Here in the Western U.S., smoke season has become a summer ritual. It’s never enjoyable and never routine, but far too common to brush off: Days too choked with smoke to go outdoors, weeks of scratchy throats and headaches, constant low-level anxiety about fire and health impacts.

But so far the heavy smoke has mostly clung to the Western half of the country.

So it’s strange to see it take hold in New York City: That familiar smoky orange haze hanging over skyscrapers, enveloping the Statue of Liberty, smogging up the streets. Sorry to say this, Northeasterners, but welcome to our reality. Our sympathies. It’s stressful and suffocating and disorienting. We get it.

But for better or for worse, though, we’ve developed some coping strategies that some might find useful. So from your friends out West, here are some tips on surviving smoke season:

The first time Oakland was fully socked in with smoke a few years ago — the sun didn’t come out for a day or two, which was really eerie and frightening — I was shocked that some people just tried to keep on with their workdays. It helped me a lot to pull back and take time for what was really going on: grief. THIS IS NOT NORMAL, and trying to go on with my regular day made it feel even worse. I ended up strapping on an N-95 mask and going for a really short walk to take in how totally scary and weird it was in my neighborhood. That was a physical health risk, to be sure, but it helped my mental health to fully process what was going on. And I ran into other neighbors who were walking their dogs or doing the same thing I was. Connecting over the scariness of it all helped, too.

—Sarah Trent, editorial intern

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“All is changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”

If you know someone with COPD, asthma or similar diseases — in my case, a vulnerable family member — try to find ways to help them so they don’t have to leave their house. Fetch groceries, pet food, mail, etc., if you can, and make sure that they have necessary prescriptions, especially inhalers, and that their cooling system is working as well as possible — which is not easy for poor folks living in challenging conditions, I know. Like Sarah, I sometimes masked up (thank you, Dr. Fauci!) to go for walks outside, because walking is necessary to me, and besides, if I stayed inside too long, the climate grief and depression overwhelmed me — but I certainly avoided any outdoor activities that might require heavy breathing. You never really get used to it — or even accept that it’s actually happening to a place you love so dearly. It was strange, but at times the light was eerily magical; sometimes I thought of Yeats: “All is changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”

 —Diane Sylvain, copy editor

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A home air filter is about the same size as a box fan. You can duct-tape one to the back/intake side of the fan and turn the fan on. It’s an inexpensive way to filter particles out of the air indoors.

— Toastie Oaster, staff writer

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The light is different, the air can feel strange, time passes differently. You’re not going crazy; it is really disorienting. I found it helpful to remind myself this was just going to be weird and find ways to ground myself. For example, cold showers help with the vaguely sooty, sweaty feeling. Also: That headache? Yes, it probably IS because of smoke.

Also: Use your COVID toolkit. Maybe you got yourself an air purifier or rigged up a makeshift one. Put that back in action! Did you get a humidifier to help with COVID symptoms? That may help ease your throat scratchiness. If you have to go outside, your N95 mask will help protect you, although it isn’t going to block everything.

 —Kate Schimel, news and investigations editor

“Fire season” is a household phrase here, as depressing as that is. But I noticed that like the grinding doldrums of the pandemic, we slowly found ways to process the nightmare through humor and memes — all small acts of defiance against something larger than ourselves and largely out of our control. So share that selfie with the hellish sunset! Become Vin Diesel in The Chronicles of Riddick! For once, we all get to be in on the same pitch-black joke. And If you’re a nerd like me, you might also find that mapping the inferno provides a small measure of calm: it’s nice to know thy enemy, so to speak. Here’s a NASA tool where you can put a face to that flaming monster with satellite imagery. 

—Samuel Shaw, editorial intern

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If you have young kids, find out where the indoor tumbling classes are to keep them occupied. And I think it helps to invest in a good map app that can show you smoke paths, like OpenSummit.

 —Michael Schrantz, marketing communications manager

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I boil rosemary. Somebody told me it purifies the air by binding to smoke particles. I have no idea if this is actually true, but the added humidity and pleasant smell make me feel better when my asthma acts up during smoke events.

