While Nashville sits over 2,000 miles away from the wildfires burning on the West Coast, many Lipscomb students from California who are living on campus feel the heat from afar.
Due to historic drought, wildfires have charred over 306,000 acres of public and federally-owned California land this year.
Not long after arriving on campus, freshman Courtney Brenner received a call that she hoped she would never get from her parents about the fires. Fire officials had directed her family to evacuate their home in San Bernardino County due to the raging Blue Cut fire.
“There’s been a lot of wildfires. During one a couple months before this, my family didn’t evacuate, but the other half of the town did,” Brenner said. “It’s just made things stressful.”
Brenner has grown up living in a hazard zone in Southern California, and she said wildfire threats and damage impact her profoundly every year.
“Realizing that we live in an area where there’s going to be wildfires, we just have to prepare for the high chance that one day our house could burn down. It’s [a reality] of living in California.”
While Brenner’s family and house escaped the flames, her friend’s family was not so lucky. The Blue Cut fire, fully contained as of Aug. 26, consumed part of his house and garage. Fortunately, his family evacuated safely.
“They were able to save a lot of things, thank God, but it [the fire] went around and burned his neighbors’ houses, too,” Brenner said.
Senior Taylor Romine from Orange County, California, has also dealt with wildfires since her childhood.
Her aunt, uncle and grandmother’s house burned to the ground nine years ago, but they only recently finished rebuilding in a new location.
“That part of my family lost everything,” Romine said. “They didn’t know they wouldn’t get to go back into the house, so my grandma lost her wedding dress, photo albums . . . everything.”
Romine said the high-fire danger this year has refreshed memories from almost a decade ago.
“It emotionally affects you,” she said. “It hurts knowing that someone that you love lost all that.”
Romine said she worries because her family members’ new home stands, once again, in the path of the blaze.
“If the fire crosses over the freeway, it has a straight-shot up the hill to them,” Romine said.
Over 12,000 firefighters continue to work around the clock to contain the twelve fires still burning across California.