Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The rumbling of the fire rig finally stopped as the driver shut down the massive diesel engine. I join Donny and the rest of the crew gathering our gear in preparation for exiting through the rear doors. Any fear of bottles or rocks being thrown was left far behind, they could tell because the driver had shut the engine off. They only did that if they were sure it was safe. A few of the crew grunted at the cushiness of the drivers job ferrying crews between camp and fires. You had to have connections to get a job like that. Whatever ill feelings towards the diver were short lived as the crew felt the relief that came with making it back to camp. I hate it at camp which makes me the exception. The feeling of relief the others enjoyed was because they felt safe away from the fires. I know this safety is owed to the fact that the contractors didn’t want to risk losing their equipment. No such worries for the crews. Long rows of converted semi-trailers served as barracks for sleeping in while others formed mobile field kitchens or any number of other services the crews might need. We were still in time for chow though just barely. If we were lucky we might even get a full portion.

Crews tended to eat based on rank. We had been on the line for over a week so there was no telling which crews were in camp at the moment. The stenciled lettering on the back of brush coats showed we belonged to 2/2034. The crew pronounced it “Second of the Twenty Thirty four” and despite our lack of connections the crew did share a fair bit of clout in most camps. Part of this was because we always seemed to be given the more shit assignments, which means the other crews don’t have to do it. The other reason is the Second is the only crew left from the Twenty Thirty Four.  The rest have either perished in the over three decades since the unit was stood up or crossed the line. We were almost all short timers with one to two years left before we would cross the line and be given resident status. This was also why the fire bosses kept throwing us into the worst of it, pulling every last ounce out of us right up to the end. The food was slopped onto our trays by the contract workers. Their uniforms might have been white at one point but the industrial washers weren’t very good at removing the soot that covered everything this time of year. Instead they looked ghoulish in drab gray, faces hidden behind their bulky respirators. Everything in camp was run by private contractors mostly from the big three. The workers were all residents that couldn’t find work elsewhere. Years ago they tried farming it out to what they liked to call foreign nationals but even that time honored tradition failed just like the rest of the economy. In the end it was cheaper to hire locals. There was even a chance one of the ghouls lived in the community we had just abandoned.

The crew was in luck, one of the crews billeted of this camp failed to turn up meaning there is still enough chow for full rations. I lay awake in my rack. It's just after ten at night and I’m the only one in the barracks trailer. We got word the missing crew from earlier was burned out, caught on the wrong side of an ash slide. The Second was being tasked with recovery which meant we would be given an extra two hours rack time.It had nothing to do with the crew, the powers that be seem to think the drivers might need the extra sleep time to help them deal with the stress of watching us pick through the wreckage. We’re not going to complain this time.The crew is using the extra time to enjoy some of the camp’s other amenities. The far end of the camp contains a couple of trailers not on the books. Circled around to leave only one way in and out, three armed Camp Patrollers keep a watch on things just in case. It’s been a while since I last visited the back trailers but no doubt at least one of them is a brothel, another for gambling. I know Eleanor doesn’t care what I do but some part of me finds it unsettling, so I’m turning in early. The brothels are the weird offspring of the practical meeting the reality of having an all-male fire service. In the beginning it was almost something from a utopian painting as men and women worked the fire line side by side. As the rest of society broke down, so did the morals and values that kept such a dream alive. Everyone has a racket and as things broke down people began looking for ways to race to the most despicable lows of humanity. The Federal government ended women in the fire service as a last ditch effort, signaling their inability to maintain even basic human rights within their ranks. Not long after the brothels began springing up in camps. It’s illegal for non-residents to work, which is an issue when the brothels are almost entirely filled with non-resident women. To get around this the women offer their services in exchange for a promise of marriage. If the feds, or god forbid the states, ever decide to raid the brothels, they would find a number of soon to be wed couples engaged in copulation which was enough legal cover to convince the fire bosses to allow the brothels, of course they also skimmed a nice percentage off the operations. Everyone’s got a racket. This gave rise to the term Fire Bride. Interestingly for the non-resident women that worked as Fire Brides, it was one of the few ways they could safely make money.

