Generators, Coors and canned food. How these ‘mountain boys’ are surviving in Paradise

Brad Weldon has lived in Paradise his entire life, and wasn’t about to leave his home or his blind, 90-year-old mother behind when the Camp Fire hit. And he’s not going to leave now that the fire is gone, though not much is left of the town he remembers. When the flames came up to his neighborhood in the central part of Paradise, Weldon grabbed a garden hose and beat back the blaze. When the hose line cut out, he started throwing buckets of water, five gallons at a time. His home was spared, but everything around him was wiped out. Two weeks later, Weldon is still at his house, one of a small group of self-proclaimed “mountain boys” who have defied evacuation orders and are surviving on meat stored in their generator-powered freezers, bagged lunches dropped off by PG&E crews and supplies provided by a mysterious band of volunteers that Weldon calls “the redneck underground.”...MORE