Peru native mourns for her burning California home

While her adoptive home state burns, Liz Toraason Tutton prays.

Tutton, a 1974 graduate of La Salle-Peru High School, now calls California home and its breaking her heart to see the way fires are not only displacing families and ravaging the beautiful and bountiful forests, but also disrupting the lives of those not even remotely close to them.

“It’s frightening to see my state just burn out the way it is,” said Tutton, a 40-year resident of that state now vacationing near Lake Tahoe in Glenbrook, Nevada, away from the Newport Beach, California home she shares with her family. “It’s really bad everywhere. They tell you that you have to have an evacuation plan, you can’t have any fires of any kind, not even in your house. You can’t smoke cigarettes.”

Tutton said the fires are all anyone talks about these days.

“I drove down to Carson City the other day, about 20 minutes away, and you can’t even see the mountains as you drive along I-395 near Tahoe, it’s so smoky. It’s terrible. It feels like everything is burning.”

Tutton said she's been told it is the worst fire situation in state history, with more than
2 million acres destroyed and 85 people dead.

For those not near any of the historically large fires, outdoor activities have been curtailed by the poor quality of the air because of the smoke and ash falling on large areas of the state.

Friends in Marin County have told her the sky is so thick with smoke it seems like an overcast day, though the sun is out and there’s not a single cloud.

Her daughter, who lives in Orange County, has asthma and is having a particularly difficult time. Lake Tahoe is usually rife with activity on and around the water, but there’s hardly a biker, boater or swimmer to be found. Most of the state parks are closed.

“We’re supposed to have some rain coming in and that will help quite a bit, I’m sure, but it’s not here yet, Tutton said. “And everywhere you go, you see firemen – on the road, in restaurants, in grocery stores – and they all look absolutely worn out. I always thank them when I can, but you can see they’re totally exhausted.”

Tutton said her nephew works in insurance and while many people are taking advantage of low interest rates so they can buy a new home, they can’t afford fire insurance because it’s so expensive, as is the cost of rebuilding burned homes.

Californians are no strangers to such destruction. Tutton’s sister-in-law had to be evacuated in Napa a few years ago, and 10 minutes after she left her home, it burned to the ground.

Tutton said she feels the state’s deforestation policies are partly to blame for much of the destruction. Her family was told two years ago that they were not allowed to remove trees from their property, but this year got a notice that demanded they remove some 60 trees. That can be a costly proposition for some, costing $500 to $1,500 a tree.

That move she deemed too little, too late, but the situation is not without hope.

“In other places around here, you can see the regrowth from past fires, and it will happen again where these fires are,” said Tutton, “but it’s just so sad to think of all that devastation, all those trees turned to ashes, all those people.”