Jim McMahon
Gabe Price was having another rough day. As he had every morning since escaping the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, the 17-year-old had woken up beside his father on a sagging air mattress at his grandparents’ house, now crammed with four extra people and a dog. Stress filled the cramped rooms like smoke, always on the verge of flaring into another argument.
Home—or what he had until recently known as home—is a pile of ashes. Paradise High School, where he’s a senior, is cordoned off in an evacuation zone. Lessons are now all online, and Gabe desperately needed to find a Wi-Fi signal. So there he was, walking through a Muzak-filled shopping mall, where the Paradise school district had converted a former LensCrafters into a temporary school, wedged between a JCPenney and a toy store.
“This is the most stressful environment I’ve ever been in,” says Gabe, over the buzz of Spanish and algebra lessons nearby. “There’s nowhere I can get fully comfortable, and I’ve got so much work to do.”
The 2018 fire season has been the most devastating and the most deadly in California history. Across the state, more than 8,000 fires have burned close to 2 million acres. The fires have killed at least 103 people, including six firefighters. Scientists say California’s wildfires are getting more severe because of climate change, which has made the state both hotter and drier, and thus extremely vulnerable to fire.
Gabe Price was having another rough day. He had had many of them since escaping the deadliest wildfire in California’s history. The 17-year-old had woken up beside his father on a sagging air mattress at his grandparents’ house. Things felt crammed with four extra people and a dog. Stress filled the cramped rooms like smoke. And it seemed like they were always on the verge of flaring into another argument.
Home—or what he had until recently known as home—is a pile of ashes. Paradise High School, where he’s a senior, is taped off in an evacuation zone. Lessons are now all online, and Gabe desperately needed to find a Wi-Fi signal. So there he was, walking through a Muzak-filled shopping mall. In it, the Paradise school district had converted a former LensCrafters into a temporary school wedged between a JCPenney and a toy store.
“This is the most stressful environment I’ve ever been in,” says Gabe, over the buzz of Spanish and algebra lessons nearby. “There’s nowhere I can get fully comfortable, and I’ve got so much work to do.”
The 2018 fire season has been the most devastating and the most deadly in California history. Across the state, more than 8,000 fires have burned close to 2 million acres. The fires have killed at least 103 people, including six firefighters. Scientists say California’s wildfires are getting more severe because of climate change. The climate shifts have made the state both hotter and drier, and thus more vulnerable to fire.