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The CampFire was devastating like no other event.

My mom, Victoria Taft, was lost in the fire on November 8, 2018. 

It destroyed a town called Paradise, California with its horrible communication, almost no technology use…

My mom’s memorial will be held on January 12th in Sacramento. Vicki should be remembered. She was a great person and is extremely missed.

I will be working on an Emergency Platform prototype as an internship. I will try to solve these communication and centralization issues.

The social media platforms are not made for emergencies. It’s sad that they would announce the evacuation there, and tell us to put missing people onto Fakebook instead of onto the county sheriff’s website.

We had to find out McDonalds was burned on Instagram, and 300 trapped in a parking lot on that website. Calling the fire and police line did nothing. In fact, everything was in-person and word-of-mouth only as I had thought for ages, but I thought at least calling may work. 911/dispatch never responded to me. I had to ask CHP in-person to call it in hours too late.

It’s scary that with more technology, emergency response is getting WORSE. This is my project for 2019.

It’s extremely devastating because my mom was my only family. I’ll put a page up later with her photos and a tribute if I can onto my website later. She was right once again. I shouldn’t have left so quickly because she didn’t go with me. No official warnings ever happened and I wasn’t a loud enough authority.

There’s a tribute to my mom Vicki Taft, who deserved better, with photos at: GoFundMe.com/camp-fire-lost-mom-and-home 

❤ My Tribute to My Mom ❤

Victoria Taft was nice, generous, social, independent, honest, trustworthy, caring, facetious, dependable, sarcastic, modest, smart, stubborn, and loyal. She cared about other people more than herself. She always thought the world was better than it was. She was liked by whoever knew her. She mostly went by Vicki. We had lived together in Paradise for 10 years. She loved the community, had volunteered in it, and did not want to leave it.  I wish we had.

Victoria, my mom, was 66 and born November 11, 1951 in Pennsylvania. Her birthday was just 3 days after the fire. She grew up in Los Angeles. She was a single mom who mostly stayed at home after I was born in 1993. We then lived in Arizona for 12 years and moved to Paradise in 2008.

In her life she did acting, real estate, and other jobs in Los Angeles and Southern California. Her last job, aside from a temporary caregiving one for several months in Paradise, was as a stunt double in Dick Tracy in 1989/1990.  In the 1970’s, she went to a Los Angeles College. In her 20s or 30s, my mom wrote a book called Tara about her life and traveling with her friend in Europe. I was not able to not read her book before it was lost when I was younger. She also was disabled at the end. I loved her. She deserved a longer life and I miss her.

Because we didn’t have mandatory orders from authority or any warning to leave, my mother didn’t know it would be as bad as it was and didn’t evacuate with me. I feel pain, guilt, shame, loss, death, and anger about what happened. I wish I had stayed longer and that the emergency response was better. The fire was deadly.

Victoria Taft, my mom.