On this Thursday’s episode of Homestead Rescue, we head to California where the wind-swept 2018 fires scorched the earth and literally razed one town, Paradise, to the ground.
A family who had a homestead has reached out to Marty Raney along with his grown children, Misty Raney and Matt Raney, in an attempt to rebuild their shattered lives and destroyed homestead.
What happens on Homestead Rescue?
We open our exclusive clip with Marty Raney taking an inventory and talking to the owners. He says” Every square inch burnt… every tree scorched, every structure gone. Where was your house?”
The homeowners explain that they are standing in the middle of it all. They tell Marty they are all inside the dwelling footprint. They tell him, “[You are] parked in our living room.” You can clearly see that Marty is floored by the level of destruction all around him.
Marty explains that one’s been to their parcel of land and former home for almost a year, and as we can see in the b-roll footage, the wild animals and snakes that have moved into the area, now void of humanity until everything is rebuilt.
Assessing the well situation is Misty Raney, the water expert and all things gardening, who says, “There is no homestead unless we have water.”
Collectively, the Raneys agree that this is one of their biggest challenges to date and that it presents the exact opposite of everything homesteading represents. In doing so they give themselves seven days to address the homesteaders’ needs and fix what they can for them.
Marty concludes with an optimistic outlook, saying, “We’re going to help these homesteaders rise from the ashes, literally.”
What was the Paradise fire and when did it happen?
There have been several fires dubbed the Paradise fire in California, but the Paradise fire the Raneys are trying to deal with happened in 2018. In news reports we learned that the whole town had little time to prepare, waking up to what was described as “thick, dark smoke.”
The news was filled with people frantically trying to shelter and save their animals, recording footage of traffic that was completely stuck due to the crush of people trying to leave.
This Paradise fire began on what was determined to be a “red flag” day by local firefighters. Around 6:30 am on November 8, 2018, it came barreling in, and paired with heat and low humidity, the situation turned lethal.
Over the course of 17 days, the Paradise fire, also called the Camp Fire, as the origin of it was along Camp Creek Road, burned more than 150,000 acres and leveled more than 18,000 buildings.
The state of California ruled that energy behemoth PG&E was responsible for the fire.
Exclusive preview of Homestead Rescue
Homestead Rescue airs on Thursday night at 8/7c on Discovery.