My name is Leila Levi.

I was born in Hanford, California. My parents had a walnut tree farm. I'm really allergic to walnut, so I didn't have to work the trees very much. I went to college and I really wanted to be a metal smith. I'm 67. In that period in time, out of every 100 seats, there were only 11 saved for women. It was even more staunch in departments like that. When I graduated in the early 70’s. As a woman I wasn't going to be able to get a job so I had to move to a major city. All throughout my career, it was pretty much all men.

I started coming up to this area in 2009, looking for property with water rights. That was what I really wanted. I came up almost every month for years for over a decade and finally found a place. It wasn't the perfect place for me, but it had water rights. I moved up here in January of 2019. I retired in 2017, I had saved a student's life and my right foot and my right leg were torn off. So, I had to retire early. I came up here in 2017, when you guys had the big flood, I still was on crutches. It was pretty funny. I've been pretty adamant about finding property up here.

I was at Hat Creek, and found a couple of properties I liked up there. As I was driving back, I drove through Greenville, and I hit that open area, just past Greenville, and then got to the Taylorsville cut off on Arlington road and that was it. I drove down and came out here, no cell service, I couldn't call a realtor or anything. But I just felt the energy out here was so incredible and the place was so beautiful that I just felt like it was home already and this was where I wanted to be. It took me a few more years to actually find a property, there's not a lot of properties that come up with water rights, so, it makes it a little more challenging. But, I wanted to start a small farm, I still need a small income because I had to retire early because of the accident.

My property is TPZ land and Williamson Act land, so for the most part, all I had to do was take care of my forested land. It’s 130 acres. I was trying really hard to get this garden in over here. I was putting all my attention over there. I had gotten three goats to help me eat the underbrush and The Red Dragon and the biochar kiln and everything.

I'm 100% off grid, I had a bath house up in the house that had a composting toilet and hot water on demand unit.

I had a campground, with a trailer I’d fixed up. The campground was already here, it just wasn't fixed up. I had to run a new water line. Each spot has their own hanger for a hose, I hung those and I put picnic tables and the porta potties. It was fixed up for campers and then somebody could camp on the deck if they wanted to. I was only planning on having one reservation at a time because I really wanted them to have the privacy and to be able to enjoy the forest.

Everything was limbed as far as I could reach either on the back of the Polaris or with a chainsaw. I had help too, don't get me wrong, but I did over one-thousand trees myself. I had bought something called a red dragon. We were burning, and if you look on that side of the street, mine is the only place that's limbed and was back burned. The Forest Service came out every six months, and said that I would never have a fire through here. And if I did, it would be maybe three feet tall. It would just be kind of a grass burn, which is not at all what happened when you look around.

When the Dixie Fire got closer I was sleeping in my car down in the garden, watching the fire come down the mountain. I’d go back up to the house and take a shower and eat and come back down.

I had been going down to where the fire fighters were stationed there twice a day. I have two structures, and you can't see those two structures. I saw them going to everybody's properties and lay down hoses. But they didn't lay down hoses for me. So, I went down to the campground, just outside of Taylorsville to talk to them. There were two locations where they were stationed. One of them was at the Genesee store, two miles up the road and then one of them was 7.9 miles away, down at the campground. So, I went down there and said, “Hey, you guys, I didn't get hoses. What can we do?” And they're like, “oh, we'll come out and look,” so they came and looked. And then meanwhile, everybody got bladders. And I didn't get bladders. So, I went back down there and they came out and they said, “Well, we're not going to give you structure protection because we ran out of materials”. And I just kind of looked at them.
Then they sprayed both sides of the road from Taylorsville, all the way up to the fork. They didn't spray my property on purpose. They were going to let it burn and I didn't know that at the time.

I was up at the house when somebody came up and was pounding on my door and there's fire everywhere, just like that, in just a few minutes, throughout the whole place.

I came back down, and you couldn't see anything. The smoke was so thick, and everything was on fire, literally everything. Because of the explosion in the wind, literally 100 acres caught on fire in maybe just matter of seconds. It was unbelievable. It was really hot and dry. The fire was everywhere in the forest.