There’s value in rituals of healing, something as simple as sipping tea or massaging oil onto a strained muscle. Even if it turns out whatever the tea was made of, or whatever was infused in the oil, doesn’t have any extra health benefit, the act of noticing an ill and paying attention to it does. These things allow me to pause, admit there is a problem, and feel for a moment that I have some agency over a solution.

 —Luna Anna Archey, associate visuals editor

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When it looks, feels and smells like the world is ending, don’t expect you’ll be at peak physical and mental performance.

Wildfire smoke will wreck more than your lungs. Ash can also damage vehicles and other items outdoors if you try to wash it off with water: The particulate wood ash reacts to form a weak lye solution that can damage your paint. Keep vehicles indoors, or cover them if you can. If not, try to brush the ash off rather than rinsing it. In a pinch, putting a wet bandanna over your nose and mouth can help with the worst effects of smoke.

Also, it’s normal for orange skies and the eerie, blood-red sun to affect your mood and mental health. Symptoms of smoke exposure, like shortness of breath and a vague, general feeling of unwellness, mirror and can exacerbate anxiety symptoms. When it looks, feels and smells like the world is ending, don’t expect you’ll be at peak physical and mental performance.

 —Rachel Alexander, managing editor at Salem Reporter

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Being surrounded by wildfire smoke soup often makes me feel powerless and hopeless. It’s hard to feel safe when systemic forces and global problems — climate change, forest management — seep across borders and make your lungs, throat, eyes and head hurt. But I’d encourage people experiencing wildfire smoke for the first time to protect themselves, and then push for change that lasts after the smoke dissipates and protects the most vulnerable. Disasters can be pivotal moments, and action is an antidote to despair. Demand that wildfire fighters, who are on the frontlines of these blazes, receive adequate compensation and health care. Demand that farmworkers, who harvest food when the rest of us hole up inside, receive adequate protections from smoke (and heat!). Demand that people living without shelter have access to clean indoor air. Don’t just buy an air filter and go back to normal.

—Kylie Mohr, editorial fellow

Being an avid walker and hiker is difficult during wildfire smoke events. Some days it’s simply not feasible or advisable to exercise out of doors (purple and red days!). But other days, especially for those who don’t have health issues that make them particularly vulnerable to marginal air quality, it can be done. I watch the air quality index (AQI) throughout the day and choose my walking/hiking time based on air-quality reports. I also watch different air-monitoring stations throughout my area, and choose my walking/hiking locations based on AQI, which can be variable even locally. Sometimes I will take a walk wearing a N95 mask. I don’t do more strenuous walking or hiking masked, though. On days when it’s better to stay inside, I use a stationary bicycle to get my cardio fix. During the Thomas Fire of 2017-2018 (which burned for over a month), air quality was so bad for such a prolonged time that I and many others in our area who had the ability to do so simply packed up and left home.

—Jennifer Sahn, editor in chief

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I grew up in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. The summer after college, I went to Montana for eight weeks of field ecology classes (maybe I was done with college, but college wasn’t quite done with me). On the last day of the program, I woke to the hazy hot air and lurid neon-red sun that now, after more than 15 years of living in the West, I’m very familiar with. That day felt like the Apocalypse or the End Times — something biblical, something entirely beyond my previous understanding of what the world could even be. What I’ve learned since then is that the smoky days will always be hard and scary, but they do pass. One day it will rain, one day I’ll be able to see the distant hills from my back deck, one day the morning sun will be as yellow as the roses blooming in my neighbor’s yard.

—Emily Benson, senior editor-north

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

Last year, Fairmead received a grant to help plan for farmland retirement in order to recharge groundwater under California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA. But the community’s vision for the future is bigger than that: The locals also want to see improved air quality, a community center and reliable domestic wells.

The West is not just facing an energy transition, it is also at the beginning of a major transition in land and water use. In California’s Central Valley, groundwater regulations will require retiring between 500,000 and 1 million acres by 2040. (Retirement, or “fallowing,” refers to taking lands out of agricultural production.) The planning and decision-making now underway across more than 260 regional Groundwater Sustainability Agencies will determine how SGMA plays out across different groundwater basins: whether landowners will be compensated for retired lands, what the lands will become and who will manage them, and how counties will replace the revenues they currently collect from agricultural lands and use to help provide services to residents in need.

