The Brief

On the morning the Camp Fire destroyed Paradise, California, Charles Brooks was getting his kids ready for school. His eldest son, who was eight at the time, came into his room to say he smelled smoke. But Brooks didn’t smell it.

The sky darkened as they drove to school, and before long, ash was falling from the sky. Brooks decided to turn back, and as he pulled into the driveway, the school called to say classes were canceled.

“That phone call was really important,” he told Grist, “because if we had all dropped off our kids at school that morning, with what happened, we never would have gotten back to them.”

Ash began to fall so hard it sounded like rain. A burning stick landed at Brooks’ feet. “At that point I was like, ‘Hey, I think we’re out of here,’” he said.

He told the boys to pack two days of clothes and a favorite toy. He filled a bag for himself and his wife, who had already left for work in nearby Chico, and grabbed the dog. It took hours to get out of Paradise. Calls to his wife kept dropping. Fires broke out in the yards of homes as they passed. When he learned later that some evacuees drove through tunnels of fire as they fled, he felt fortunate his children hadn’t endured that.

“It was just an awful, awful experience that I would never want another person to have to go through,” Brooks said. “But many people have since. In Lahaina, California, Colorado, Oregon, lots of people have gone through a very similar experience.”

The Brooks family looks at remains of their home in Paradise, California, after it was destroyed by the Camp Fire.

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Courtesy of Charles Brooks

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The Camp Fire, sparked by a faulty transmission line on November 8, 2018, killed 85 people and burned 14,000 homes. It destroyed 95 percent of Paradise and the neighboring town of Concow, and remains the deadliest fire in California history.

Brooks and his family lost their home that day. Almost immediately, they resolved to rebuild, and Brooks soon founded the Rebuild Paradise Foundation. It has helped hundreds of families by providing grants for building costs, like engineering fees, not covered by insurance and government assistance, and free resources, like residential floor plans pre-approved by the city building department. Last year, the foundation awarded more than $1 million to families.

Grist called Brooks, who is board chair of the foundation, to see how, five years later, his family and his town are doing. He was on his way to repair the iconic “May You Find Paradise” sign that greets drivers as they enter town. It had burned in the fire and been restored, but was damaged in last winter’s storms. “People couldn’t wait for it to be back up,” he said. “It looks a little different than it did before, but it’s going to survive.”

The same is true for Paradise. The town, once home to around 26,000 people, dwindled to only 1,000 or so after the fire. In the years since, more than one-third of the pre-fire population has returned, and some 3,000 housing units have been built. Brooks reflected on what the anniversary means to his family, what Paradise looks like now, and how in the age of wildfires, impacted communities can find ways to thrive again. His comments have been edited for length and clarity.

The Paradise we loved, the Paradise we lost

We moved to Paradise in 2004, before we were married. My wife and I were living and working in Chico, and the only place where we could afford to buy a house was Paradise. That was the story of a lot of people who lived here. We got a tiny fixer-upper. Within the first year, we fell in love with the community. Our neighbors were wonderful people, the type of people who would take your trash can down if you were gone on vacation. We gave neighbors eggs from our chickens. They gave us honey.

When we wanted to start a family, we moved to the house that we ended up losing in the fire. It was a fixer-upper too, a small four-bedroom house on half an acre.

It was completely destroyed. We had a friend who worked for one of the utility companies who was getting back in the next day to survey damage for his company. He asked me if we’d like to know if we lost our house. That poor guy talked to at least two dozen people to let them know that they lost their home. That’s like being the grim reaper.

It just sucked. You work most of your young adult life to finally get a piece of the dream of owning a home. And then something that you put all your blood, sweat, and tears into, where your kids took their first steps … our kids had only known that home. Those types of things come up at random times and weigh on you pretty hard.

The restored welcome sign in Paradise, California. Charles Brooks and a firefighter reinstalled the halo on top just in time for the weekend’s anniversary events.

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Courtesy of Charles Brooks

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Believing in the rebuild

We learned that we lost our house late morning on Friday, the day after the fire had started. That afternoon I told my wife, “Hey, I think we should rebuild.” She said OK.

The next week, we dragged ourselves to an architect’s office, exhausted, not knowing anything that we wanted. I think it took us two months for us finally to get up the courage to go back and start talking about what we wanted.

During that time, we were going through the emotions of whether to really rebuild. It took almost a month before we could get back up and see our property. With everything we were hearing and seeing through the media and pictures, it seemed like the town was completely destroyed. Everybody was saying there was no chance for Paradise.

But then you started seeing videos of how the Holiday Market survived. The Ace Hardware survived. You started seeing little glimmers of hope. There was this point in time when we said, “You know what? We absolutely love it there. The people are amazing. We can do this.”

