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View Winners → Environment Sep 17, 2020
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A truck was destroyed along a road in a Thursday evening flare-up of the Bear Fire in Oroville, Calif. Linda Oslin and her husband lost everything when the Camp Fire raced into their neighborhood in Paradise, Calif., in the fall of 2018. She’s in her 70s, he’s in his 80s — and they decided they didn’t have it in them to try and rebuild. That could take years . So they found a place for sale out of the woods and farther down the mountain near Oroville, Calif., where they’ve started to rebuild their lives. Except for one thing. They’ve since had to evacuate from three more wildfires, including this past week when the Bear Fire exploded near the town, burning an untold number of structures and claiming at least ten lives. “And every incident I organize a little more,” Oslin says. When she heard reports that the Bear Fire was burning into the village of Berry Creek, they didn’t wait for the official evacuation call. They left, knowing that some of their neighbors died in 2018 because they couldn’t get out of Paradise. “Knowing how evacuation traffic can go, we were stuck in it in the Camp Fire, […]