Life After Paradise: One Camp Fire Survivor’s Long Road to a New Home

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deadly wildfire, flooding and a seemingly endless malaise. Jennifer Porter has found her way through it all.

Six years ago this month, Porter survived the deadly Camp Fire in Paradise, California, but her home, and thousands of others, were turned to ashes.

While Porter was lucky enough to drive through the flames that day, she was immediately set on a new, harrowing path: creating a new life, finding a new job and building a new community, all while recovering from trauma.

We checked in with Porter in various stages of her journey to rebuild her life to hear about all the bumps in the road and how she navigated them.

Life before the fire

Just before the Paradise fire started on Nov. 8, 2018, Porter’s life had hit a sweet spot. She was an emergency department nurse at the local hospital and was living in her “dream home.” Her bedroom was “huge,” and her parents and best friend would often visit to enjoy her pool and hot tub.

“We had really good times there,” Porter remembers.

She had strong ties in Paradise. When she first got there in 2006, she was a core member at a local Seventh-Day Adventist Church, where she helped coordinate worship services. That’s where she met her ex-husband.

“I would sing, and he played violin,” she said.

But Porter said she struggled with a group-think mentality at the church. She felt forced into getting married and having a perfect wedding. That marriage didn’t last, and by the time the fire broke out in 2018, she was divorced. The house she lived in was part of a new life she carved out for herself.

Driving through the flames

That November day, Porter had just come home from working an overnight shift at the hospital. She decided to sleep on the couch and charge her phone because there were warnings of high winds and a possible power outage.

“My mom called me,” Porter remembers. “She was like, ‘Jenny, you need to pack up your cats, grab… important stuff and get the hell out, now.’”

Porter didn’t realize how bad it was until she got in her car. Fire crews had stopped traffic on her road to let residents closer to the fire out first. Ash started to fall on them. Then, the wildfire jumped a major thoroughfare and ignited a house on their street. The house exploded — possibly from a propane tank — and sent embers over their cars.

“That’s when it headed for my house,” Porter remembers. “I watched it go straight for my house, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, there goes my home.’”

But at this point, the roads were still blocked. Porter and other people in their cars started screaming to let them go. When Porter finally was able to start driving, she looked in her rearview mirror and saw that the people behind her were burning up in their car.

“At the time, I couldn’t process it or something,” Porter said about seeing the horrific tragedy.

She kept driving and called her mom to say goodbye.

“I was screaming: ‘I love you guys. I’m so sorry. I tried. I tried really hard…but I’m not going to make it.’”

But her mom told her she had to get out, and Porter kept driving through smoke and flames. It was pitch black outside the car, so she had to drive with her bumper right up against the car in front of her to guide her way out. People were jumping out of their vehicles with their children and pets in their arms. Finally, Porter reached a parking lot 20 miles away where her family was waiting for her.

“My little brother saw me, and he came running and gave me a big hug,” Porter remembers. “It was probably one of the best moments of my life.”

Just after the fire

Porter and her parents were close before the fire, but after, they were inseparable. Her parents and her little brother had also lost their homes in the fire, and she was determined to stay with them.

Just a few weeks after the fire in 2018, the town of Oroville — about 30 minutes south of Paradise — turned a local community center into a makeshift free grocery store. There, evacuees — still sleeping on couches or in their neighbors’ garages — could fill shopping carts with food.

That’s where I first met Porter. She had been washing up in store bathrooms and wearing donated clothes since the fire.

“It’s been really hard for us to find a place,” she explained to me about trying to find a temporary home for her adult family members and all their pets.

Porter had slept wherever she could since the fire. First, it was in her car, with five cats, in a Kmart parking lot. Then her aunt loaned her a trailer, where Porter — 35 years old at the time — slept in the same bed as her parents, packed in with the nine cats and a dog they shared.

Then, an animal shelter in Grass Valley put the whole family — and their animals — up. That’s where she was sleeping when I met her. It wasn’t a huge improvement, but she was grateful for it.

“It’s not ideal because there’s so many of us,” she said. “We don’t have a kitchen or anything. We just have a room and a bathroom.”

Porter was surprisingly calm and clear-headed for someone in the thick of a disaster. But at the same time, strong emotions would sometimes erupt out of her. Dead bodies were still being identified among the ashes, and she knew some of them from her church. She had intense survivor’s guilt.

“God, I just wish so bad we had time [to save them],” she said as she fought back tears. “We just didn’t, and if I didn’t leave a minute earlier, I would have burned too.”

Six months later

To this day, the Camp Fire in Paradise is still the most deadly in our state’s recent history. It also destroyed more buildings than any other California wildfire. And at least 30,000 people in and around Paradise lost their homes overnight.

Six months later, in the spring of 2019, Porter had learned through conversations with her homeowner’s insurance company and mortgage lender that she was “grossly underinsured” on her home in Paradise. She was told that she would have had to pay to keep her property, so she let the mortgage company auction off her plot of land.

