Oppressed By Wildfire: Weaving Culture Into Fire Management Helps Tribes Reclaim Suppressed Heritage
This story was produced as a project for the 2019 California Fellowship, a program of USC Annenberg's Center for Health Journalism....
Community Safety
When a major wildfire burns into an urban area, federal disaster officials are quick to offer financial help to people who lose their homes. But not everyone is eligible for aid after a wildfire.
Some people say they only had minutes to prepare before they had to flee their homes during the Carr Fire in Shasta County last year. Such short notice was extra challenging for seniors and people with disabilities.
Dena Kapsalis, director of student services at Paradise Unified School District, was surprised at first by how many students chose to return after the Camp Fire destroyed the town.
“I never imagined that in one day, my whole caseload would have such severe trauma due to a natural disaster,” a school clinical social worker said.
Oppressed By Wildfire: Language Barriers, Unwelcoming Attitudes Discourage Latinos From Seeking Help
Abandoning your home while fleeing a wildfire can be a traumatic experience. It’s even scarier if you don’t understand the language of the evacuation alerts chiming into your phone.
“I have kids telling me still, oh Ms. Henry I lost my stuffed animals that were in the garage and I know that they burned in there and it makes me very sad,” she said. “You know, those little things were people to them.”
Roads are a key to everything, a reporter quickly finds out while traveling through the Navajo Nation.
Black babies in Wake County are six times more likely to die before they reach their first birthday than white babies.
Kemberly Mahiri shows me one of the hundreds of thank you cards she and other counselors for Sonoma County's Teen Parent Program have received. “It just chokes me up every single time,” Mahiri tells me.