Aug 15, 2018 -- Doug Stelter ran for his life last year, when a wind-driven firestorm destroyed the property where he was living and killed his brother, his brother's girlfriend, and kennels full of purebred dogs. Now he lives in a FEMA trailer at Lake Mendocino and enjoys catching catfish. But the new fires have him spooked. And a lot of the customers who used to hire him to do work on their land are burned out, too. When we drove out to the parcel where he lived less than a year ago, we saw signs for three different realtors at the end of the road.
What's next for elderly people like Stelter, who didn't own property and relied on occasional, informal work? And with longer fire seasons involving hundreds of thousands of acres burning for weeks, how many Californians can expect to live as fire refugees?