“The side effects of agriculture have a huge impact on the environment and on everyone.”

But while groundwater sustainability is SGMA’s focus, it’s not the only thing on Central Valley residents’ minds: They also need jobs, as well as clean air and water. Many Central Valley towns have diverse demographics; Fairmead, for example, is over 70% Latino — mostly immigrant and predominately Spanish-speaking — but there are also Black, Asian, Indigenous, mixed-race and white individuals. The median household income is less than half of the state’s average, and the residents are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards.

“The side effects of agriculture have a huge impact on the environment and on everyone,” said Ángel Fernández-Bou, a climate scientist at the nonprofit science advocacy organization Union of Concerned Scientists, which is researching the Central Valley’s land-use transition. He and others spoke to High County News about how SGMA can help create a healthier and more sustainable post-agriculture Central Valley:

Improved air and water quality: Locals are in dire need of better air quality. “When they spray, they spray all kinds of pesticides,” said Nelson, who is also president of the organization Fairmead Community and Friends. “The Central Valley has a lot of problems with people with asthma and COPD because they grow so much stuff out here. The environment is bad to breathe, plus it’s super-hot.”

Around 200 million pounds of pesticides are used in California each year, and the geographical pattern of their application is one of environmental inequality: According to the Pesticide Action Network, majority-Latino counties see 906% more pesticide use than counties with fewer than 24% Latino residents. Fernández-Bou calculated that creating “buffer zones” by retiring the farmland in a one-mile radius around the Central Valley’s “disadvantaged communities” — a term used by the state of California for municipalities with median household incomes lower than 80% of the state’s — would decrease pesticide use by 12 million pounds, and also combat the health effects of pesticide drift.

Agricultural inputs also affect the water quality. When the nitrate from fertilizers leaches into aquifers, it can cause chronic health effects and conditions, such as blue baby syndrome. A long-term study by the Environmental Working Group found that 69 Central Valley water systems serving at least 1.5 million residents — the majority of them Latino — exceeded federal standards for nitrate. The impact is likely even higher, given the numerous domestic wells. Creating buffer zones would reduce nitrate leaching into aquifers by over 200 million pounds, per year, Fernández-Bou calculated.

The impact of land fallowing on dust is less clear. The Public Policy Institute of California has raised concerns about increased dust blowing off fallowed lands and affecting farmworkers and nearby communities. But Fernández-Bou took a more optimistic view, saying that dust is most often a problem when farmers till fallowed fields; left alone, he said, cover crops or weeds will grow roots that hold the soil in place.

Workforce transition: For many Central Valley residents, the biggest question concerns jobs, wondering how they’ll make a living once farmland is retired. Transitioning away from agriculture is “a hard pill to swallow,” said Eddie Ocampo, director of the organization Self-Help Enterprises. “Everyone is for economic diversity, but there’s going to be a gap, and those who are the most vulnerable are going to be the most affected.”

Under Fernández-Bou’s buffer-zone model, an estimated 25,682 agricultural jobs would be lost. Communities are only beginning to think about what will replace them. One option is renewable energy: California’s SB100 requires the state to be 100% renewable by 2045 — a timeline similar to SGMA’s land fallowing — and the Central Valley is being eyed for significant solar production. “We’re going to see long-term sustained demand for solar construction and maintenance jobs,” said Andrew Ayres of the Public Policy Institute of California. Community colleges in the Central Valley are working to develop training programs for these jobs. Another initiative plans to re-train farmworkers to install water recycling systems.

“Everyone is for economic diversity, but there’s going to be a gap, and those who are the most vulnerable are going to be the most affected.”

Access to drinking water: Like Fairmead, many of the Central Valley’s low-income rural communities lack urban water infrastructure and must rely on shallow domestic and municipals wells to meet their drinking water needs. Because SGMA prioritizes access to drinking water, many people believe it could improve the health of those wells. “Generally speaking, SGMA implementation is going to be good for rural groundwater wells,” said Ayres. Recharging groundwater, he said, “can buoy those community wells.”

Dialogue: The planning process itself, said Ocampo, has been beneficial for the Central Valley. Developing successful land-repurposing plans, he said, requires the participation of diverse interests — agribusiness, environmental justice organizations, land trusts and under-represented communities. “A lot of stakeholders realize that the more diversity of opinion there is, the more multi-beneficial and inclusive the outcome will be,” said Ocampo.

