Sarah Ruiz-Grossman is a San Francisco-based reporter on HuffPost's Now team, focused on breaking news. For the last month, she's been busy covering the wildfires that have ravaged her state and left many without power amid rolling blackouts designed to help prevent flames from spreading further.
Her recent stories have looked at how survivors of the 2017 fires are coping, the ways in which extreme weather is exacerbating the problem and the particular risks for seniors with disabilities. Must Reads talked to Sarah about what it’s like to cover a disaster that’s unfolding in your backyard.
How are people in California reacting to both the fires and the outages? Sometimes I feel like at the national news level, it can be hard to convey what this feels like for people on the ground.
The truth is, living in San Francisco, I got a skewed perspective of how Californians were feeling, since the city itself was part of a small area of Northern California that actually didn’t lose power or face evacuations, much less feel the fear of fires spreading toward our homes.
But speaking to residents of Sonoma who went through the 2017 fires, as well as older residents in Marin — just north of SF — who faced days of outages, the fires were terrifying enough, but the outages really added a layer of nightmare they’d never experienced before.
Outages imply things that many people don’t think of at first. It’s not just your lights going out, it’s your fridge and freezer full of food going bad. It’s your local grocery stores and cafés being closed, so there’s nowhere to get more food if you need it. It’s gas stations being shut down so if you don’t have a full tank, you’re worried about being able to get away when evacuations hit your area.
How have you found new insights or angles on fire stories?
Since I moved to California in 2017, fires have been a repeating news story every fall. It can be hard to find a new way in, or one that will translate to a national audience just how scary and life-altering losing your home to a fire is.
For several stories, I’ve focused on milestones — a few months, a year or even two years after a major blaze — and moments when many have forgotten that it happened or expect that folks would have recovered by now. I reached out to people who were affected to detail just how much their lives are still upended, their ongoing search for a permanent home and their wrecked mental health.
You've come back to some of the families you covered in past fires several times now. What have you learned in continuing your relationship with those sources?
Staying in touch with sources has been a real gift. I’m so grateful that they’d be willing to keep sharing their story with me, given how traumatic their experiences have been.
I’ve been most surprised, perhaps naively, by just how long it takes to recover from a disaster like a wildfire. Some of the families I spoke to last month, who had lost their homes in the Oct. 2017 fires in Sonoma, had literally just moved into their newly rebuilt homes a week before. In one case, they were still waiting to move in later this year. That’s a full two years after the disaster, and these are middle or upper-middle-class families who owned homes and had insurance.
What are the big stories you think national media is missing on the fires?
My impression is that this year, national media did far better than previous years in covering California fires, in that the disaster was repeatedly making front pages. However, some of the stories — like an AP piece headlined, “Los Angeles wildfire threatens the homes of the stars” — missed the mark in their framing.
One piece the Los Angeles Times did was exactly the kind of coverage I’d love to see more of, focused on housekeepers and gardeners, largely Latinx immigrants who went to work amid evacuations after employers didn’t warn them away. As natural disasters get worse, the stories to focus on are those of the most vulnerable groups — lower-income folks, people with disabilities, communities of color — who are both hit the hardest and face the steepest battles to recovery.
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