There are fewer trees in Paradise now, but Brooks says there are new sunrise and sunset views over the ridgelines.

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Courtesy of Charles Brooks

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The missing middle

My wife and I started talking about how we needed to do more. We started making posts and sharing pictures on social media of the little glimmers of hope.

A friend saw what we were doing and introduced me to this incredible woman, Jennifer Gray Thompson, who started the Rebuild North Bay Foundation to help people in Santa Rosa recover after the Tubbs Fire. She told me, “I can share with you what we’ve done down here, but your disaster is completely different. You have to do what makes sense for your community.”

We knew that the government was going to develop programs for the non-insured and underinsured, programs for low-income and extremely low-income people. But working folks who were kind of lower-middle class, working paycheck to paycheck, were facing housing replacement costs that had skyrocketed because of disaster economics.

At the same time, all these costs started showing up that FEMA and insurance were not going to address. We wanted to build a program around these gaps, and to develop programs that helped “the missing middle,” the group of people who are above typical assistance but not able to afford market-rate housing.

The foundation’s volunteers were going through this in parallel. So we knew that was what other people were going through. So many people have reached out to the foundation over the years to say, “I can’t believe you thought about this. It was such a lift to know that somebody else recognized how hard it is to do this.”

Charles Brooks with his wife, Jenn, and their sons, Liam and Tyler.

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Building back smarter

There’s a heightened level of awareness that you have after going through something like this.

We’ve learned a lot. The collective consciousness of the community is very fire adapted, fire aware. When you drive around town, you can see that in the way that builds are done. You’re seeing innovation. People are really paying attention to defensible space.

Our community is installing an early warning system. In case your cell phone goes down, which we saw on that day, there’s also an audible alert that lets you know. All of our utilities are going underground. The schools have more robust plans in place.

Our parks department is working with fire scientists to create buffer zones. They’re acquiring property, getting rid of thick vegetation and developing parks that are maintained and that are large enough that people can use them as safety zones.

We have people who are really focused on learning from Indigenous practices of how to work with the land. They’re learning about the cultural practices of Native Americans. We’re doing burning in a way that actually benefits the environment and reduces fire severity. Last week there were eight prescribed burns, some of them up to 8,000 acres, in our area. Five years ago, in the greater Northern California area, that never happened.

Charles Brooks and his family volunteering at a recovery project at the Boys and Girls Club.

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Courtesy of Charles Brooks

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Our Paradise today

Now that we’re back, it’s absolutely amazing. It’s really cool to see houses everywhere. There’s about 600 under construction.

Then you’ve got the vibrancy of the community. As soon as they could, the chamber of commerce brought back our weekly Party in the Park and farmers market. The community comes out and sits on this big grassy hill, listens to a band playing. Kids are dancing.

Paradise was known as a retirement community, but now you notice a lot more families. There are a lot of people who are moving here because it’s still more affordable than other places in California.

The landscape looks a lot different. There used to be pine trees everywhere. We lost hundreds of thousands of trees that burned or were removed. But now almost anybody in Paradise has a sunset or a sunrise view, which is really neat.

There’s still a ton of challenges to rebuilding, and those are always going to be there. You just can’t build a home for the prices you used to. People are having to build back smaller, and get creative.

The Brooks family’s new home in Paradise, California.

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Courtesy of Charles Brooks

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Grieving is a process

For the community, there’s been a lot of working through it. Now the big thing for us is how far we’ve come.

The recovery is different for everybody. My family and I are going to do a commemorative 5K run on Saturday. We talk about the fire openly. We don’t hide it from our kids. When they want to talk about it, we talk about it. We could go two months without talking about it, and then other times it’ll be a couple days in a row. Summertime can be a little bit triggering for the kids, especially if there’s smoke and if there’s planes flying around.

There are tributes to the people we lost, and more are being planned and built. But along with never forgetting, I think the best way we can honor the people that called Paradise home is by making Paradise home again. Rebuilding a place that people want to call home is honoring the people that lost their lives, because we’re recreating what people loved.

NEW YORK — In Brian Sanchez's slice of Astoria, the FIFA World Cup doesn't begin with the first match. It starts weeks earlier, with the arrival of a sticker album — and a mission.

It's a deceptively simple one: Fill the book with all the stickers representing World Cup teams, players, venues and other tournament details. But these stickers are sold in blind packs, similar to baseball or Pokémon cards, which adds to the fun and the headaches.

Sanchez, 20, has tried to complete the task before but never succeeded. This year, he planned to skip it altogether, but it was hard to ignore the chatter and excitement among his friends and family — both at home and abroad — who were all participating.

"Honestly it comes down to a little bit of FOMO," he said.

The hunt for stickers, produced by the Italian company Panini, is a decades-old World Cup tradition that's especially popular in Latin America and Europe. In the U.S., interest has been building steadily over the years, but this summer, the buzz is bigger than ever.