Planning for groundwater sustainability gives historically agricultural communities the chance to envision myriad new economies and land uses that will shape the future of the Central Valley. Habitat restoration, parks, regenerative agriculture, community centers and cooling centers are all on the table.

“I would say the possibilities are endless,” said Fernández-Bou. “But please don’t bring bad stuff to the valley.”

Caroline Tracey is the climate justice fellow at High Country News. Email her at caroline.tracey@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

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The Department of Health’s expanding climate health team, which also includes a scientist who studies insects as disease vectors and experts on water quality and climate justice, is part of a deepening understanding of how profoundly climate change affects human health. Recent studies paint a grim picture: In addition to increasing the severity and frequency of both extreme heat events and wildfires, climate change is creating disease hotspots while also making some infectious diseases worse. This realization is changing health experts’ training, including at Harvard Medical School, which recently added a climate curriculum to all four years of instruction.   

The Washington climate team members approach their work with the foundational understanding that climate exacerbates historic injustices. “Communities of color, children, older adults and pregnant people are all more sensitive to the impacts of climate change,” said Kelly Naismith, the agency’s newest climate epidemiologist. “They’re more vulnerable.” She plans to monitor emergency room data in close to real time to see how high temperatures drive diagnoses and patient numbers. “One thing we’ve learned in the past couple years, during heat waves, is that there’s a pretty big increase in ER visits,” she said.

“Communities of color, children, older adults and pregnant people are all more sensitive to the impacts of climate change.”

Michelle Fredrickson is quantifying the unequal distribution of climate impacts. She’s using LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, a type of laser scan, to determine how tree canopy, green space and asphalt coverage affect neighborhood temperatures during heat waves. Her work builds on research that has already shown how widespread those inequities are. A nationwide study published in 2020 found that areas subject to racist housing practices in the 1930s experience hotter temperatures today: Lower-income people and people of color live in areas with less greenery and more asphalt, which magnifies heat.

Washington epidemiologists are using existing data about air quality and heat-related deaths, things that are historically monitored by public health departments, for a new purpose: illuminating their connections to climate change. “When you start pulling together climate data and environmental hazard data, it starts to paint a clearer picture of the existing environmental justice issues in the state,” said Rad Cunningham, senior epidemiologist. “You start seeing patterns of how those issues are going to get worse over time.”

But they’re not just addressing current issues; they’re also trying to determine what the future will look like and how to prepare for it. “It’s a paradigm shift,” Cunningham said. A proactive approach can help states save lives, blunt unhealthy trends and be better prepared for emerging climate-driven threats.

That may improve the situation on the ground in Washington in the coming years. School evaluations could show where state funding is most needed to retrofit buildings and design new ones to make spaces cooler and cleaner on hot, smoky days. The team is working to make public health tools and messaging — such as tips on how to protect yourself from wildfire smoke with box fans and filters — less jargony and more useful. The epidemiologists are collaborating with newly created, climate-focused local public health positions across the state.

The climate health team’s total budget — $1.8 million this fiscal year — comes from state and federal sources. Washington is looking to climate health programs in other states like California and Colorado for inspiration. And the epidemiologists hope to learn from places dealing with problems that aren’t as prevalent in Washington — yet. For example, warmer temperatures are allowing ticks to spread into areas they previously weren’t able to survive. In response, Michigan’s Department of Health has become an expert on ticks and tick-borne diseases, such as Lyme. “We have a lot to learn from them,” Cunningham said. “We have a chance to do what they wish they would’ve done.”

Kylie Mohr is an editorial fellow for High Country News writing from Montana. Email her at kylie.mohr@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. 

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He calls it the “tin can.” Its heater is broken. The cold creeps through its thin walls. Wind rattles the wooden cabinets. But it’s all he could afford.

A year ago, two runaway fires set by the U.S. Forest Service converged to become the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon wildfire. It rode 74 mph wind gusts, engulfing dozens of homes in a single day as it tore through canyons and over mountains.

