LAHAINA >> Officials with the town of Paradise, Calif. — which before Lahaina suffered America’s previous deadliest wildfire in more than a century — have reached out to Gov. Josh Green and Maui County officials to share their experiences as a potential road map of what could lie ahead for Lahaina.

The two communities have much in common: Both are home to working-class families that saw their homes destroyed by fast- moving wildfires.

“There were similarities in the nature of the fires that were extremely fast-moving, and there were issues with notification,” said Colette Curtis, recovery and economic development director for the Town of Paradise, who served as the town’s public information officer in the aftermath of the fire and played other roles, including as a survivor whose home was spared while 11,000 others were destroyed.

The Camp Fire killed 85 people on Nov. 8, 2018, and the rebuilding process continues as the fifth anniversary of the fire approaches. So far, the Aug. 8 Lahaina fire has killed 115 people while more than 300 others remain unaccounted for in the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history in more than a century.

Both communities also share similar concerns in the aftermath of their fires about how to best educate displaced students, with both Lahaina and Paradise sending hundreds of students initially to different schools. And like Lahaina, anonymous conspiracies emerged immediately in Paradise that discouraged survivors and property owners from engaging with the unspecified “government” — or risk losing what’s left of their properties, Curtis said.

Paradise comprises generally conservative-leaning, rural residents who question the role of government and, “Yes, there are so many conspiracy theories about the Camp Fire and now about the Maui fire. It’s sad, and it confuses people and keeps them from getting help. I’ve heard many times that the Camp Fire was a government conspiracy using big lasers to basically incinerate houses to get all the poor people out. Obviously, none of that could possibly be true because most of the people moving in are returning residents.”

Curtis knows firsthand the range of emotions that Lahaina survivors are likely to experience in the years ahead as they struggle to figure out what comes next, including whether to relocate or rebuild sometime in the future.

All five Butte County council members and 95% of government employees lost their homes, while others like Curtis inexplicably were spared.

“I felt a lot of guilt,” she said.

Like Hawaii, Paradise officials initially faced “really some frightening times when we thought we had thousands of dead.”

But once they reported the names of the unaccounted for in the local newspaper, people came forward to say that they were OK, along with friends and family, reducing the updated number of missing to a dozen.

Over the months that followed, Curtis said, “Everyone dealt with peaks and valleys” of emotions, and “mental health support remains an issue.”

“There’s devastation, anger, sadness, survivor’s guilt,” she said. “Then it’s, ‘We’re going to come back,’ There’s this community drive and a lot of optimism that lasts a while. But then, at the one-year anniversary, there is this sense that ‘This is taking forever. I don’t want to do this anymore. My adrenaline can’t sustain me anymore.’ So there continues to be a big need for mental health services. A lot of people left for Idaho, Wyoming, Tennessee, Kentucky, looking for a place like Paradise because they didn’t want to rebuild or couldn’t afford to rebuild. Other people left and came back.”

Pacific Resource Partnership, the political arm of the Hawaii Carpenters’ Union, helped connect Hawaii and Maui County officials to officials in Paradise.

In a statement to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, PRP wrote, “Pacific Resource Partnership is focused on providing good information to Gov. Green and Mayor Bissen as the rebuilding of Lahaina moves forward. There is an urgent need to prevent displaced Lahaina residents from moving to the mainland, so it’s critical for the West Maui community to know what’s possible when it comes to building new homes in the area. PRP and the carpenters union are ready to meet this need once West Maui residents, in consultation with the governor and the mayor, decide on a path forward.”

Green, U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda and U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono all told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser separately last week that they appreciate any input from the experience that the town of Paradise can share. Tokuda and Hirono also said they have been contacted by their California congressional counterparts about what to expect, based on the Camp Fire — “especially listening to the community,” Hirono said. “Consultation with the community, that’s really important.”

At a Lahaina “help fair” Saturday organized by Tokuda, fire survivor Gary Gless said he appreciated any guidance about what to expect from the experience in Paradise.

“I’m glad they’re willing to help,” Gless said. “For people who truly lost everything, any help from them is truly a blessing.”

Among the experiences in Paradise, Curtis said:

>> Like Hawaii officials, Paradise vowed to include survivors’ input for every step of the recovery process. There were lots of community meetings involving hundreds of participants, surveys and online input.

>> Paradise faced regulations from California’s building code, along with additional building regulations being in a wildfire zone. But a third level of divisive building standards was proposed in the aftermath of the Camp Fire.

The fire showed that homes with garages did better because garaged vehicles tended not to explode while others in carports did.

“They became a bomb, basically,” Curtis said. “But building garages is expensive and was rejected.”

A low-cost change also was rejected but later embraced. The new rules now require a “noncombustible zone of five feet all around a residence, including no brush or trees or plants or furniture, including a fence.”

“That was not desired at first because people wanted their homes to look a certain way, but that changed,” Curtis said.

>> Before the fire, Paradise was home to workers who commuted about a 20-minute drive away to Chico and about a 25-minute commute to Oroville. Rather than undergo the years-long process to rebuild in Paradise, many residents simply relocated closer to work and transferred their children to schools in Chico or Oroville.

>> Like Lahaina, Paradise was home “to your restaurant workers, hotel workers. All of them lived in Paradise,” Curtis said. “In another similarity, many homes were passed down generationally from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. ‘It was grandma’s house, but we didn’t need insurance because there was no mortgage and we might not be able to prove we own it since we’re not on the mortgage.’”

>> Paradise faced a housing shortage for cleanup and rebuilding efforts and had to hire workers from as far away as the Bay Area, forcing crews to commute over three hours a day, one way.

“We really didn’t have properties set up for workforce housing as displaced residents found other housing,” Curtis said. “A lot of local contractors were overwhelmed. The constraint is not in the demand. It’s the supply.”

>> Like Lahaina, there were initial concerns that so-called predatory buyers would take advantage of economically distressed survivors by buying up their land for pennies on the dollar and “turning the community into something the community doesn’t want,” Curtis said. “Instead, 90% of building involves returning residents.”

Utility owner Pacific Gas & Electric in 2020 pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter and admitted that its equipment caused the Camp Fire before filing for bankruptcy protection.

Some property owners’ attorneys generally advised their clients to hold off selling until class-action lawsuits against PG&E were resolved because proceeds from land sales could reduce the size of their damage settlements, keeping real estate prices relatively stable with reduced lots for sale.

Some owners in Paradise did sell, but at close to pre-fire rates because of reduced inventory, Curtis said. Some evacuees also chose to sell their lots in order to buy new homes that emerged from the fire, allowing them to return to Paradise faster instead of undergoing the rebuilding process. Others bought adjacent properties from their neighbors to rebuild on larger plots of land or to include accessory dwelling units, she said.

Most survivors rebuilt similar-sized homes, others smaller and a few bigger. But there have been no large-scale purchases that have transformed the community into something bigger and different.

Curtis acknowledged that the pressure to sell in Lahaina could be greater because of its pre-fire reputation as a tourist destination, unlike Paradise.

>> Maui and state officials should get specifics on what the Federal Emergency Management Agency will and will not cover before seeking reimbursement later for costly cleanup of contaminated soil and before rebuilding gets underway.

Curtis wants survivors of the Lahaina fire and Hawaii officials to brace themselves that Lahaina will undergo years of debate and discussion, long ahead of what a reborn Lahaina will look like.

“The scale of this recovery is going to be decades long,” she said. “Everything’s going to be a top priority.”