The firefighters went into my garden and started letting all my animals loose. I said, the animals are safer in here, leave them alone. But there was a bunch of them and there was only one of me, so I couldn't really fight, so they let all my animals go. But they left them in the garden, which was the good news. When I came back, they were all just eating. Then, I left. I didn't leave, I just left where they were and then this lady said something like, “What should we do?” I looked at her like, Are you kidding me? I said, “there's two structures up there on which you refuse to give me structure protection. Go save my structures,” because the forest was already all gone.

I never left. I could have left when they first evacuated. But by that time there was no way out. It was already down to the creek. People have talked about their houses burning in 10 minutes or something. But this literally burned 120 acres in a matter of seconds. But that's because the all those embers went up into the air with the explosion and then the wind came through.

After the Walker Fire the Forest Service got a grant, where they cut all the 10-inch and smaller trees all the way from Quincy over to my place and stacked them. They burned the ones in Quincy last year, but they never got out here. So, there were 400 cords of wood stacked around the perimeter of my property. When the fire hit it, it literally exploded. It was deafening. My place probably burned because the Forest Service wouldn't come out and take and burn those 400 cords of wood.

At the same exact moment that the fire hit and exploded, wind came through. With the explosion and all those embers in the middle of the air, because it was literally an explosion, it hurt my ears, it just went poof, that might be why my place burned, even though I had limbed everything. It's impossible to say. I had done so much to try to make sure that my place didn't burn. But here we are.

The closest I can figure is everything burned, but about 10 acres, maybe 20. There was a little bit of spot burning, where as it rolled down to the creek, for example, it mottled. It would miss a patch here and burn a patch. It ran, don't get me wrong, but it ran unevenly. It seemed like a lot of the fire burned in fingers. If you look at the mountains, it's like these fingers. Here it did the same thing, but then it would burn patches and it just kept going.

I had porta potties, for the campground, they just kind of crumbled. They said that blue chemical, it's in the toilets, that just boils away really quickly. It's very flammable. At least now I know why the porta potties went so fast, because they were just gone in seconds. I had about 25 swings hung everywhere. This was a mommy and me swing, and the mommy part is gone, but the me part is still there, the kid part. Most of the swings, you can't even tell they were ever there. They're just gone. Because they told me not to disturb anything before they came out here, I haven't even stopped to look to see if I can find any of the parts.
I had three picnic tables, but they're crumbling now. Around the porta potties and the deck, I had laid down road base so that they would stay clean, and they may not burn, but it just protected that little tiny deck. That's the only thing that it protected, which is something and I'm not complaining about that. But I still lost my income. And it's been really hard. I don't really know what to do. I'm struggling with it.

After the fire they had tanks and guns at both ends of the road. The National Guard, you couldn't come and you couldn't go. So, I couldn't go get humanitarian aid. I couldn't get food. I couldn't get gas. One of my neighbors is on the concentrator, so I gave her my gas. I'm 100% off grid, I'm on solar, but because it was a nuclear winter out here, my solar gave out and the only thing I had was my generators, but you couldn't get gas. I needed that, so that I could keep pumping water to put out fires that were constantly rolling through here. But there was no humanitarian aid at all.

Several of the ranchers were given passes. They could come and go all day long, but they never checked on any of the neighbors to see if they needed anything. Like the lady who was on oxygen, if she needed gas or anything. I'm pretty sure that what they did was a crime against humanity, but I'm not going to even deal with that at this point in time.

And of course, I didn't have insurance and even with FEMA, they don't recognize outhouses, and so I'm not really sure what to do with that. I can fight with them about it later on. I just really don't have the emotional energy to fight with anybody about anything right now. You know, just trying to navigate what I can.

I wish that they had put down fire retardant like they did on the entire rest of the road and that they had back burned like they did everybody else's property. I wish that they hadn't let it go burn hundreds of thousands of animals because they could have stopped it here. Again, that's the part that really bothers me the most, is they let my placed burn and okay, fine, it burned. But, it went across and burned all those other places and all those animals and other people's homes who didn't have to burn because they could have stopped it right here. I think that's what bothers me the most, is all of the animals. We will never know how many tree frogs we lost. How many endangered species? How many of the snow flowers that are endangered? We just won't know.

Here I am, trying to my hardest to live my dream that I have had my whole life. There are moments that I feel like it's dashed, but I am really trying to hold on. I've heard that you can really tell a lot of difference by the next year. I'm kind of hoping and waiting for, “the next year”. For me, I keep getting the wind knocked out of me but I just keep trying to suck down another breath. I am not going to give up.