The blaze became the biggest wildfire in the continental United States in 2022 and the biggest in New Mexico history. And it was the federal government’s fault: An ill-prepared and understaffed crew didn’t properly account for dry conditions and high winds when it ignited prescribed burns meant to limit the fuel for a potential wildfire.

By the time the blaze was fully contained in August, it had destroyed about 430 homes, according to the Forest Service. Monsoons helped extinguish the fire, but they spurred floods that caused more damage.

FEMA stepped in to help, offering cash for short-term expenses and, after the state requested it, temporary housing to 140 households. But the federal government has acted so slowly and maintained such strict rules that only about a tenth of them have moved in, an investigation by Source New Mexico and ProPublica has found.

A year after the fire began, FEMA says most of the 140 households it deemed eligible for travel trailers or mobile homes — essentially, people whose uninsured primary residences sustained severe damage — have found “another housing resource.”

What the agency doesn’t say: For some, that resource is a vehicle, a tent or a rickety camper. It’s a friend or relative’s couch, sometimes far from home. It’s a mobile home paid for with retirement funds or meager savings.

The fire upended a constellation of largely Hispanic, rural communities that have cultivated their land and culture in the shadows of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains for hundreds of years. Many residents can find their family names on land grants issued by Mexican governors in the 1830s.

Now they’re dispersed across the region, even out of state. Source New Mexico and ProPublica obtained records from local officials and volunteer groups and eventually interviewed more than 50 people who between them lost 45 homes.

Many of them said FEMA’s trailers were offered too late, cost too much to get hooked up or came with too many strings attached. Several said they went through multiple inspections, only to learn weeks later that one rule or another made it impossible to get a trailer on their land. In some cases, FEMA officials told people that their only option was a commercial mobile home park, miles down winding, damaged mountain roads from the homes they were trying to rebuild.

People who between them lost 17 homes said they withdrew from the housing program because of those problems.

As of April 19, just 13 of the 140 eligible households had received FEMA housing. Only two of them are on their own land.

Martinez said he got a call from FEMA in mid-October, seemingly out of the blue. By then, he had been living in the tin can for a couple of months. As temperatures dropped, he had started sleeping on the couch, closer to the space heater.

A FEMA representative asked if he needed a trailer to live in.

“I told them it was too late,” he said. “Way too late.”

FEMA said terrain and weather, among other factors, presented challenges in providing housing to survivors. But the agency said it made an exception to its rules by providing trailers and mobile homes in the first place — normally such programs are reserved for disasters that displace a large number of residents.

The agency said it tries to place temporary housing on people’s property, but couldn’t in many cases because of federal laws and its own requirement that trailers be hooked up to utilities. State and local officials have asked the agency to loosen its rules, but it hasn’t.

FEMA knows it has a problem with its response to wildfires. A 2019 Government Accountability Office report said FEMA’s housing programs are better suited to help those displaced by hurricanes and floods because some victims can remain in their damaged homes, there’s often more rental housing in those areas and there’s more space for large mobile home parks than there is in the rugged mountains scorched by wildfires.

FEMA agreed with the findings and said it would explore providing housing funding to states because they’re better positioned to guide recovery. That didn’t happen after the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon fire.

Last month, Martinez woke up on the couch in severe pain from a swollen bladder. Now he needs frequent medical appointments to check his catheter and figure out what’s causing the pain. His sister has been trying to get him a FEMA trailer in a commercial park closer to a clinic in the town of Mora. It’s just 8 miles away, but it can take 45 minutes to drive there.

What neither of them knew when he bought that old trailer last summer is that doing so made him ineligible for a FEMA trailer.

Martinez wants to stay on his property if he can. His great-grandfather once owned the land where he built that cabin. He raised his hands to show his stiff, swollen fingers. “They ain’t worth shit now,” he said. “But a man builds his own castle, right?”

The cost of free housing

By mid-June, firefighters had finally started to get the blaze under control, and people were being allowed back into communities in the area known as the burn scar. New Mexico officials turned their attention to those who had nothing to return to.

Kelly Hamilton, deputy secretary for the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, told FEMA in a letter that people were living in their cars, at work and in churches, in campers and even in tents.

He asked FEMA to provide travel trailers or mobile homes. “If the housing situation is not immediately addressed, the survival of each community is bleak,” he wrote.

