'Living here isn't easy to begin with.' How an earthquake brought people together

Mackenzie Mays
Sat, December 24, 2022 

A staffer at the library in Rio Dell, Calif., spent hours reorganizing books after Tuesday's magnitude 6.4 earthquake. (Mackenzie Mays / Los Angeles Times)

I woke Tuesday morning to a phone call from my editor before 8 a.m. — earlier than usual — with the kind of assignment you can't plan for.

There had been an earthquake. A big one. Could I drive five hours north from my home in Sacramento to Humboldt County? Now?

I rushed to pack a bag, shoveling in phone and laptop chargers, a notebook and pens and business cards to prove I am who I say I am. I opened my map app and typed in Fortuna — a historic logging town, population 12,000 — that I hadn't been to in my eight years of living in California.

I didn't have time to do much research but knew it was a magnitude 6.4 quake that led to two deaths, 11 injuries and the closure of a bridge over the Eel River. I knew that people had gone to bed the night before with a very different life than they woke up to.

What I didn't know was that a new place would feel so familiar and that the reporting would be easy because of that sense of community. This coastal county, about 55 miles from the Oregon border, surrounded by giant redwoods, reminded me of my hometown in West Virginia, at the heart of Appalachia.

Both are regions defined by a connection to nature, fading 20th century industries and people who are resilient as hell.

When I arrived in Fortuna just before 2 p.m. — after a long, winding drive that included a snowy detour through the Shasta-Trinity National Forest that only God and my GPS can explain — I pulled into the first restaurant I saw. Double D Steak & Seafood was closed but full of people cleaning up broken bottles of liquor and wine — the smell hit you in the face.

Most of the folks helping weren't employees but volunteers: The owner's son had gotten his buddies to help sweep and take out the trash. The owner, wearing a camouflage Santa hat despite being awake since 3 a.m., welcomed me in and showed me the dining room that days prior had been readied for holiday cheer, now filled with shattered ornaments, crooked photos and a toppled Christmas tree.

It was my first glimpse of a town that had been wrecked by nature but was full of people helping one another get through the crisis while grasping for a shred of normalcy.

At a vintage shop down the street, I felt my first aftershock, which made an antique chandelier sway. I've never experienced a big earthquake and wondered what we should do. I was struck by the owner's nonchalance.

"Oh, that's a tremor. We should probably go outside," said Heather Herrick, owner of the Haute Hoarder boutique, taking a break from cleaning up shards of glass.

By the end of my first day there, though, I understood being underwhelmed by an aftershock. I was exhausted, at one of the few hotels in town that had power restored but was still without water. I was too tired to care about the slight swaying in the middle of the night. I let the tremor rock me to sleep.

I'm always surprised by people who are willing to let journalists into their lives on the worst days. People were without sleep, power or water. They couldn't stay warm or charge their phones. They didn't know if insurance would cover the damages. Motorists lined up to panic-buy gas. All of the grocery stores were closed.

Yet no one turned me away or scolded me for intruding, even as I was questioning people who'd been left homeless in an instant. One person always led me to another.

"Is this Mackenzie with the L.A. Times?" a text read. It was Kevin Mcniece, a friend of Herrick, who had told him I was in town, and he wanted to show me his house that had been split into three pieces, caught fire and condemned by local officials. He had lost most of his belongings and was staying in a hotel. For free.

"Riding on the coattails of generosity," as he put it. He wanted to share his story.

A family who'd been sleeping in their car introduced me to their pit bull, Sarah, when I ran into them at at a pop-up food bank. A woman who'd taken refuge at the fire department started crying while telling me that someone had offered to buy her family a hotel room for the night.

Volunteer firefighters and food-bank workers assembled. It made me think of that quote attributed to Mister Rogers that doubles as good reporting advice. In times of disaster, he said, "look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

Parts of Humboldt County that were hit hardest, including the towns of Scotia, Ferndale and Rio Dell, seemed much like where I grew up.

In West Virginia, we don't have earthquakes, but we have floods. Instead of old lumber-company towns, we have remnants of a once-booming coal mining industry.

