'Now there is nothing for us': Towns vanish when survivors can't return

It's been five years since a sudden shift in the wind brought the North Complex fire roaring up a remote canyon into the pines of Berry Creek, where it incinerated almost all of the more than 1,500 houses in the area and killed 16 people.

- JESSICA GARRISON, LIAM DILLON, BEN POSTON AND DOUG SMITH

TEANEA BARTLEY feels the uneven drywall installed by a young contractor. She plans to put a large hutch in front of the spot.

But to many of the hundreds of people who remain in the mountain hamlet in Butte County, the blaze that burned through their homes and their lives often feels as if it might have happened five weeks ago instead of five years.

A Times analysis has found that only about 5% of the homes that were burned have been rebuilt, the lowest percentage of major fires in the state over the last eight years by a gigantic margin.

Hundreds of residents left, never to return. Some concluded it was foolhardy to even consider rebuilding in such a fire-prone place. But hundreds more stayed and without homes, people have been camping out year after year amid a fire-denuded landscape in mobile homes and lean-tos.

About 80% of the children at Berry Creek School still bed down each night in an RV or mobile home, according to Patsy Oxford, the former school superintendent. They wake up each morning to reminders of apocalypse: blackened stumps and ghostly bare branches where a tree canopy used to be, and bald rocks and makeshift shelters where homes used to stand.

The situation is in stark contrast to the rebuilding efforts in more suburban communities, like Santa Rosa and Redding, where construction was buzzing along two years after the flames.

The era of mega-fires is causing a little-noticed climate migration that is reshaping life for thousands of people in California's backwoods, pushing small, self-reliant mountain communities to the brink of extinction.