“If the housing situation is not immediately addressed, the survival of each community is bleak.”

He cited an analysis showing there was just one rental apartment available in Mora and San Miguel counties, the two hardest hit by the fire. He noted that roughly 20% of residents in those counties were below the poverty line and that one-third of Mora County residents were disabled, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.

It took FEMA a month to approve Hamilton’s request and about two weeks more to tell the public. On Aug. 2, the agency announced it would launch a small housing program, which “will likely entail placing a manufactured home on the resident’s property for the length of time it takes to rebuild.”

But there were strict rules for where those trailers could go. Recipients would need to have electrical service, septic tanks and drinking water close to the housing site. The agency’s draft contract for the housing program specified details down to the width of straps that were required to secure trailers against wind.

Local and state officials and disaster survivors told Source and ProPublica that the utility requirements were unreasonable, especially in this area. It’s common for homes to be heated with wood stoves fed with timber harvested from the surrounding land. Some people didn’t have running water or septic tanks even before the fire. Electrical outages were common in remote areas.

Martinez’s cabin never had running water; he got it from his neighbor’s well. So even if FEMA had offered him a trailer earlier, he would have had to pay thousands of dollars to build a well — if he could’ve found someone to do it.

FEMA is “very efficient in deeming people ineligible.”

“I’m trying to put this diplomatically,” said David Lienemann, spokesperson for New Mexico’s emergency management department. FEMA is “very efficient in deeming people ineligible.”

The effect of those rules is clear. As of April 19, FEMA said 140 households were eligible for trailers, as determined by the agency’s own inspections and policies. Of those, 123 had “voluntarily withdrawn.”

People dropped out because they “opted to live in their damaged homes, located another housing resource or declined all Direct Housing options,” said FEMA spokesperson Angela Byrd in an email. “However, those households remain eligible for the program should their situation change.”

FEMA wouldn’t allow Vicki Garland to connect a trailer to her solar panels, which weren’t touched by the flames. Instead, the agency insisted that she connect to the power grid, which would’ve cost her about $20,000. She’s now moving to the outskirts of Albuquerque, about 140 miles away.

Six individuals and families said they left the program because it would’ve cost too much to hook a trailer up to electricity, restore their wells or meet other utility rules.

Emilio Aragon was living in his office when he was told he was third on the list for a FEMA trailer. After waiting six months, he gave up and spent his retirement savings on a mobile home. He was among six individuals and families who said they were offered housing too late or faced delays that forced them to find housing on their own.

In response to those accounts, FEMA said in a written statement that it must ensure housing is safe and secure. “Generally, this is not a fast process because it requires us to be so thorough and meticulous. Working during the monsoon season meant it took additional time to make sure these sites were safe.”

FEMA has had a hard time getting people into temporary housing quickly after disasters. After Hurricane Ida struck Louisiana in 2021, FEMA said its housing program “is not an immediate solution for a survivor’s interim and longer-term housing needs” because it takes months to get sites ready. The agency praised Louisiana’s decision to launch its own federally funded housing program alongside FEMA’s.

A few months after the storm, The New York Times reported, the state’s program had housed around 1,200 people in about the same time it had taken for FEMA’s program to house 126.

Because FEMA’s housing programs end 18 months after a disaster declaration, every delay runs down the clock. Unless the Hermits Peak housing program is extended, it will expire in November, when the next winter is approaching.

FEMA declined to say whether it would extend the program, saying it would work with the state to meet survivors’ needs.

Wesley Bennett and his wife, JoDean Williams Cooper, said they went through three inspections to see where a trailer could be placed on their property. No spot was suitable, and they were instead offered a site at a mobile home park. Five other individuals and families said they pulled out of the housing program because of the red tape.

FEMA has noted that nine households declined to live in a mobile home park. Several of the trailers it has installed at those sites stand empty.

Some survivors, including Bennett and Cooper, said it wasn’t feasible to live in a trailer park an hour away from the homes they were rebuilding, especially with so many roads washed out by the flooding that followed the fire. They needed to stay on their land to take care of crops and deter theft.

