Laborers and domestic workers stay behind as thousands flee California wildfires

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/30/california-fires-workers-kincade-easy

Vivian Ho in Oakland and Mario Koran in Santa Rosa
Wed 30 Oct 2019 16.48 EDT

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In northern California, more than 185,000 people were ordered to evacuate their homes and work sites over the weekend as the Kincade fire raged across the wine country hills. While many in the region were able to heed the warnings, many workers stayed behind.

“It’s an agricultural community and everything is very time-sensitive when it comes to harvesting the crops,” said Ariel Kelly, the chief executive of Corazón Healdsburg. “We have those visa workers on temporary agricultural visas and they’ll be concluding their stay because this is the end of the season. There’s this concern that ‘if I don’t finish the job, I won’t get paid’…I know that after the first wave of evacuations happened last Wednesday night and a number of them were at our shelter, they were still leaving to go back to work.”

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“For a lot of day laborers and household workers, not having a day’s work often means the difference between houselessness or not,” said Maegan Ortiz, the executive director of el Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California. “Not having a day’s work is actually a big deal. Not working means not having money for medication for a chronic illness. Not working means not having money for food.”

In the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa, several construction crews were at work on Tuesday, many of them rebuilding homes that burned down during the 2017 Tubbs fire that leveled the neighborhood.

Josh Strand was cruising the neighborhood, which he said had been “technically” evacuated in totality. He was emptying the portable toilets on construction sites along street. The air was thick with the smell of fire, but Strand said he wasn’t too worried. “Two years ago it was worse. I had to wear a mask. It’s not so bad this time.”

Advocates in southern California have similarly warned that workers are left exposed as wildfires rage in and near Los Angeles. “I’m hearing stories from Los Angeles where the owner just forgot to tell the worker not to come into work that day,” said Lucas Zucker, the policy and communications director for the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy. “You have safety exposures for workers where they may have less access to information about what’s going on and the risk they’re under, or they may be compelled to stay, whether it be their own economic necessity or their employer asking them to stay.”

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Last year during the Woolsey fire, which charred up nearly 97,000 acres and killed three, Ortiz’s organization collected stories from more than 500 workers about having to work through the wildfire.

“The stories we heard last year were workers being given hoses and being asked, ‘Hey, keep the fire away’,” she said. “Families evacuating and saying, ‘Hey can you stay and watch my dogs?’”

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“The homeowners have insurance and are able to rebuild or move to a different place,” Zucker said. “The worker has essentially nothing. With domestic workers, we saw people in really desperate situations, just people completely unemployed in a moment’s notice, with no unemployment benefits and no access to any government aid.”

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