Both places have immense natural beauty and are home to people who struggle with poverty but are proud of where they're from. They are places rightfully leery of outsiders but astoundingly welcoming.

In this part of California, like West Virginia, communities are tight-knit in part because they believe no one else is coming to help them. I sensed a relatable frustration with feeling overlooked and misunderstood.

But I knew I wasn't one of them. I was there for only two days. All I could do was listen. I always asked about more than the earthquake: What's this place usually like? What do people get wrong about it?

"The more densely populated areas tend to speak for all of us,” Mcniece told me. “The Bay Area and Los Angeles and Sacramento — they get to be the face of what California has on its mind, but over here behind the redwood curtain, we have different needs."

Whether they lost a few dishes or entire homes, people tended to stay positive. This wasn't their first earthquake, and it probably won't be their last.

"Living here isn't easy to begin with," Rio Dell resident John Ireland said. "When something bad does happen, people come together. You get to see the best sides of people.”

It wasn't an easy place to file a news story. I didn't have power to charge my laptop. Cellphone service is spotty on a good day. When the sun set, the already quiet town of Fortuna was silent, pitch-black and difficult to navigate.

Lacking a reliable internet connection, I had to file a story the old-fashioned way, calling from my car a co-writer who transcribed my notes and plugged them in. I filed another story from the McDonald's in Eureka. (Great WiFi.) On the drive home Wednesday evening, I pulled over in dark and foggy Lake County and pleaded with the initially reluctant owners of a hotel to let me use their internet despite not being a guest. (Shout-out to the Lodge at Blue Lakes.)

When I got back to Sacramento, where I normally cover state government and policy, I was thankful for seeing a part of California that reminded me of my hometown nearly 2,500 miles away.

I was thinking about the Scotia Lodge, a 100-year-old hotel that was somehow mostly unscathed by the earthquake, even as destruction was visible all around it. The owners of the lodge rushed to take in the displaced. By the end of the week, they were back up and running, and the rooms were filled with both paying tourists and community members staying for free, nowhere else to go.

Aaron Sweat, the lodge's chief executive, told me about a family visiting from Europe who were so alarmed by the earthquake that they fled Scotia in a rush. When a gas station wouldn't accept their international credit card, a local stepped in to pay and refused to take cash in return.

"I guess in times of tragedy, Humboldt, and all these small, rural towns everywhere, just come together and say, 'Let's figure this out,'" Sweat said.

On Facebook, the lodge let concerned locals know that the place was still standing.

“This isn't the first time, nor the last, that this old gal will be put to the test by Mother Nature,” the post read.

The historic building, sturdy and welcoming, was a surprising sight. But it gave me a feeling that was achingly familiar.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

During earthquake blackouts, this Humboldt tribe was an island of clean power

Ari Plachta
Fri, December 23, 2022 

When a powerful earthquake jolted Humboldt County early Tuesday, tens of thousands of homes immediately lost power. Just as instantaneously, a mini-power grid of solar panels and batteries turned a nearby Native American reservation into an island of electricity in the sea of darkness.

The Blue Lake Rancheria served some 10,000 people over the day-long outage, by some estimates, becoming an emergency resource center for roughly 8% of the region’s population. The scene demonstrated how microgrids, though expensive investments, can preserve critical services during California natural disasters.

“Fortunately or unfortunately, we have tested these micro grids in real world situations,” said Jana Ganion, the tribe’s director of sustainability and government affairs. “We’re facing more emergencies even as we try to make our infrastructure more resilient.”

The magnitude 6.4 earthquake that occurred just after 2 a.m. left two dead and at least 12 injured, damaged bridges and shook homes off their foundations in the Rio Dell and Ferndale communities. Some 72,000 homes and businesses across the county lost power supplied by PG&E. Service was near fully restored Wednesday evening.

By utilizing microgrids, two public places preserved power all of Tuesday and Wednesday following the quake: Redwood Coast-Humboldt County Airport and Blue Lake Rancheria. Holiday travel went undisrupted and the local tribe’s facilities became a vital part of emergency response — again.

