(No. 23, a ±05 minute read)
I learn an awful lot that doesn’t make it into print.
Vacation is over, and how! And now, on to some housekeeping: Tomorrow my long, hard look at the consequences and lessons of California’s Camp Fire runs; delayed from its originally scheduled date last Tuesday due to the vicissitudes of online magazine publishing. Please give it a read! And I have a new masthead here at Uncertainty Today. That is Manapua, our beloved uncertainty engine, all over it. And now, some of what won’t be in print tomorrow…
“I’ve been planning this” — the memorial — “for probably a year, understanding that five years is a really big deal,” said Colette Curtis, the town’s Recovery and Economic Development Director. Curtis is a stylish woman, her wardrobe evoking the appearance of a silent film era star, perhaps too chic for a Sierra Foothill town and the rough reputations that can still hang on them. Don’t be fooled, or underestimate her acumen.
Curtis is deeply involved here, in the nuts and bolts of post-fire response and recovery work. Thoughtful, knowledgeable, and willing to dive into tasks as varied as overseeing widespread snag removal, ensuring that the town’s new warning sirens are up to the task, practical municipal economic recovery, and the town’s communications and marketing; critical for keeping townspeople abreast of what is happening after the fire — and drawing new ones in.
We were sitting in her office, in one of the few buildings that wasn’t incinerated at this end of the Skyway Road commercial strip. She tells me, “My home survived. I was very fortunate, but most of the people I work with did lose their homes. All of our council members lost their homes.” And now, five years on, “this really isn't a celebration. I would never use that word for what this is. This is really commemorating a huge event that happened in all of our lives. And marking the time.”
Memorials, Curtis says, are a bedrock for community-building after a disaster. She is clear that they are ongoing even now, probably as we speak, without municipal influence or initiation; irrepressible phenomena occurring all over Paradise. “Even five years later, even a hug to a neighbor, that’s what you’re doing” — making a memorial. “Those hugs are a little longer because there’s just something there, unspoken.” Such interactions between those who lived through the Camp Fire continue, discreetly, creating personal commemorations every day.
But public efforts are just as crucial. We discussed how far Paradise has come, especially when three post-fire years were impacted by the pandemic, with its human toll and construction-materials shortages. We talked about Curtis’s ideas for a youth advisory council, and her goal to build a workforce-training center focused on sustainable building techniques. And Curtis spoke of the difficult mechanics of municipal government, given the still-potent reverberations of the fire.
How does the day-to-day business of town bureaucracy proceed after facing such a horror? A local official, for example, might need to issue a permit, accept a payment, or aid in a document search. But official business can no longer be done officiously:
We realized very quickly, you can’t do that right after a disaster, after trauma. You have to sit in that space and have that moment where they tell you their story of where they were the day of the fire. Then I tell them my story, and we have that moment together. And then it’s like, okay, now we can do this. If you try to bypass that, you won’t. You can’t. There’s anger and hurt, and there’s tears — because all that exists — and you have to meet it.
As involuntary pioneers, Curtis said, she and other town leaders “felt it was very much our responsibility to help FEMA fine-tune [their] playbook to be more for wildfire as opposed to just for hurricanes and floods and tornadoes.” Driving home what is perhaps the biggest municipal lesson learned in Paradise, she told me, “There’s a really big difference between response and recovery. Huge difference.” Response, Curtis explained, takes far longer than people understand — or want to accept — that it will.
Curtis is asked repeatedly, “Have you been to Lahaina? Have you been in there and helping them? And my answer is no, not yet, because that's not our place yet. Yeah. Because they're responding and now they're [just] getting into recovery.” She has the faith of experience, and input to the process, that this initial response is something best left to state government and FEMA, because there is a playbook, “becoming more finely tuned.”
And while this is true in California with its long experience of disaster — Curtis’ first was in the Bay Area, Loma Prieta in 1989, as a nine-year-old learning that the world could be a profoundly uncertain place — whether Hawai‘i can rapidly take up the available response playbook remains to be seen. There it must be applied in substantially more complex circumstances: the first significant oceanfront urban fire, geographic isolation, real estate desirability many orders of magnitude greater than Paradise knows, the complex and unavoidable layer of Indigeneity, historically, and presently, abused.
FEMA has learned from Paradise, and California has learned from what is rapidly becoming too many fires to list. It is now Hawai‘i, and Maui’s, to learn from both sources; and contribute to the body of knowledge we are on track to more-and-more increasingly require. Colette Curtis is there, up on Skyway, with the rest of municipal and Paradise’s communities, available to be a resource.
That’s the bit, with a little massaging to be presented here, that was cut, but I want to leave you with a final quote from Curtis that I did not work into the story, as important as it is:
Disasters are terrible [but] they create opportunities that did not exist. Of course, we all would wish that these disasters wouldn't happen, and we could go along with our lives, but the fact is they do happen. And when they do, you have to find what those opportunities are. And that really has been a big part of my job, looking to see what are the opportunities that are now available to us as a community? And to make sure that we harness those to every extent we can for our residents. And I think the people of Lahaina have the same opportunity. You just have to be very careful with the way you do it.
This is the first of my companion pieces to the Paradise story that will run tomorrow. I don’t know how many there will be. I suppose I will write them until I have relayed everything I learned in those eight days of reporting this difficult, and yet still very hopeful, anniversary. (It is not uncommon for a feature story like this to land on an editor’s desk at 10–11,000 words, as mine did. Much has to be cut to make it to “only” 7,500 or 8,000. Thanks Frances for your always thoughtful ax!) Stay tuned…