her son’s early years. That is all she had.

It is a reporter’s job to bring empathy to disasters like this. But I wondered how I could ever comprehend the magnitude of her loss.

• Although the direct danger from wildfires may be waning, there is an unseen hazard from household chemicals and pesticides in hollowed-out homes. [The New York Times]

• Many people did not receive an emergency alert during the wildfires because counties have struggled to collect numbers as people shift from landlines to cellphones. [The Sacramento Bee]

• Survivor’s guilt is a legitimate concern for those who had their home spared while their neighbor’s was destroyed. [The Mercury News]

• Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital stayed open throughout the blaze, with doctors and nurses delivering 36 babies and treating four firefighters. [The San Francisco Chronicle]