She had received some insurance money for lost belongings and had bought a used trailer. Her parents had a trailer, too, so they had all moved to an RV community right on the Sacramento River in Los Molinos, a half-hour north of Chico.

Without knowing where she would be permanently, she said, it was hard to look for a job. In the meantime, living in an RV park on a riverbed presented a new problem: flooding. After one rain storm that spring, water had risen to the third step of her trailer.

“When my mom and I wanted to get to each other’s trailers, we would be walking through a lake. It was insane,” Porter laughed about it later. “It was just like, ‘What’s next, God? What else do you have for me?’”

Amidst the catastrophes, Porter’s family formed even tighter bonds during this time. Her two aunts were there too, and when I visited them one hot spring evening, they were all barbecuing. Her mom, Linda, sat at a picnic bench, scrolling through real estate listings on her phone, looking for places where they could all live together.

Porter was laser-focused on finding a new home with her family and getting her career back on track.

“It’s like starting over a whole new life,” she said, and “figuring out who I am now. Because who I was is gone.”

Family strife

Later that summer of 2019, Porter and her parents found a house in Red Bluff, farther up the Sacramento River. She got a job as an ER nurse again — this time, at a hospital in Redding.

But Porter found that kind of nursing harder than before. She was helping people in the worst moments of their lives while she herself was struggling with PTSD and survivor’s guilt.

“If you’re an ER nurse, you have to put that away because you have to be present for the person that you’re dealing with,” she said. “I just was unable to do that.”

Porter was getting help from a psychiatrist. But she said the medications she got during that time actually started her on a new bad road. At one point, she was on five different anxiety and depression meds, and she started experimenting with them.

“If you say an antidepressant… or an anti-anxiety med, I’ve probably been on it,” she said.

She said she started mixing medications and taking too much of them.

“My parents were trying to intervene with me and tell me that I needed to back off the medications,” she said.

She and her parents were fighting constantly. Porter was having trouble getting out of bed, and her parents were doing all her household duties, including taking care of their large menagerie of pets. After only a year of living together, Porter and her parents decided they couldn’t do it anymore. Porter moved out, stopped nursing and was back in limbo, picking up waitressing shifts.

“I knew I needed something light. And my whole life before I was a nurse was being a waitress.”

For a few years after the fire, Porter was still finding herself.

Wildfires in 2024

When wildfires started raging this past summer, I wondered about Porter. People in Butte County were being evacuated again because of the Park Fire, which burned more than 400,000 acres.

I connected with Porter over Zoom and found she was still the look-on-the-bright side person I first met six years ago.

She had moved to Portola, a town north of Lake Tahoe, near the Nevada border. She still had four of the five cats she escaped Paradise with. She had finally received a victim compensation check from PG&E. And she was almost completely off the medications she started taking after the fire. She was back to nursing, but this time, taking care of the elderly.

“It’s a huge change,” she said. “I needed something a little more lightweight, and geriatrics was a good way to get back into it easily.”

Porter was living alone now, and she had reconciled with her parents, who had moved nearby to be with her. The Park Fire wasn’t threatening them, but other smaller fires in the mountains were. Porter got a warning that she might have to evacuate, and her parents actually did —they came and stayed with her for a couple of weeks.

She was pretty calm about it all when I talked to her. But when the orange glow came back in the sky, she said she did lose it for a minute.

“My mom says all the time, ‘I don’t know why we moved back into the trees,’” Porter said. “Because it’s always in the back of your mind, is there a fire risk?”

Moving to Nevada

For some time now, Porter’s been cooking up a plan to get out of California fire country for good. She used some of her insurance money to buy land in Carson City, Nevada. There’s a trailer home on it now, but it’s in bad shape. So, using some money she got from PG&E, she’s tearing it down and putting a new manufactured home on the land.

When I met her in Carson City in October 2024, I also saw a new development in her life: her future husband, Johnny.

As they’re building their home, he’s living among the plywood and moving boxes, and Porter visits on weekends.

“We love four-wheeling, being up in the mountains… We take my Jeep up and go camping,” she said about spending time with her fiancé.

Her new neighborhood in Nevada’s capital suburbs isn’t much like Paradise. There aren’t many trees near her house, and it’s so flat you can see the horizon over miles of farmland. She couldn’t be more excited to move into a new permanent home.

“To be able to set myself back up in a position where I can be a homeowner again and start over has been everything to me,” Porter said.

She’s happier now without the medications. She’s studying for another nursing degree, and, at least for a while, she plans to commute to her nursing job in California, where the wages are much higher.

She said she doesn’t think she’ll miss California or Paradise — too many triggers.

The trauma never really goes away, she said, and it took her many years to come to terms with that. But she said prayer — for herself and others — has helped her heal.

“You have to decide that you’re not going to let that traumatic event control who you’re going to become anymore,” she said.

Realizing that she survived and finding a purpose in that survival, she said, has helped her move to a better place.

Special thanks to Paul Conley and to Capital Public Radio in Sacramento, where Pauline first covered the aftermath of the Paradise fire.