Indian Valley native in New York Times on the Dixie Fire and Rural Life

Annie Correal, who grew up in the Indian Valley in Plumas County, California, has published this in the New York Times, where she works.  It's a very personal reflection on the #DixieFire and its impact on Plumas County, which I've recently written about here, here, here, and here.  

A short excerpt of her piece follows, highlighting the sense of abandonment many feel in the face of the most recent wildfires, as resources are shifted each time a new fire erupts in a more populous area:  

“They just want to let us burn,” said Butch Forcino, repeating a common refrain heard among the valley’s weary residents, who have watched fire crews appear and disappear. He lost his home in Indian Falls to the fire and, like many of those displaced, has been living in a trailer in a friend’s field.

* * *

Most have stayed despite evacuation orders, tending to their hundreds of head of cattle even as the largest wildfire burning in the United States bears down.

Some officials have tried to encourage them to leave, saying they put themselves and firefighting crews at risk. But at a time when about 100 large blazes are burning across the West, stretching federal and state resources to the limit, they fear that if they do not protect their homes, no one will.

Please read the rest of Correal's poignant essay, and also my prior post about folks refusing to evacuate because of a sense of duty to protect their neighbors property--and a fear that if they didn't protect their own, no one else would.  In other words, some don't trust CalFire to protect their property.  This fear has surely been aggravated in the past few days as we have heard repeated announcements on state and national media that the highest fire priority in the nation is stopping the Caldor Fire from reaching the Lake Tahoe Basin.  This suggests that it has taken a threat to rich folks' homes to get authorities to pull out all the stops to get a fire under control.  These recent events have renewed my concern about whether adequate resources were dedicated in late July and early August to stopping the spread of the Dixie Fire in nonmetro, sparsely populated Plumas and Lassen counties.  Were those communities just not important enough to marshal more resources?  

Also, the photos accompanying this story are as extraordinary as the writing.  Don't miss them.