Jason Howarth, senior vice president of marketing and athlete relations at Panini America, said retailers reported being sold out of sticker packets within a week of the release in late April — unseen in previous World Cup cycles.

"There's a different energy coming out of it," he said. "Right now, it's outpacing where we were in 2022 by three to five times."

The surging demand comes as collectors face their toughest challenge yet. This year, they need to track down 980 distinct stickers to put the album to bed — 310 more than at the 2022 World Cup and a record number for the company. It's a reflection of the upcoming tournament's historic scale, which is expanding from 32 teams to 48 across three countries.

This edition will also be the second to last men's World Cup sticker album produced by Panini — ending a partnership that stretches back over five decades. Last month, FIFA announced that starting in 2031, U.S.-based Fanatics will be the official supplier of FIFA soccer cards, trading cards and stickers.

On a recent afternoon in Central Park, Sanchez met up with other collectors. Hunched over stacks of stickers, some two dozen people inspected the offerings with laser focus.

With only four stickers missing, Sanchez was already looking forward to earning bragging rights as the first person in his family across the finish line this year.

" I'm feeling pretty accomplished," he said. "I've been trying to get a win, and this is gonna be a huge win for me."

An expensive, labor-intensive but rewarding hobby

A single pack of seven stickers — available online, at corner stores or drugstore chains like Walgreens and CVS — now cost $2, compared to four years ago when five stickers retailed for around $1. That means simply buying enough packs to accumulate 980 stickers would total $280.

Given the costs, finishing the book is rarely a solitary pursuit, and aficionados often meet up to spread the wealth, according to Crista Latvis, 26, who organized the recent sticker swap in Central Park.

"You can't just buy your way into it," she said. "Otherwise,  it's super expensive and you've got to be very lucky."

For many, these gatherings are part of the pastime's draw.

"It's great to meet other people who are also doing it and also excited for the World Cup, especially since it's here," Latvis said.

Sebastian Clavijo, who attended Latvis' swap, said he spent tens of thousands of dollars on his quest this year. Clavijo, 32, has been collecting Panini stickers since he was 4. This year, his goal is to complete the book only with pieces featuring red and purple borders — an even rarer get.

" I just like soccer and I love collecting," he said. "That's my hobby, you know?"

In 2022, Panini introduced stickers with different colored borders that vary in rarity. That element has been an especially big hit with the trading card community and contributed to the hobby's appeal in the U.S., according to Howarth from Panini America.

Panini popularity has grown along with soccer

Demand has always existed in New York, Texas, Florida, among other big states, but it's also emerging nationwide, in places like Phoenix and the Northwest, according to Howarth.

" As soccer has grown, so has Panini," he said.

Howarth believes part of this year's popularity stems from the expanded World Cup format. Teams that have never qualified for the tournament — and therefore never been sticker-fied by Panini — are finally getting their moment.

For some, completing the sticker album is driven by nostalgia for their childhood, family or home country.

Linda Lino never heard of the hobby until she was 18, and her grandmother gave her a Panini sticker book. That was in 2014. Lino has completed every World Cup edition since, in part in memory of her late grandmother.

"It started with my grandma and then it became like a whole family thing," Lino said. "I love the community that it brings together."

That's especially true with her father, who never had the chance to collect stickers when he was a kid in Peru, Lino said. Now, the two are making up for lost time.

"My dad is so excited," she said. "He's like 'I want to help you. I want to put the stickers together.'"

Clemente Lisi, a sports journalist who has written about the Panini sticker phenomenon, said the sticker album serves as a time capsule for the World Cup. With the tournament's return to the U.S. after 32 years, he expects it will produce more first-time collectors looking for a way to remember this summer.

"This may be the only tangible thing from a World Cup unless you go to a game," he said.

Lisi, who also runs Planet Soccer on Substack, anticipates that the U.S. company Fanatics will further cater to the market at home.

" It'll even become more American and more baked into our culture," he said.

Sanchez, the college student from Astoria, dabbles in collecting other items, like vinyls and trading cards. But what he appreciates most about the Panini sticker scene is its supportive and rarely competitive nature.

" The community around the World Cup stickers is something like I've never seen before," he said. "The community is just so nice."

After countless hours of trading and visiting multiple convenience stores, Sanchez found his 980th and final sticker at the swap in Central Park. It was of the Iraqi team. He let out a gasp, followed by a smile that spanned ear to ear. "Let's goooo!"

With a mountain of duplicates left, Sanchez wasn't ready to move on just yet. His next step was to help his mother finish her album.

" I'm going to take a break," he said. "I'm going to celebrate today and then get back to it."

Topline:

The backstory: Once a year, dozens of sound artists converge on the hill with views of the harbor below to perform their audio art, which can range from serene to “beautifully weird.”