“People who have largely lived in a rural setting are not going to be as comfortable in a trailer park. It’s just their whole way of life,” said Antonia Roybal-Mack, a lawyer who’s from the area and is assisting hundreds of victims in filing administrative claims for damage with the federal government.

“Here’s hoping it’s a paperwork issue”

Erika Larsen and her partner, Tyler White, were living in a camper van after losing their home in the village of San Ignacio when they learned FEMA was offering temporary housing.

Their livelihoods depended on being on their land, they said. Larsen is an herbalist who before the fire made tinctures and elixirs with ambrosia, hops and nettle she grew in gardens dotting the property. White works in construction and gets a lot of her work from neighbors who know where to find her.

Early on, White was feeling optimistic. She posted to a private Facebook group of disaster survivors on Aug. 23, a day after a FEMA inspection.

“Amazingly enough, yesterday we were approved for a trailer to live in. There is only one place to put anything on our property because of flooding. Our well and septic are shot because of fire and floods so we didn’t think we’d qualify. But we did. We should get it in a couple months,” she wrote.

“All this is to say as much as it stinks dealing with FEMA,” she wrote, “as hard of a fight as it can be, you might just get something out of it.”

Two days later, she added something.

Their case manager had “asked us if we wanted to live in a FEMA trailer park. We told him we’d been approved for a trailer at home and he said there was no record of that. Here’s hoping it’s a paperwork issue!”

She and Larsen waited for word while living nearby in their camper van. By late August, afternoon storm clouds often formed over the mountains, bringing monsoons that seeped through the roof and flooded their land. They worried about further damage to their property while they were away.

Two weeks after her first post, White offered another update. FEMA said the proposed site was in a floodplain, so the couple wasn’t allowed to put a trailer there.

“Our case manager said lots of people have been saying they were told they were approved for a trailer just to be declined,” she wrote. “So the moral of my story is: If a bunch of FEMA people come and tell you you are getting a trailer, you still might not be eligible.”

“If a bunch of FEMA people come and tell you you are getting a trailer, you still might not be eligible.”

They appealed the decision, but more inspections over the next two months determined that other sites on their property were too far from a septic tank, well or electricity hookup.

The agency also apparently made an error in its denial: Inspection records provided by Larsen showed the proposed trailer site isn’t actually in the floodplain on the map that FEMA says it uses for such decisions.

FEMA officials declined to comment on particular cases without written permission from the people who’d filed the claims.

By early November, as temperatures dropped and a long winter loomed, they’d had enough and decided to move into a dilapidated mobile home on a neighbor’s property. The landowner used it for storage, but at least it had a wood stove.

Larsen likened dealing with FEMA to an abusive relationship. “It really has been the worst part of this whole experience for me,” she said. “I feel capable of doing the work of processing this trauma. But having to keep talking to these people that are just fucking with my mind is pretty intense.”

The flood that never came

It wasn’t just residents who saw that the program wasn’t working. State and local officials asked FEMA to relax its requirements or make accommodations, but the agency didn’t budge.

After FEMA announced in early August that it would provide trailers, officials met with Amanda Salas, the planning and zoning director for San Miguel County, and told her inspections and approvals could take 10 weeks.

Across the burn scar, survivors were arranging inspections with caravans of contractors and FEMA employees who poked around their properties to evaluate possible sites.

In late-September, Salas cleared her desk, expecting a flood of building permit requests from residents seeking permission to place FEMA trailers on their land.

Getting people back was “number one,” she said in an interview. “I need them to be in a warm place, you know?”

The flood of permit requests never came. About 35 people expressed interest in FEMA’s housing program when she told them about it after they showed up in her office to ask questions about cleanup and rebuilding. Most withdrew due to bureaucratic hurdles and delays, she said. Her counterpart in Mora County said he observed the same thing.

FEMA spokesperson Aissha Flores Cruz said in an email that the agency respects survivors’ decisions not to apply.

In mid-October, Salas attended a meeting of local and federal officials. It was her first opportunity to talk to high-ranking FEMA officials in person, and she spoke up.

She told them it didn’t make sense to require electricity, wells or septic systems in a rugged area where people didn’t rely on those services before the fire. She asked FEMA to provide gas generators.

“It seemed like they heard us,” Salas said of the meeting. “But they didn’t do anything about it.”

