On this episode of Margin Call, we welcome two women with recent firsthand experience of the impact of natural disasters. Dayna Willis did animal rescue work during the recent California fires, and Wendi Thomason’s mother lost her home in Hurricane Harvey. They joined the Margin Call crew to share their experiences and discuss the personal and profound ways in which natural disasters affect people’s lives.
Russell Morse: 00:08 Greetings all and welcome to Margin Call the podcast and editorial meeting for Kwest On Media. I’m your host Russell Morse. Late this summer and well into the fall, the world watched as California burned. A series of wildfires including the Mendocino complex fire and Campfire in northern California, as well as others throughout the state combined to burn nearly 2 million acres, causing 3.5 Billion dollars in damage, displacing an estimated 5,000 people and killing at least 88. The destruction of these fires reminds us of the increase in frequency and devastation in this country as a result of natural disasters. Last year, Hurricane Harvey caused catastrophic flooding in the Houston area, causing the staggering and record-setting, $125 billion dollars in damage, displacing tens of thousands and causing the deaths of over 100. These destructive events have prompted debates about disaster preparedness, climate change, and the ability of the federal government to respond to increasingly destructive natural disasters.
Russell Morse: 01:09 And while all of those are worthwhile questions, sometimes the lasting personal effect of these events is lost in the debate. The people who are directly affected, I’m joined today by two women who experienced these events firsthand. Dayna Willis is a registered veterinary technician in theBay Area who did animal rescue work during the northern California fires, and Wendi Thomason is an art consultant whose family suffered considerable losses as a result of Hurricane Harvey. I’m very grateful to both of them for coming on the show to share their stories. Thank you and welcome to both of you. I’d like to start with you, Dayna, because in your situation the fires did not come to you. You went to the fires to try to help. It’s remarkable and admirable. Can you tell me a little bit about how you made that decision? Have you done rescue work before? Did you work with a specific organization?
Dayna Willis: 02:04 I come from a family of firefighters men, and so they’re usually the ones running to the fires. In order to get out of there, that’s the only way that your livestock will survive. You just have to let them go and they were showing videos of horses just roaming the streets.
Russell Morse: 02:22 So is there just for me, because I don’t know, is there a considerable amount of livestock in that area in paradise.
Dayna Willis: 02:32 Okay. The Paradise Magalia areas. Very rural, very foresty. The fire was traveling at like, I think it was something crazy, like 80 football fields a minute. I mean it was coming fast. People didn’t have time to do anything other than run.
Russell Morse: 02:52 So you’re saying people who keep livestock, they were letting the livestock go so that they could flee on their own. Is that, is that what you’re saying?
Dayna Willis: 03:00 If they wouldn’t load in, I mean they probably tried to load them up or if they don’t have a trailer, you know, it’s all very chaotic. Horses get scared, they just, you can’t, you know, you can’t sit there and fight with them. So a lot of them just got let go. Some people were working in Chico and they heard about it and they weren’t allowed to get back up the hill to get to their animals that were in their homes. The group of people that were going in with trailers and just getting livestock out. You know, the first day a lot of people just found horses roaming, you know, they were just bringing in horses from everywhere.
Russell Morse: 03:44 You work with animals, you’re an animal person, so this is your skillset, right? Whenever there’s a crisis, people think, what can I contribute? How can I help? And you felt that your experience and expertise with animals was, was the best way help up there?
Dayna Willis: 04:00 I did. I felt like we needed to get a tray. I got a friend with a horse trailer.
Russell Morse: 04:09 So you attached the trailers to your vehicles and drove toward the fire. I’m sure you were the only ones going in that direction.
Dayna Willis: 04:17 Yeah, us and other crazy people with trailers, but yeah.
Russell Morse: 04:20 How do you encounter, I mean, what’s, what’s the strategy for finding livestock for finding horses and then once you do, you know, how do you convince them you’re trying to help them?
