Hundreds of Spokane families have lost their homes to the wildfires that began on that wind-whipped Saturday, the first of August. Jennifer Gray Thompson can empathize. She lost her northern California home to wildfire in 2017. It inspired her to create an organization called After the Fire USA. She spoke with SPR's Doug Nadvornick.
This interview lightly edited for length and clarity.
Jennifer Gray Thompson: It was a terrible experience. Physically, it was terrifying and it was very stressful emotionally.
But on a human being level, it was absolutely the most beautiful human experience because we all showed up for each other and we did a really good job and I know to this day that if anything happens that I know I can count on my community. I think that every time I've walked into a new mega fire community, I've seen the exact same behavior. It's what Rebecca Solnit calls a paradise built in hell. She wrote a great book about this disaster. It brings out the best in people, most people, obviously not all, and I have been dedicated to sort of fostering and honoring that human connection and the humanity that shows up during these disasters. It's become my life's work. I'm obsessed by it.
DN: Gray Thompson's organization is devoted to helping communities that endure megafires process the experience, heal and grow anew.
JGT: Our main function is to teach the leaders of these communities about disaster so that they can better serve and they're not trying to relearn everything over and over again. Building new systems and learning this brand new language of disaster is really tough. We make it easier on these communities so that they can have hopefully a smoother path on the way home. It's a very hard road to rebuild.
DN: When you heard on Saturday that the wildfires in Spokane had broken out, what was your visceral feeling?
JGT: You know, I watch these fires all over the country and I look at them with a side eye and then I'm waiting to see are they going to move into the status of a mega fire? They're going to have a lot of structural loss. How are they affecting the community? So we watch that.
In the moment that I saw it, we knew that we would be involved and that we would show up to help your community.
We're very experienced in all kinds of fires from island to frontier to rural. But urban conflagration, which is what happened here, is one of the things that we are actually best at. These fires are devastating. They have a very high percentage of return in about five to six years for full rebuild.
So we knew right away that we could be of service, but my really my first gut feeling was I'm just so sorry.
We would like to be out of a job. We would like for us not to be needed. We would like for people not to suffer in the ways that we have been suffering for a decade, but every time it revisits or visits on a new community, the first thing I think is, I'm just so sad for them and I get the shock and I get the devastation and we know we're going to be there to help them, but we can't give them back the day before the fire. So my first instinct was just a lot of empathy and compassion, but also a determination to show up for the people of Spokane.
I got a ton of texts over the last few days offering help from all the other megafire communities that we have helped, from Lahaina to Los Angeles to Santa Cruz to so many places that people want to show up.
The one thing I will say about all of the megafire communities and the leaders is we are all dedicated to paying our lessons forward. I never have a shortage of volunteers and really excellent ethical compassionate leaders who want to show up for newly fire-affected communities and I'm very proud of that. That's part of our model is that we bring experienced megafire community leaders to new fires so that they can start to build a relationship and because they now enter it into the network.
We actually call this the worst club with the best people so Spokane will not walk alone. I can promise you that.
DN: So how do you get involved with the community? Are you invited in? How does that process work?
JGT: You know, it really depends on the community. One of the things I'm also proud of is that we know how to read the room. We watch and we listen and then we see who contacts us. We do make sure that we put things out on social media so people know that we exist. We're really trying to be very gentle, though, about how we enter. We do not want to enter and just layer ourselves over a community that isn't ready for us and can't hear what we have to say yet.
The first whole year is about fire brain. It's incredibly hard to take in all the offers of help and assistance, so we are very strategic in how we do it. It just depends.
We start to get outreach from anybody from like a senator's office. That's pretty normal. Or somebody who's like a city manager or a community leader or a foundation leader. It really is through a variety of places. They find out about us and they start to engage and then we meet them where they're at.
We start to have virtual meetings, phone calls, whatever it is that they need. We pull all the demographics so that we understand the community that we're dealing with and we start learning the community in front of us.
Now, in certain cases like Maui, we waited four months to walk in because they very much didn't want a lot of people there and there really wasn't enough housing and hotel rooms for everybody. So we made sure that we were mindful of that. We went in four months later.
But we had already established relationships virtually in the case of Los Angeles. Our phone started ringing within about seven hours and our emails and phone calls did not stop. It was 12 to 14 hours a day for several weeks and we were on the ground in three weeks.
Other places, like the Dixie Fire in Plumas County (California), I was called on August 8. Greenville burned down on August 4 and one of the community leaders there said, we need you, and I said, I'm really useful for your long-term recovery because we stay with these communities for years, right? We remain a source of resources and information and coaching until they get all the way home. Unfortunately, we have like 14 communities still in that process. So it really depends.
In the case of the Dixie Fire, though, I said fine. I will come now because he said what we need you to bring is hope. So I went and I met with them while the fires were still burning. That fire was one million acres and we talked about it. We established relationships that we have to this day.
So it depends on how they want us to come in, but it's very important to us that people don't feel like we are imposing ourselves on them. We have been part of a mega fire community. We have felt the ick and I will never give that to a community. They have to feel like we are coming in gentle and respectful of what they just went through and that we are not like wizened saviors. We will not be heroes or saviors and there's nobody who travels with me who has that attitude.