The brothels were protected rackets with offenders having to answer to fire bosses that could and would send their asses straight into the inferno. Back home in the Bricks, women had it the worst. At least for the Fire Brides they didn’t have to offer their hands in marriage for free. Of course crews don’t get paid so you get creative the longer you go. Most start out looting shit but if you are smart about it, there are always ways to make money. The door to the trailer opens letting the music from the back of the camp spill in. I can tell by the sound of his tentative steps in the dark of the trailer it's Donny. “Boss you awake?'' The whisper barely carries over the music. The dumb fuck left the door the open. “What do you want, Donny.” He’s been with us for most of our current tour. One of the few that isn’t a short timer. I hate everything about the kid but I also know it’s not his fault. Donny spent most of his life living as a resident out in Colorado. His father had somehow convinced a resident woman to marry him, giving him and Donny temporary resident status, Donny’s mother had split when things got rough, taking Eleanor and fleeing to Washington state, eventually ending up in a different Green Zone. His father died just after Donny turned fourteen. The state of Colorado emancipated Donny on his behalf as his step mom hadn’t legally adopted him. Now an adult in the view of the state he was remanded back to his original status as a non-resident. Following a series of riots, Donny was able to get a transfer to the Seattle Green Zone to be with his sister Eleanor. By the time Donny turned sixteen, two years of living in the non-resident Bricks had convinced him to sign up. Too young to be useful to anyone, the fire service has been punting him around for the last three years. It's hard enough to get a crew to accept you, and Donny was still so childlike about the world around him that most crews dumped him as soon as they could. I’d be looking to do the same at the end of this tour if he wasn’t Eleanor’s brother. It was the only thing she had ever asked of me, to keep him safe. The women didn’t care about anything except pathetic little Donny. I know why he is here whispering in the dark. “The answer is no Donny. You don’t need to go and get mixed up with that shit.” I won’t sell Donny smack. It's got nothing to do with morals or shit like that. Everything about the kid tells me he will fall apart the moment he starts using. I’ve seen it happen enough times to know the look. The kid is paper thin and the second he finds an escape from reality, he is never going to come back. Eleanor wouldn’t forgive me for that. Better to wait it out and hope he becomes someone else’s problem. Sure he could buy from some other crew, if he was brave enough to try it, but he wasn’t. “I just need something…” his voice trailed out but I knew what he was trying to say. Seeing all of those natives shook him up more than he realizes. I reach into my bag tucked safely under my head. Small bottle, I check the label in the little bit of light from the still open door. “Here, swallow these, don’t chew em.” I gave him two tablets. “Thanks boss.” I listen in awe to all of the noise Donny makes as he tries to find his rack. It takes about twenty minutes before his breathing takes on the steady quality of sleep. The kid doesn’t need dope, not yet anyways. Two aspirin was enough. As Donny’s snores mix with the sounds of camp from the still open door, my mind turns back to the gray area. Anything to take my mind off the fact that Donny is able to sleep but I’m not. Fuck Eleanor, maybe.  

Palmore was one of the two largest homeowner insurance providers left in the state of California when the Pay Day fire kicked off and it wasn’t by choice. Nearly every national insurance provided had some part of the market in the state due the sheer size of the market. Each company competed to insure the least riskiest homes which often meant those inside city limits. The problem for these companies was that in order to operate in the state they had to play by the rules set by state. More so than any other state in the country California epitomized what happens when you kick the can down the road. The largest housing market in the country had also been one of the hottest for decades. Oddly enough, part of the problem was the result of nuclear weapons. Back before the weapons became so powerful and accurate, the U.S. government became worried about what would happen if Russian warheads landed in major metropolitan areas. The solution was dispersal. Starting in the fifties the government started pushing the idea of not putting all of your eggs in one basket.Reliable highways and expanding infrastructure meant people could and should reside outside core urban areas targeted by the Ruskies. This was the birth of urban sprawl. For a generation the answer to every problem was to build further outside the problem area. When social problems occurred in cities, mostly white communities fled just as they had when faced with nuclear annihilation. To feed the increasing need for homes outside the urban core areas, tract developments sprang up. Each of these new homes was increasingly being built in what the experts called the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI). This wording was used because of the fear of scaring away home buyers.  WUI is just a polite way of saying an area that can, will, and has burned at some point. This is not something people and communities were eager to talk about at first.