What to expect: This year includes a performer bending a bar of tin with his bare hands to get it to emit what’s called a "tin cry" and synthesizer-based soundscapes that take inspiration from both the ocean and the industrial space below.

When to go: Soundpedro is free and lasts from 7-10 p.m. Saturday.

More info at the Soundpedro website.

You may know about Union Station as an L.A. landmark or as a transportation hub — but how much do you know about its rich architectural history?

To foster that interest and knowledge, Metro created a series of public tours of the station this spring.

“There's so much that you might just walk by without really having the opportunity to delve deeply into,” said Zipporah Lax Yamamoto, deputy executive officer of Metro’s art program. “[The tours are] a really wonderful opportunity to be able to spend time with the station, learn more about the historic landmark, which belongs to all of us.”

Union Station in Los Angeles

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Myung J. Chun

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Architectural style

It’s called Union Station because when it opened in 1939, it connected the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific railroads with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railway.

While it was designed by father-and-son team Donald and John Parkinson, the architects who gave us L.A. City Hall, its style is very different. Union Station’s interior and exterior mixes art deco, Spanish colonial and other styles into a hybrid dubbed Mission Moderne.

As you begin the tour, entering from Alameda Street, tour guides ask you to look up at the decorative elements in the high ceilings. The beams and geometric patterns may look like wood — but they’re actually just painted to look that way.

A community destroyed by development

Along the way, the tour gives background on pieces created more than 30 years ago. These include "City of Dreams/River of History" by artists May Sun and Richard Wyatt in 1995. Sun’s piece uses remnants of the Chinese American homes torn down to build the station, a reference to the high price that community paid for this building’s construction.

Detail from "City of Dreams/River of History," created by artists May Sun and Richard Wyatt at Union Station.

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“It was an enormous price. Chinatown ceased to exist in this area. … The families that lived here during that time are still around and maintain archives of that time period and the original Chinatown here, and we've worked with those families to have those objects on display,” Lax Yamamoto said.

Meanwhile, Wyatt’s large-scale mural includes the face of a Chinese man, along with nine other people of different races, ethnicities and ages; a nod to the diversity of the city since its founding in the late 1700s.

There are also stops to see new art installed for the World Cup.

A mural by Richard Wyatt at Union Station

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Adolfo Guzman-Lopez/LAist

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There are three tours left in the series but the RSVPs have reached their maximum; however, Lax Yamamoto said Metro will decide whether to continue them based on what people have thought about the tours.

Meanwhile, Union Station is set to swell with people in the next couple of months as L.A. hosts World Cup games. The station is the site of an official FIFA-sponsored Fan Zone from June 25-28.

When I first came to the states many years ago, if I’d mentioned Arsenal, people would have thought I was referring to the U.S. military or something. But all that has changed. You can now watch U.K. premier league games in sports bars, most kids play soccer, and Ted Lasso is must-watch TV.

To which I say — welcome. We English are proud of the fact that soccer began with us more than 150 years ago. And every World Cup, we think, surely this will be the year that the trophy returns home — the year that we’ll win!

Queen Elizabeth II awarding the Jules Rimet World Cup Trophy to Bobby Moore after England won the 1966 World Cup final at Wembley.

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I mean it did happen … once… back in 1966. It’s such a long time ago the game was televised in black and white and shillings were still being used. My mother was nine months pregnant with my brother, and got so excited jumping up and down she went into labor and had him the next day. World Cup Willie they called him. Actually his name is David, but never mind.

Since then, every four years everyone in the U.K. watches the games with bated breath. And then something stupid will happen, and we’ll lose, like that time in 1998 when David Beckham (who played for England before he came to L.A. Galaxy) lost his temper and was sent off, and we’ll sit there, gloomy and despondent. I know because I was there in my friend’s living room in London, gloomy and despondent, thinking just once, just once, maybe could we please have a win?

David Beckham's infamous 1998 red card in the England vs. Argentina game.

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The last World Cup, I went to Ye Olde Kings Head in Santa Monica to watch England play. At 7 a.m. it was full of people already on their third pint of beer. And when the team got through to the next round, the gentle men of England ran outside the pub, whipped off their shirts and started weaving through traffic, singing football chants and acting like hooligans. I really couldn’t decide if I was embarrassed or if it felt like home.

Anyway, this time, since I’m now an American citizen, it’s in my contract that I need to support Team USA. I’m a dual citizen, though, so I’ll also be cheering for England. If by any chance Team USA and England play each other, my two selves will be watching, with a cup of tea in one hand, and a cold brewski in the other, and the polarities will explode, or something. But what will probably happen is that both teams will be eclipsed by Brazil or France playing the beautiful game… beautifully. Cheers.