We understand that this is really shocking and really hard what happened. If you lost your home or love, you haven't had death, but you lost your home, you're obviously having the most amount of loss, but the entire community feels the shock waves of it.
So when we come in, we want to make sure that we're serving that community in the way that they need to be served.
DN: So can I assume then from what you said that you have been contacted by someone in Spokane and that you've agreed to have some sort of relationship here once all the hoo-ha gets gets down to a dull roar?
JGT: Yeah, you're definitely still in the thick of it. You don't have enough containment. We don't know what the full measure of the damage will be.
We do know that your governor is preparing a federal declaration beyond the emergency management piece of it. We expect that you will get that so we will wait.
We've been contacted by several people, not a foundation or fund. They are just a person who lost their home.
What we do is we just sort of keep those virtual connections, but we also are mindful right now that these people are in the thick of it. So we say we're here. Thank you for contacting us. Here's what we do. When you're ready, you let us know for further contact. So in this case, that's how it's going for Spokane.
DN: When someone invites you to Spokane or any community, what are the first things that you start to teach a community?
JGT: The first thing we want them to know is they will get through it.
I look at the community in front of me and then I design a delegation of people who've been through it. I try to do a variety from the public sector, city managers or county directors, public works that kind of thing, emergency management. I have the best roster in the nation on experienced community leaders.
So what I do is that I will bring a delegation of about 8 to 11 people. We will come and we will listen and we want to hear what's the love language of the community? What do they care about the most? What are they most sad about losing and that informs our response a lot. I know that sounds a little like woo-woo, but it is actually what people need at the first touch of it. They need to know what happens next and we explain things like debris removal.
I have an insurance expert on my team and people have, you know, how many renters do you have? Looks like you have about 35, 33 to 35 percent renters from the zip codes that are affected.
How do you deal with you know, mobile home parks? I think you have a mobile home park that was also burned.
How do we even navigate this disaster that we have all of those experts? We bring them and then we sit in community and they can ask us anything and we will answer them.
The most important thing we do is establish hope and relationships so that people know that they're not alone and that we do have the expertise to back the community and anything they may need then, we start to deliver webinars, whatever they're asking for.
One of the things that's really hard about disaster is as soon as you get one phase of it down, you've moved on to the next phase. That's really can be tough. It's a little bit like new parenthood where you're like, oh, I finally understand how to take care of this baby and then the baby changes its entire schedule. It's not that different.
The language too. There's a ton of acronyms and there are processes to navigate that are rather opaque. Navigating individual assistance with FEMA is tough. SBA comes in and you're like, oh, I thought they were just for businesses and it turns out that they do a lot of work with individual individuals who need low-interest loans, but they also have to qualify for those loans and so there are just a lot of surprises and not always good ones around the corner.
We're also dealing with a very different federal landscape for disaster than we've had previously. This has been a huge challenge in the Los Angeles recovery and so we want to start to talk to the local leaders from the public sector about what to expect and it doesn't mean we have all of the answers, but we definitely walk alongside of them. They always have somebody to call and pick up is a ton of peer-to-peer support.
DN: I think you made an allusion to this earlier, but how long do you stay with a project like this? Say you establish a relationship with the community. How long do you keep working with them?
JGT: Well, we still have a relationship with Paradise and they are almost eight years in my community. It will be nine years in October. We still respond to requests when it's needed here. We're pretty much past all of that. But sometimes we get new disasters like in Lake and Mendocino for more fires. We will stay with them until they are all the way home.
The other thing is that, in our model, we bring people who are brand new to it. Maybe they have a year, year and a half under their belt of disaster leadership and then all the way to, you know, the people like from my fires nine years ago because you want that entire span of understanding and we don't want people who are again like wizened in any way shape or form.
You have to remember it has to be fresh what it feels like and what the challenges are because it's easy to forget. It's kind of like a fog of war.
And so I've already had Lahaina or Maui County leaders reach out and offer their assistance to Spokane. People like to come in with us because we are very organized.
But they also they like the respect with which we enter a community. So we stay as long as they need us. Sometimes it's a light touch, but we never actually go away. They can call us at any time.
I was just up in Oregon in Santiam Canyon and I got to see the closeout of their rural recovery from the 2020 Labor Day fires and it was great to actually see that, but I'm still in communication with those leaders. One of them went to D.C. with me to work on a federal bill recently. She's going to go again in October. Another woman is really good at disaster case management and so I'm flying her to Los Angeles to make sure that she can sit down with their community leaders, their disaster case managers. That's really one of the hardest jobs in all of this work.
So I'm looking for people who I think are really excellent ethical leaders and approach this work with humility and can be very respectful of the leaders in front of them in new communities.
I'm always bringing those people back and then once a year we gather leaders together in Sonoma for a three-day summit where we share best practices, innovations, new ideas. But we also make sure we take really good care of them because they've just been through a lot, whether it was 18 months ago or a few weeks ago or nine years ago. We want to make sure that we are building a community.