By 3:30 a.m. Tuesday, tribal police opened an emergency center in the reservation’s hotel and dozens of cars arrived to use Wi-Fi after losing internet connectivity. A line started to form at the reservation’s gas station by sunrise, and people poured into casino restaurants. Many charged their devices at the community center, and displaced people booked rooms at the hotel.

The operation unfolded much the same as in October 2019, when PG&E cut power to more than 2 million people across Northern California as a safety measure during a period of high wildfire risk. The tribe was credited with saving four lives with emergency medical equipment and even transformed a hotel conference room into a newsroom so the local paper could publish.

Humboldt County residents line up for gas at the Blue Lake Rancheria Tribe reservation after a powerful earthquake Tuesday led to widespread electricity blackouts in the region.

Too many microgrids?

The Blue Lake Rancheria, a federally recognized tribe operating a 102-room hotel and Casino, constructed two microgrids on its 100-acre reservation beginning in 2017. Much of the $6.5 million for both projects came from a California Energy Commission program meant to invest in clean energy technology and bolster the state’s electricity sector.

Microgrids are a complex of solar panels, storage batteries and distribution lines that operate as part of the larger utility network when the electricity is on, and even contribute power to the main grid in many cases. But during blackouts, they disconnect from the system and use solar-generated energy stored in batteries to operate independently.

The Energy Commission has helped build 43 clean energy microgrids around the state, mainly in rural communities vulnerable to shutoffs and as a backup for universities or critical infrastructure such as wastewater treatment plants. According to some estimates, there are roughly 200 privately-owned and fossil fuel-powered microgrids total in California.

Most recently, $31 million in state funds were granted this year to deploy 60 megawatt-hours of long-duration energy storage for the Viejas Tirbe of Kumeyaay Indians outside San Diego. The facility will supply power that can be sent back to the grid during heat waves, such as the one that hit in September, to help avoid power shutoffs.

Mike Gravely, research program manager at the Energy Commission, said state-sponsored microgrids are meant to both support a business — in Blue Lake Rancheria Tribe’s case, the hotel-casino — and the community during blackouts. Yet every home and business in the state should not go looking for a self-sufficient energy system, he said.

Too many microgrid users could not only undermine the utility-operated grid that the vast majority of state energy customers depend on but also deepen California’s divisions between haves and have-nots as affluent communities and big businesses install their own systems.

“Climate change is happening faster than we can modify the grid,” Gravely said, adding that transmission upgrades are expensive and take years. “So until we get more permanent solutions installed, going forward we’ll see these things get more popular.”

Mark Schaeffer has had a front-row seat to his community’s reliance on Blue Lake Rancheria during power shutoffs. His small solar and battery storage business, Haven Electronic, is just down the road from the reservation. He’s glad the microgrid is there.

“The line outside their gas station goes on for a mile,” he said.

“Everybody in the northern part of Humboldt County knows that they have batteries and big solar arrays, so when the grid goes down they’re fully functional. People go eat, gamble, maybe watch music... people love to spend money when they can’t do anything else.”

'An earthquake can drop in': More than 1 million California homes need retrofittings

Summer Lin
Fri, December 23, 2022

Jacqui McIntosh peers in the window of her red-tagged, quake-damaged home in Rio Dell, Calif., this week. (MediaNews Group / East Bay Times via Getty Images)

Jacqui and Shane McIntosh were looking to sell their two-bedroom, single-family home in Rio Dell, Calif., so they could move closer to work. When a potential buyer scheduled a visit to their property this week, the couple hoped it might result in an offer.

But hours before the buyer was set to arrive Tuesday, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck Humboldt County, jolting the couple awake in the middle of the night and knocking them to the ground. Jacqui McIntosh, 28, recalls clinging on to one of the legs of the bed as they were being tossed around.

She said it was only after they exited the house that they realized how bad the damage truly was.


“Our porch was higher than our house,” she said. “When we got down, our gas line is right next to the door, and we got hit with natural gas and propane. On the other side, there was water going everywhere because the water main broke.”