Dayna Willis: 04:30 Yeah, so we had a problem with a cow for about an hour trying to get the cow to the trailer. The way we were run, we were really organized. We actually had a little dispatch team and they would dispatch us to a certain address looking for a specific animal, that way, you know, we were in contact with the actual owner to let them know where we were taking their animals once we got them, which was mostly Gilroy because that’s what’s happening now is people know their animals are safe, but they don’t know where they are so it’s hard to get them reunited. So at least you know, when we did it, we had a record so we let the owner know what was happening. So that’s how we knew where we were going.
Russell Morse: 05:14 Could you see flames? Did you have a sense of how close you should or shouldn’t go? Roads were closed, right?
Dayna Willis: 05:22 It was eerie because we were the only ones in a town, you know like if you imagine going into a town that’s just gone like everything is gone and it was, it was very eerie. Everything was still smoking. We weren’t in the fire danger per se, but I had to watch out because there were downed power lines and you never knew there were little flames, you know, stuff that was still burning and because that cow didn’t want to load in the trailer cow. Train your cows to load up in case of emergency. We ended up being stuck up there at night and that was really scary. I’m not going to lie because there were no lights. There was smoke, embers.
Wendi Thomason: 06:09 I bet you can’t tell what it looks like where you’re at because everything was gone.
Dayna Willis: 06:15 Yes, it’s exactly how. It was weird. It was very eerie.
Russell Morse: 06:24 Do you have any tricks and tips for convincing a cow or get into a trailer now that you had that experience?
Dayna Willis: 06:32 It took four of us, a lot of pulling on the ropes. A lot of pushing from behind. Eventually, the cow just decided to do it. I mean we were pulling and tugging on that cow. It literally an hour and at one point I think my friend reached down and picked up her hoof to like get her to step into the trailer.
Russell Morse: 06:55 Were you going up there mostly for horses or were you thinking about family pets even? You know, dogs and cats.
Dayna Willis: 07:03 We were checking on dogs and cats, but we mostly, the animals that we took off the mountain, we took off goats, chickens, two horses, and a cow. The cats, I think because we were there. The fire started on a Thursday and we were there Saturday and Sunday and all the cats were hiding. You know, a lot of them were. It took them a few days to come out of hiding. I didn’t see any dogs. It was crazy.
Russell Morse: 07:37 Once you found a horse or a cow, you were able to coordinate with an owner and then. I mean it must have been difficult because those people were displaced. Right? Like you’re saying, how can you meet with someone who doesn’t have a home? Where do you go?
Dayna Willis: 07:50 Gilroy fairgrounds were the meeting point for the livestock and we had the owner’s numbers, so we were able to actually call them and let them know that we got their animals off the mountain and they were so grateful because that’s all they had. Like we were taking these horses, I mean there was nothing left of their property. I couldn’t imagine. I couldn’t believe that they survived. Everything was burned around them. It’s just really crazy what animals can go through.
Russell Morse: 08:23 I had no idea. I mean I know that this kind of work exists, but of course livestock, it’s not something a lot of people you could think you could take your family dog, put them in the car and evacuate when you evacuate, but it’s very different.
Dayna Willis: 08:36 And unfortunately a lot of their dogs were at home. Right. And they were at work and they couldn’t get. That was the sad part.
Russell Morse: 08:44 All right, well I want to turn to you, Wendi. First of all, I’m so glad you could be here partly because I feel like a lot of the time we tend to forget events like this, right? Like it’s the national attention is completely focused on Harvey. Like every tournament, tv, everything’s Harvey and then you know, the weeks kind of tapers off and people move on, but the people who are affected by these events continue to deal with those lasting effects. From what I understand, that’s what, you know, the past year has been like for you and your family. Can you tell me a little bit about what you guys experienced during Harvey
Wendi Thomason: 09:23 Actually my mom just moved back to the house today. So she has, you know, and surviving the transition from losing everything familiar and getting, you know, and then trying to be healthy enough to get it all back, you know, it’s not an easy thing to have to deal with sitting at FEMA and the time it takes to get the help that you need and people that have jobs don’t have time to go sit down at FEMA because they’ve got to keep supporting their families and paying their bills. So it’s very difficult. And the worst part about it, if my mom was a caregiver for her sister, and my concern from the beginning was that my aunt would not survive this transition was ready and she’s not going to. So it’s very difficult because she’s been moved around and it’s cost her, you know, it’s cost her,
Russell Morse: 10:27 Your aunt’s health was already not good right before. And then of course, what happened, just so I have a little bit of background, what was, what was the series of events with your mom’s house? How close were they to the storm where they flooded? Was the house damaged with what happened?
