The names were released as the authorities announced that 13 more bodies had been found, bringing the total dead in the Camp Fire up to 42. Ten of the 13 were found in Paradise, and the remaining three in Concow.

“The numbers of losses of life are probably going to go much higher, I fear,” said Jim Broshears, Paradise’s emergency operations coordinator and the town’s former fire chief.

A concern over whether Paradise can rebuild

While the Woolsey Fire chased residents from one of the wealthiest ZIP codes of California, near Malibu, the Camp Fire hit a low-income retirement community in Paradise. Some residents now wonder how — or if — it will be rebuilt.



“It had no real economy,” James Hana said of Paradise, where he has lived since 2002. The town was a haven for residents who were elderly or retired, many of them in mobile homes. A quarter of its residents were over 65, according to census data from 2017. Fourteen percent of the population was below the poverty line.

“What are they going to do?” Mr. Hana said. “They’re not going to rebuild.”

Residents say Paradise began as a mining and lumber town but those industries dried up long ago. The few people employed in town mostly work at local businesses, like restaurants and auto body shops. He makes roughly $25,000 a year as a handyman, he said, enough to get by in Paradise. The median value of a house in Paradise was around $250,000, less than half the California median of $544,000, according to Zillow, the real estate data company.

Mr. Hana sat outside the Neighborhood Church in Chico, a makeshift shelter for displaced residents, wearing donated pajama pants and running shoes. His long beard was segmented with black elastic bands. He lost his home, motorcycle and nearly all of his other belongings. He escaped with his truck, a few bags of tools and his two dogs: Roxy, a Doberman pinscher, and Winter, a German shepherd.

“It’s either God’s way or nature’s way of telling me I needed to downsize,” he joked. “I just didn’t realize I needed to downsize to that extreme. Really, did we have to go that far?”