As many as 2,000 trailers and manufactured homes will be headed to the Paradise, Calif., region to provide temporary housing for Camp Fire evacuees, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Wednesday.
This story by Dale Kasler originally appeared in The Sacramento Bee.
The first few Camp Fire evacuees might find themselves placed in a FEMA trailer as early as this week, but the entire program could take several months to unfold as the federal agency scours the region for appropriate sites and determines evacuees’ eligibility.
“I have teams out in the field today,” said Toney Raines, FEMA’s housing task force lead, in a conference call with reporters. “We look at multiple sites every day.”
He said the actual number of trailers brought to the Paradise “could be substantially lower” than 2,000 as evacuees take advantage of other housing-assistance programs, including financial aid for hotels and apartments. FEMA officials have been encouraging evacuees to explore those alternate forms of aid.
Raines and Tina Curry, a deputy director at California’s Office of Emergency Services, said the enormity of the Camp Fire disaster brings special challenges. More than 13,000 homes were destroyed, eliminating about 90 percent of the housing stock in Paradise and creating an immediate housing shortage “in an area where there already wasn’t a lot of housing,” Curry said.