After their street was evacuated because of the gas leak, the McIntoshes returned home to try to find their cats and other pets and realized the house had been red-tagged.

The couple, who work for a company that makes recreation and military rafts, had applied for a grant to earthquake-retrofit their decades-old home under the state's Earthquake Brace and Bolt program. They got an email Sunday, two days before the temblor, informing them that they'd hear in February whether they'd been selected for the grant.

“It’s always been in the back of my mind,” McIntosh said. “It’s so expensive and we financially couldn’t do it. We set a path for [the new homeowner] to get the house retrofitted by the state but it was too late.”

McIntosh said they also filed a claim with their insurance company but were notified it had been withdrawn because they don't have earthquake insurance due to the cost.

“We have a huge lawn ornament that we are now responsible for,” McIntosh said. “Unless some sort of government aid comes through, it’s now solely on us to fix the house. It’s a real possibility that we might have to just walk away, ruin our credit, go bankrupt and start all over again.”

Jacqui McIntosh inspects the damage to her house. "Unless some sort of government aid comes through, it's now solely on us to fix the house," she said. (MediaNews Group / East Bay Times via Getty Images)

Unfortunately, the McIntoshes' experience is not a rare one. In a state known for its earthquakes, many homes lack retrofitting and insurance.

Today, fewer than 1 in 7 California homeowners have earthquake insurance, according to the California Earthquake Authority, and more than 1 million homes in the state need to be structurally retrofitted.

In Northern California, such a retrofit can cost upward of $5,000, said Janiele Maffei, a structural engineer and chief mitigation officer for the California Earthquake Authority.

Humboldt County has specific structural challenges to its homes, because the region is so moist, Maffei said. Many of the homes there have "post and pier" foundations, meaning they don't have a continuous concrete foundation around the perimeter of the house. Instead, the homes are supported by posts on concrete with a skirt around it, in order to give the residence access to air. Putting in a whole new perimeter foundation can cost between $10,000 and $15,000.

Under the Earthquake Brace and Bolt Program, homeowners can apply for a grant of up to $3,000 for seismic retrofitting. There's also additional funding for low-income homeowners making up to $72,080 per household.

In the case of the McIntoshes' home, the earthquake had knocked the house off of its foundation and made it unstable. Retrofitting would involve either bolting the house's frame to its foundation or adding braces to the walls in the space beneath the first floor.

Registration for the retrofitting program ended Nov. 29, and about 169 households from Humboldt County applied. Maffei said randomized selection for the program is expected to take place in the next few months. She encouraged those who are placed on a wait list to not lose hope, because about 50% of people in the program end up dropping out.

Restoring a home that has fallen off its foundation involves putting up steel beams, picking up and moving the house to where it's supposed to be and building a new foundation underneath, Maffei said. The process can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"My heart goes out there to these families who are displaced," she said. "An earthquake can drop in on the worst week of someone's life. It doesn't just drop in on the healthy and young who are financially prepared to survive that. It drops in on real life and can be catastrophic."

Californians can also prepare their homes for earthquakes by anchoring the contents of their house, including televisions, bookshelves, microwaves, cabinets and other appliances. Beds should be moved away from windows because of the risk of glass shattering. Heavy objects and frames near the bed should also be removed.

Insuring that your gas heater is secured to the wall and installing an automatic valve that shuts off the gas during an earthquake could decrease the chances of a leak or subsequent fire.

Chimneys also pose a significant hazard during earthquakes and could be removed or retrofitted to ensure safety.

McIntosh and her husband have been staying in a corporate condo that her company had offered to them. The days immediately after the quake have involved picking up the pieces of their lives, including locating and securing a place to stay for their pet pot-bellied pig, Elvis Pigsley, who used to reside in their backyard.

McIntosh's sister set up a GoFundMe page for the couple, who are waiting to hear if the Federal Emergency Management Agency will be able to provide any disaster relief or other financial assistance.

“People are living paycheck to paycheck," she said. "They can’t afford earthquake insurance. We’re not the only ones sitting out there going ‘How am I gonna fix this?’ And that’s the scary part.”