Paradise, California – Extreme weather has ravaged America's high streets, and in the past five years, at least five cities in four states have all but been wiped off the map, all after Paradise in Northern California he fell.
“At first I thought we were just going to, you know, maybe evacuate for a day or two, and then go home,” Justin Miller told CBS News.
Justin Miller's childhood home in Paradise was among the nearly 20,000 homes and businesses destroyed by the Colony fire 2018, which killed 85 people. He is one of the many who chose not to return and now makes his home in Oroville.
“At first, we were thinking, you know, after we clean up the lot, we could rebuild on it,” Miller said. “But … then we realized it was going to take a while for the city to rebuild, so it would be easier to move somewhere like here in Oroville.”
Last year, extreme weather forced about 2.5 million Americans from their homes, according to the US Census Bureau. Realtor.com research released in March found that 44 percent of all American homes are threatened by climate change.
“Paradise was that place in the 1990s for my family where they could afford their own little house,” said Ryan Miller, Justin's older brother and Ph.D. candidate in geography who is now studying climate migration.
“Why were we in a situation where the affordable place was also the place that had this huge danger?” Ryan asks. “And so, it made me start to see Paradise through the lens of these broader issues of housing affordability and exposure to climate risks.”
Ryan and his team at the University of California, Davis, used postal records to track where people moved after the fire. What they found was that, in many cases, moving did not solve the problem, but instead put people back in harm's way, and households moved to areas also threatened by other types of disasters, such as hurricanes and tornadoes
“We may be in a situation where, more and more, people are finding that, in their search for affordable housing, they have to live in an area that is exposed to one of these climate-driven hazards,” Ryan said .
“We're going to see more potential havens happen, where we have these communities exposed to this threat that maybe the community isn't prepared to deal with,” Ryan adds.
Paradise residents Kylie Wrobel and her daughter Ellie, he remained in paradise after the Camp Fire, they largely picked up the pieces on their own by clearing dead trees and vegetation from their property while they applied for and waited for federal aid.
They say that now home has a new meaning for them.
“Home to me was kind of where you live, but home will always be wherever my mom is,” Ellie said.
Five years later, the Paradise families have scattered, the fabric of this small town torn apart. But don't tell the Wrobels, pioneers of a new American community they hope will be resilient to climate-fueled storms.
“Watching the city grow and build, my heart needed that,” Kylie said. “A lot of people don't want to come back here. I had to stay here.”
Jonathan Vigliotti