Wendi Thomason: 10:50 When the storm first started coming in the very first day it started raining and her town Dickinson. and they got 55 inches in two hours. It actually came up from the bayou and she called at 2:30 in the morning and said the water is at their ankles. And I said, okay, we’ll start hitting the pictures, you know, it’s very chaotic because you are not thinking properly and you’re scared. It’s in the middle of the night. And she knew she had my aunt who was 400 pounds and cannot walk within 30 minutes. It was up to their knees by 4:00 in the morning and was up to their waist. And the thing that was a blessing was the house next door was a two-story and they had built four feet up. So they were able to get over there. There were 48 people in that house from the neighborhood.
Russell Morse: 11:52 48 people in one home. Wow.
Wendi Thomason: 11:52 And you could hear people screaming for help because you couldn’t see, the power was out. It was in the middle of the night and the water was moving swiftly. So it was, to hear it on the phone was traumatized. I’m still traumatized. It’s traumatizing. And my mother lost her house in a fire five years ago. So we’re listening to her stories. I completely understand the differences in a fire. You cannot tell what you have left. All of it looks the same. At least in a flood, you can tell what you had for insurance reasons. And so, I mean, that’s the only thing that we could tell what you lost.
Russell Morse: 12:34 Your mom and her sister were, they caught us by surprise that they think they would be okay if they stayed at home with just …
Wendi Thomason: 12:43 Completely. She wanted me to come there and I said, you come here because I live five blocks actually from the water and but I’m 15 feet up. And so I said, so I did it go. I would have been trapped down there. Praise Jesus, because we, they lost all their cars, you know, and they had to be rescued by a boat in the middle of the night. So
Russell Morse: 13:09 So all 48 people who were in that house were eventually rescued by a boat in the middle of the night.
Wendi Thomason: 13:13 Yes. two or three at a time.
Russell Morse: 13:17 Wow, that’s incredible. Your home, you were okay because as you said, you were 15 feet up or so.
Wendi Thomason: 13:26 So we’re on a point, so the water sucks into the lake and the bayous it goes away from us. So I knew from the previous storm that they did well here, so I wasn’t, I really wasn’t too worried. But every one of my friends and family, high school teachers, when your whole community it hit, 7,500 homes in our town, you know, and only 20 percent of people had insurance, 20 percent. So it’s changed everybody’s lives and I don’t know. You kind of live in fear, you know, what’s going to happen next when it’s gonna happen again. And when you were talking about earlier how people forget, but it’s so hard when there are so many disasters and shootings and all kinds of different things that people have to direct their attention to it. You just have to take care of yourself and take care of your community. You know, it’s hard to take on the fire because it almost throws you into another level of shock that this keeps happening to our country.
Russell Morse: 14:37 Well, I’m glad you mentioned that aspect because I think that is part of it. I don’t mean to say that just to be dismissive of society at large. Oh, we don’t care. We do in general. We do. And people come together to help where they can. But it’s hard as, as you say, with successions of events and sometimes the way that intense media focus shifts.
Wendi Thomason: 15:04 It’s almost that you just can’t take it on because you’re still in survival mode here. It’s upsetting. I have a cousin in Santa Monica, I have family, we have family all over the coast. So we were worried about those folks too, you know, making sure they got safe. And, uh, you know, it’s this, it’s just a sad, sad for those people.
Russell Morse: 15:29 What was your mom’s experience over the past year? Did she have another place to live? Did she and her sister find another place temporarily, or what have they been doing?
Wendi Thomason: 15:41 M mom’s been staying with an 84-year-old friend and she had an extra room, but you know how it is living with family, you’ll have problems with. They’re living with another person. They can really, you know, it’s this difficult and you don’t have anything they can love, you know, and she’s gone through it, you know, she breaks down all the time. She yells and screams. it’s hard to be around her, to be honest. She’s very erratic.