“It seemed like they heard us, but they didn’t do anything about it.”

Meanwhile, state officials sought waivers for the utility requirements and urged FEMA to outfit homes with portable water tanks or composting toilets. The state wanted “to at least get people back in a safe, warm home, on their property,” said Lienemann, the state emergency department spokesperson.

On Dec. 19, as temperatures dropped to single digits in parts of the burn scar, the state had not heard back from FEMA about its request. Ali Rye, an official with the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, asked for a response and again requested that FEMA approve waivers for high-need cases.

Lienemann said FEMA told the state that it would make decisions on waiving rules on a case-by-case basis. The agency never made any exceptions.

FEMA said federal law doesn’t allow it to waive the rules for its housing programs. And Flores Cruz said FEMA funds cannot pay to reconnect or rebuild utilities because that would be “permanent work” funded through a program intended to be temporary.

Payment for permanent repairs falls to a special FEMA claims office created in January, but it hasn’t cut any checks to survivors yet. Congress set aside about $4 billion in compensation funds in acknowledgement of the federal government’s role in starting the fire.

Sheltered but not home

Daniel Encinias is one of the two people who got trailers on their own land. Each month, a FEMA representative stops by and asks for proof that he’s trying to find permanent housing — one of the conditions of living in the agency’s trailers.

He tells them he’s waiting for a check from the $4 billion compensation fund. “The minute FEMA releases the money and gives me enough money to build my home back,” he said, “that’s when things are gonna get done.”

The claims office will handle such requests. It was supposed to start sending out money in early 2023, but the agency is behind schedule.

“I have to tell you, opening an office is hard,” claims office Director Angela Gladwell told a packed lecture hall of frustrated fire survivors at Mora High School on April 19.

FEMA said it now expects to open three field offices to the public this month and it is trying to make partial payments while it finalizes its rules. Case navigators — who are locals who know the communities, the agency pointed out — are reaching out to those who have filed claims for damages.

The throngs of FEMA employees who swarmed into the area last summer to offer short-term aid have moved on. Some survivors are in limbo, running low on disaster aid and lacking the money to rebuild.

For Rex “Buzzard” Haver, a disabled veteran, the first disaster has split into a tangle of smaller ones. After his home burned in May, his family spent nearly $64,000 on a mobile home — more than the roughly $48,000 he’s gotten from FEMA so far. He doesn’t have the money to install a wheelchair ramp.

The company that delivered his replacement home broke its windows, tore the siding and ripped off lights during delivery. But they won’t come and fix it until the county repairs the road to his house. Haver has no washer or dryer, and for months, his satellite TV provider kept calling to collect a dish that had melted into black goo.

Haver didn’t learn that FEMA was offering trailers until several months after his new mobile home arrived in July, according to his daughter, Brandy Brogan. Now he’s in hospice, and he’s struggling.

“He doesn’t feel that he has a purpose anymore,” Brogan said. “There’s nothing for him to do. There’s nowhere for him to go.”

On a recent snowy afternoon, just down the road from Haver, strong winds rushed past blackened trees and through gaps in David Martinez’s trailer. He raised his voice to be heard over the wind.

“I’ve never been a sick man,” he said, wincing. “Till lately.”

Martinez can hardly walk due to his medical problems. The once-avid outdoorsman spends most days sitting in the kitchenette, the space heater on full blast, watching hunting shows on a 16-inch television. He ultimately got $34,000 from FEMA in short-term aid, but he’s down to a few grand.

On a recent afternoon, his sister, Bercy Martinez, and her grand-nephew drove up the washed-out driveway to deliver groceries and bottled water, which she does a few times a week. She loaded her brother’s fridge. “This is very good,” she said in Spanish of the meatloaf she bought. “It’s not too spicy.”

She’d been asking FEMA for weeks about getting her brother a spot in a mobile home park so he doesn’t have to navigate the bumpy road that makes drives to the clinic so painful.

Two weeks ago, she reached a FEMA employee on the phone and asked if the housing program that had arrived too late for her brother could help him now. The answer, she said, was no. He’s no longer eligible because he has a place to live.

Patrick Lohmann is a reporter for Source New Mexico and a recipient of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network grant. He reports from Las Vegas, New Mexico. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.