I met Alan Rigg in 2020. I went to paradise to interview Camp Fire Survivors. Every story of fire, homelessness, relocation and corporate betrayal is gut wrenching. If it were possible to quantify – Alan’s was among the worst. You see, tragedies compound. A musician who lost everything in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit, Alan relocated to Paradise to rebuild his life.
That rebuilt life ended when Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) burned all of Paradise and parts of Magalia to the ground.
Alan’s story is harrowing and heroic. When a hundred-year-old transformer threw sparks igniting a wildfire, Alan and thousands of others were still asleep. A friend called to wake him. The rapidly spreading fire engulfed a football field’s worth of trees and homes – each second. He took his beloved dog, hopped in his truck and crept slowly through a hellish, pitch black inferno to safety. 86 others weren’t so lucky. I’ve truncated Alan’s story, but you can read about his trauma in the book on homelessness I wrote with the his help and countless others. Suffice to say, his trauma didn’t end just because he got away from the flames.
Justice for the victims of the Camp Fire has been inadequate (to say the least) and slow. Alan died in February – more than four years after PG&E incinerated his home and all his possessions.
Alan – an independent and talented musician – was forced (like so many survivors) to live on the kindness of others who lived beyond the reach of the fire. Always feeling like he’d overstayed his welcome – Alan’s life finally began to feel like his own when dear friends brought him back to the Paradise ridge, encamped in a trailer alongside their own. They were all refugees sharing the scarred remains of their town and waiting for the corporation that decimated their lives to repair the injury.
Mind you, lots of survivors doubled up, took each other in, clung together to share stories of fear, trauma and loss. Countless folks whose houses was mercifully spared moved neighbors into their guest rooms and driveways. Survivors adopted animals burned out of their homes and lost when their families fled the flames. All of them waiting for PG&E to make good on the damage they’d caused.
For Alan Rigg – the magnificent musician who suffered tragedy twice at the hands of two different epic disasters – the wait ended last month when a third tragedy struck. And his long wait ended – unfulfilled.
June 17, 2020, PG&E plead guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter in the campfire. Of course, that’s not the first time the company has murdered people, but their punishment never fits the crime, so they don’t learn. They don’t stop. And they don’t bother making their surviving victims whole.
Alan died still waiting for the company to return to him the life that he lost. And while intellectually – that’s not possible – the company fought tooth and nail against the notion of even trying. A responsible culprit would admit their crime and make reparations willingly. But PG&E is anything but responsible.
Go to Alan’s Facebook page. Check out his YouTube videos. See the giant hole left in this world when a good man dies. A hole not unlike the one in Alan’s heart.
A celebration of life is planned for Alan next week, in Paradise.