The problem wasn’t only that more homes were being built in areas that traditionally burn, these homes were to house the most prolific source of wildfires, people. Each new home meant more powerlines that could spark fires, vehicles from which burning cigarettes could be thrown, and of course the ever present dump fuck kids playing with matches. You would have thought someone would have pointed out the risk of wildfires to these homes as being a major problem. Some did at first but the solution was simple, CalFire. More funding to suppress wildfires before they could threaten homes. This just made things worse as it gave people an even more false sense of safety in building in these areas. Not everyone was naive to the growing threat however. Just like it was those seeking to profit from exploiting the available land in the WUI, it all comes down to money. The threat of wildfires making homes uninsurable prompted the state of California to pass the FAIR Insurance Act. The intent was to use fees on insurance policies to form a pool covering the most at risk properties. This plan came about due to the private insurance market not wanting to take on the risk presented by some of the homes being built in the WUI. It's easy to forget how important homeowners insurance is to the American dream. No lender will lend on a property not insured, which means every time a new home was built in the WUI, some bean counter had to look at the risk vs. the profits of insuring the home. Each time a new buyer put an offer down on an already built house, this process had to occur again. While the FAIR act was designed to solve a relatively small problem at the time, less than 1% of all homes in the state when passed in the 1960’s, a much bigger problem was brewing. What insurance providers signing off on new construction didn’t realize was that climate change was going to screw up all of their neat little calculations. By the end 1990s the early years of the decades-long drought was already in full swing. Fire Bosses and planners were quietly talking about “climate” as a moving target and no longer a fixed element.

The FAIR Act had been bolstered over the years but rumbles about costs were growing. While the FAIR act created an insurer of last resort, in the form of the State, the actual funding and management of policies came from the private insurance companies. They were required to keep these high risk properties on their books as a cost of operating in the State. To cover these high risk policies, the insurers charged a premium on all policies, not a popular thing to do. This strategy also created increased tension between the State and insurers as increases in premiums were capped on a yearly basis, preventing insurers from raising prices enough to cover the actual risk they were insuring. As the century came to a close The nation as a whole was setting records yearly for wildfire damages and cost. California was facing an even bigger problem as housing demand continued to outstrip the market’s capacity to build. Young couples began putting off having children because they couldn’t afford more than tiny cramped apartments. Employers complained about having to pay their workers more to afford tiny apartments. Through it all insurers watched as their risks grew while profits slowed. Each year larger and larger fires took a bigger bite out the industry’s dough pile.

Beginning in the early 2000s insurers began withdrawing from the home insurance market in California. Seeing the trend the state issued a moratorium on dis-enrollment.  Unlike Florida, the insurance market in California was highly regulated, some said too regulated, meaning the state had the power to force insurers to continue homeowner policies under emergency powers. What was billed as a short term patch until the state could fix some of the issues causing the insurers to flee, became like the droughts, decades long with no end in sight. That is until the US Supreme Court agreed to hear Palmore Insurance’s appeal. After losing for two decades in the state’s court system Palmore was granted a lifeline, or as was more likely, they had found a way to purchase one. Citing Florida V. Dymor, the nation’s highest court, ruled in Palmore’s favor, claiming that the state of California had over reached its authority to regulate the insurance provider in part because of the Commerce Clause. This little appreciated act prevents states from interfering with cross border commercial activities as that job falls to the Federal Government. Palmore owned several luxury condos in a Florida complex owned by the then sitting president of the United States. The court believed the company’s claim that it conducted business at these properties and thus qualified as an interstate entity. Even before the ink could dry two million of the highest risk homeowners received disenrollment notices. The kindling was being gathered.