SACRAMENTO, Calif. — It’s hard, Michael and Kristy Daneau said, to put into words what it means to see what was their home that was destroyed by the Park Fire.

“Very numb,” Kristy said. “It is difficult being here and just trying to identify the things you had.”

They said it was 30 minutes from their home being under a warning notice to an evacuation order.

The evacuation and the discovery of losing their home is even more raw for the couple and their daughters, as this is the second home they have lost to a major fire, the first being the Camp Fire in Paradise in 2018.

“It feels very surreal.” Michael said. “You don’t think that you’re going to lose, let alone one house to a wildfire in your life, but then a few short years later, lose a second one. So it’s a surreal feeling.”

Michael Kristy said they had property and fire insurance on their home in Paradise, but with the increasing costs in the last few years, they weren’t financially able to insure their Chico home.

“It was just too unattainable for us,” Michael said. “We would have had to have a mortgage sized payment to be able to afford insurance, and they would not allow us to pay it in monthly payments either. It was three lump sums, with the first being $7,000.”

The Park Fire has destroyed over 600 structures and is the fourth largest in the state’s history.

This year the National Interagency Fire Center reports there have been over 29,000 wildfires, with the Park Fire being the biggest active blaze in the country.

We are heading into a precarious time of the year as well for fires, says UC Davis environmental science professor Mark Swchartz.

“What we’ve seen over the last couple of decades is that the fall rains have been delayed and we get these fall winds,” Swchartz said. “And so, it’s been more frequent that fall winds have come during dry periods. And that’s a place where we’re very vulnerable to having fires blow up into big fires.”

CalFire said this year’s wildfire activity is nearly 3,000% higher than last year.

Swchartz said he has done studies to help forecast fire seasons, but said wildfires are something unto themselves.

“I asked Cal Fire for all their data on ignitions and acres burned by date over the last 50 years, a couple of years ago,” he said. “To see if you could use a June, July or even early August to predict how many more fires there would be that year. It turns out there’s shockingly little predictive capacity.”

Swchartz said thankfully it doesn’t seem like it will be a monsoonal weather year which brings increased lighting strikes.

For Michael and Kristy, while things are still raw, they said they have things to be thankful for.

The arrival of their first grandchild came the morning after the fire started.

“We have a grandson,” Michael said. “So that was really an amazing feeling in the midst of all this tragedy.”

Something positive they said to concentrate on as they start over once again.

To learn more about Michael Kristy’s journey, click here.