Russell Morse: 16:14 That kind of stress and trauma really takes a toll and that’s when we start to come apart at the seams a little bit. It’s hard to keep it together through all of that. You said she moved back in, was it, did she move back into her house?
Wendi Thomason: 16:33 Today. It is her first night tonight.
Russell Morse: 16:33 That’s great. I’m really happy to hear that. She, she must be thrilled. Right.
Wendi Thomason: 16:41 It was kind of weird. She seemed very nervous. Like she was out of place, you know, and I don’t know. It’s a lot to take on and it’s hard for her to be happy when her sister is dying in the hospital and having to make decisions about her life.
Russell Morse: 17:02 Yeah, it doesn’t solve everything. There’s still a lot of remaining questions and especially after that kind of trauma, I can only imagine how hard it is to get a good night’s sleep or celebrate any kind of victory. But I’m very happy to hear that she’s back in her home, uh, and she to go back to her own home, H
Wendi Thomason: 17:22 Her own home. Our house was a complete 100 percent gone. We got destroyed. So therefore when a house is over 50 percent damaged, you have to go to code. So her house was built in 1960, so they had to completely redo the power and the plumbing, Yada Yada. So that was a long know, a lot of work, a lot we had to take. And the mold was so bad that we added was just the most awful.
Russell Morse: 17:56 Yeah, of course. I want to ask you, Dana, very briefly just to give us. Maybe we can get some geographic help about the fires. I’m from California. I’m from northern California, from San Francisco, but a lot of those parts that are north outside of the Bay Area they get lost. Well even for someone like me who’s from northern California, they can get a little jumbled geographically and I’m trying, you know, I keep looking at maps. I don’t live in San Francisco anymore. I live on the east coast, but I paid very close attention of course because I have friends all over. I have friends in Chico and willows in those towns up North. But you said you know the Paradise area well or you’ve spent some time in Paradise. Can you talk a little bit about that town and whatever kind of before and after you might have experienced there.
Dayna Willis: 18:46 So it was a long time ago. I lived in Chico when I was in junior high and my dad would take me to Paradise because the place was beautiful. This little mountain town, a lot of the residents there were retired which made it hard for them to get out quickly. But there was this awesome wooden bridge called the Honey Run bridge and it was the only one of its kind and it was a, you know, covered wooden bridge and had been there for a long time, I forget, like over 150 years. And that was a really good memory that I have with my dad and it actually burned down. And so, I actually, I got a picture of it because we ended up going down that road to look for some, some animals and it’s pretty, pretty sad.
Russell Morse: 19:33 So the bridge is still there, but it’s charred.
Dayna Willis: 19:36 No, it’s gone. It’s totally gone. And it survived one fire not that long ago. The residents actually people left their own homes to save the bridge and they saved at that time. But this time this fire was crazy. It was just really crazy. But geographically, if you’re looking at a map of the South Bay, so like San Jose and Los Gatos and all of that, imagine the South Bay being on fire and then that is what we were dealing with.
Russell Morse: 20:07 Do you mean in terms of typography or, or population density or…
Dayna Willis: 20:15 Just the area. Just if you’re looking at the actual size wise, yes, it was very rural… So there’s probably a lot more people in the South Bay. The problem is people were told that they first, they were told they didn’t have to leave and then 30 minutes later they were told they had to get out. Now it’s just a lot of sort of, you know, it just changed really fast.
Russell Morse: 20:38 Did you have a lot of interaction with coordinating with people up there, helping them to find their animals. Did you hear a lot of stories about people’s firsthand and what they were going through?
Dayna Willis: 20:50 Yeah, there’s some scary. I had some friends up there that have some scary stories and then we met, you know, uh, people. People are amazing too, you know, we met people that had lost everything and their attitude was still just like, you know, they were happy that they were alive. They were alive, that they had their family. Um, you know, they realized that it was, it was stuff and obviously, they were going to have to, you know, some people were staying in tents and the Walmart, some people were able to stay in hotels. It’s just everybody’s kind of all over the place, but their attitude was still so, so just positive. It was, it was really inspiring actually.
Russell Morse: 21:36 Yeah. I can imagine it’s a perspective, especially if you’re a little bit on the outside of it. That’s incredibly inspiring. Um, Wendi, you mentioned earlier that your mom dealt a lot with FEMA and maybe you were doing some of that too. It’s like a full-time job. You’re saying the amount of time it takes/
Wendi Thomason: 21:57 It is a full-time job. you have to sit there, wait in line and wait in line and it two or three or four hours. Eight hours every day. Yeah. So I mean, if you didn’t have a job, I mean that was the only way that you could get it all done, you know, there were, there are so many forms and so many interviews and so many, it’s just, it shouldn’t be that difficult to get help. They should make that process simpler and simplify it. And why do all that? Do you know, you lost everything. Just get the stuff done, handle up, you know. And that’s what I don’t understand. I don’t understand why…
Wendi Thomason: 22:38 Your mom’s objective at that time was to show what she had lost so that she could get support…
Wendi Thomason: 22:49 Many levels because you have a person who needs to go into a home because we had no ability to take care of her and she couldn’t walk. So we had to get her in some kind of assisted living. Well, those places are $5,000 a month. So here you go. How are you going to pay for this? Right? For 12 months, that’s $75,000. I mean, if you’re looking at $150,000 on your insurance, well how are you going to fix your house now? You know, so they brought a trailer out to our property, which they had. They built a 200-foot ramp for my aunt, 200-foot ramp. Can you imagine the cost? So the energy that they did to build that into that, why can’t you that take that energy and that money and put it into the house and get her back in faster.
Russell Morse: 23:43 A 200-foot ramp. Is that because to make it accessible because she’s..,
Wendi Thomason: 23:47 By wheelchair. She couldn’t move in that FEMA trailer, she was too small for her,
Russell Morse: 23:59 Right? So it was accessible by wheelchair. But once you’re inside, you can’t…
Wendi Thomason: 24:04 Not without worry that she is going to fall, you know, that was the hardest part. And then uh, to get people, you know, to find a place for her to be taken care of by finding a place that would accept a person of her, um, disability. You know, especially for a person who is heavy. A lot of people in that industry don’t want to take it on. And so that was another problem. So, um, unfortunately, it’s not been good for her.
Russell Morse: 24:43 Earlier, just about there’s some resolution today that your mom is in her home, but there’s still a lot of lingering questions and she has her respective trauma and there are still questions, um, about your aunt. I think that’s a very important point to remember that this…
Wendi Thomason: 24:59 Well just think about the people that were wheelchair bound.
Wendi Thomason: 25:04 All the people that have disabilities in a town of all these areas, people that are in wheelchairs, how they get and get out, you know, how they going to fix their homes. They can’t even, they’re in a wheelchair. How they gonna get to FEMA, they never leave their house, you know, and uh, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a crazy situation that, how many people here provide that?
Russell Morse: 25:27 As both of you know, our, our person in common is Tom. Tom Turpel. I’ve known Tom almost 20 years now. I don’t know if that compares to how long you’ve known Tom. This conversation started because, you know, he comes on the show periodically. We worked together as journalists years ago, so we still collaborate on some, on some projects and we did, we had a conversation about how what kind of story we could tell about the fires that were important or relevant or how could we contextualize it? And you mentioned your experience with Harvey and I thought, you know, what’s important to me about the fires. Obviously, I’m biased in some ways because I’m from northern California, so it felt it hit home a little bit more is that I, I just, um, you know, I want us to remember that, that the people’s lives who were affected by these disasters. It goes on. It really continues and I just think it’s an important thing to remember and not just have this kind of laser point focus where we’re chasing one tragedy after another. So I thank both of you, I personally have learned a lot. I think this will be very, for our listeners to kind of give some context, the fires are still very fresh, so people are still talking about that, but I think it’s a really good reminder that Harvey was, was not that long ago and people are still trying to find a way to get back to normal. So thanks to both you Dayna, and Wendi. Once you guys are on the show, you’re always welcome to come back. So thanks for taking the time tonight. All my best to both of you and to your families. and, and please reach out anytime. Thanks to you. And thanks to our listeners, until next time, Kwest On everybody.
Eming Piansay: 27:19 This episode of Kwest On Media’s Margin Call was produced in Richmond, California.
