After Paradise, Living With Fire Means Redefining Resilience

Dan Efseaff, the parks and recreation director for the devastated town of Paradise, Calif., looks out over Little Feather River Canyon in Butte County. The Camp Fire raced up this canyon like a blowtorch in a paper funnel on its way to Paradise, incinerating most everything in its path, including scores of homes.

Efseaff is floating an idea that some may think radical: paying people not to rebuild in this slice of canyon: “The whole community needs some defensible space,” he says.

Residents would get expanded green space for recreation and a vital safety buffer to help protect Paradise from future fire calamities. “We would work with either landowners on easements,” he suggests, “or looking at them from a standpoint of some purchases in here.”

“There are areas you just don’t build in,” he says.

Right now it’s merely a vision.

The disaster industrial complex

He is up against the two-centuries-old American ethos to build, build, build, no matter the costs or the wisdom. It’s an ethos baked into the federal disaster response system, what critics call the “disaster industrial complex” — a system constructed around responding to natural disasters, delivering immediate and long-term aid.

Politicians vow to rebuild.

The federal agencies swoop in.

The signs sprout: “Paradise Strong!” and “We Will Rebuild!”

Hardening this tourist-dependent town includes a mix of low- and high-tech.

The town is reinstalling old-school emergency alert sirens to warn residents of a coming firestorm. Senum says the last two fire seasons exposed shocking flaws in phone- and broadcast-based alert systems. In Paradise, only about a third of the few who had signed up for phone warnings actually received the alert.

“And many of them perished waiting for that call or that text. We’re bringing back old-fashioned, hard-wired sirens with battery backup, a solar backup,” Senum explained. Nevada City hopes to have them up and running by early summer.

Some neighbors, Senum says, are now talking about investing in full-body fire-resistant suits — like the ones NASCAR drivers use — in case they have to flee a fast-moving inferno like the one that hit Paradise.

All over town, lower branches on trees around homes are freshly trimmed so any wildfire can’t “ladder” up into the tree’s crowns and grow.

The vice mayor also started a successful “goat fund me” campaign this spring to pay for brigades of hungry, brush-eating goats to munch away fuel on fire-prone hillsides and parks. The goats were helped by volunteer software engineers who aligned maps to direct the goats.

“High-tech, state-of-the-art software telling us that we’re doing the right thing,” she says.

Senum insists this strategic goat modeling isn’t some flaky Northern California pipe dream. “We’re just kind of taking up the old ways our grandparents used and using a lot of common sense that I think we’ve lost over the decades,” she says. The goats have been so effective, she hopes to bring them and hand crews back for a second round of clearing this summer.

Others who can afford to are doing more than brush clearing.

Christine Bottaro and her husband own a spacious, 164-year-old home next to a park where the goats cleared hillsides. Bottaro’s gold rush relic looks lovely yet vulnerable these days, like some giant Victorian-era matchstick.

Yet looks are deceiving. She and her husband have spent sweat and money hardening the home against fire. They have cleared brush, trimmed trees and put in a rock garden where flammable plants once grew.

And they have done much more.

“That deck wraps around the house and it’s made out of a plastic composite; at least [it] is retarded for flames and embers,” she says, touring me around the outside. The home’s vulnerable siding is actually made out of a cement composite. “It’s not wood,” she says, knocking on the hard material. “This part is far less flammable than wood is.” They’re planning to replace old wooden-framed windows, too.

“The amount of clearing and hardening and educating people here are doing, I’m really blown away,” Senum says.

Paying for wildfire resilience

But retrofitting is expensive. “So many people just don’t have the dollars or the capacity physically to do that,” says Senum. “So we’re constantly talking about how we can help those who can’t help themselves.”

California currently does almost nothing to incentivize or help homeowners pay to prepare their homes for wildfire safety, as it does for earthquakes. State and local authorities offer up to $3,000 and insurance discounts to help homeowners retrofit for quakes. A bill to create a $1 billion fund to create a similar program for wildfire retrofits has stalled in the state Legislature.

Newsom says he supports the idea, but funding it is the question. “We’ll try to do our best,” Newsom told reporters recently.

The need is enormous. California already has the nation’s strictest building standards for fire protection. But that’s only for homes built after 2008. Tens of thousands of homes in the state were not built to the newer, tougher standards.

That’s a major problem.

Reports by McClatchy, The Associated Press and partner papers showed that more than half of the homes in the path of the Camp Fire built to those stricter codes were largely undamaged. But just 18% of homes built before 2008 survived the blaze.

Climate scientist Shaye Wolf with the Center for Biological Diversity says that it is shortsighted not to invest in retrofits now: “In this era of climate change, with so many homes in fire-prone ecosystems, it’s absolutely essential that … state and local governments do a much better job of preparing homes and communities to make those homes as fire resistant as possible,” Wolf says. “That’s where the money needs to be invested.” She criticized the governor’s emergency declaration as misguided.

“Cal Fire is thinning forests away from where most Californians live and far from areas with big risks of wind-driven fires,” Wolf says. “The governor should reject this doomed, destructive approach and direct funding toward proven fire-safety strategies like retrofitting homes and improving defensible space around them.”

Retrofitting may be costly, but building new homes to be wildfire-resistant can significantly reduce loss, says Kelly Pohl with Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit land management research group. A study by the group shows the cost is not prohibitive.

Mindset change; personal responsibility

Two-plus hours southeast of Paradise, the Lake Tahoe tourist town of Truckee is also “hardening” itself for wildfire in new ways. The town, surrounded by national forest land, has accelerated work to expand key firebreaks around the area by thinning forest to create a protective “halo.”

And in a major move for a tourist-dependent area that will soon crowd with summer renters, Truckee has banned the use of charcoal BBQs and wood-burning campfires this summer, except in designated campgrounds with metal fire pits.

“On the wrong day with high winds, that’s a recipe for disaster,” says Truckee Fire Protection District Chief Bill Seline. Sometimes careless renters dump coals into a grassy or wooded area behind their rental home, “and next day the winds pick up, the temperatures heat up and next thing you know we’re chasing a wildfire through a neighborhood,” Seline says.

In a first for the area, Truckee has added a safety check to every real estate deal: Every home sold has to pass a wildfire defensible space inspection.

Seline says those moves are all important. But they’re not effective without homeowners taking action themselves, especially when it comes to planning and evacuation.

Fire and police, of course, will have a robust wildfire and evacuation response, Seline says. “But the third leg of the stool is personal responsibility … having your own personal plan: How are you going to get out of the neighborhood? Have you thought about evacuation? What you are going to take? Are you familiar with what critical fire weather is? Are you connected to the communication systems that we have in place so that when we and law enforcement agencies communicate with you to get out of the neighborhood, you have a plan and you’re ready to go?”

Beyond defensible space and evacuation plans

Former Cal Fire Director Pimlott believes a big lesson out of the Paradise tragedy has yet to sink in: There needs to be wholesale mindset change about wildfire in the West, he says, by everyone — homeowners, planners, builders and policymakers.

That includes tough choices and decisions about where people can build or rebuild.

“These are hard decisions. They cost money. They may mean land use changes.”

Changes should include embracing more prescribed burns to reduce fuels; expanding fire buffer zones and escape routes for the most susceptible towns; and incentivizing retrofits.

And, Pimlott says, being smarter and tougher about construction.

“If we don’t look at [wildfire] differently and start making some hard decisions collectively we’re going to be back in these communities time and time again rebuilding. We’re going to be spending months looking for people. Bodies of people in rubble,” he warns. “And we can’t keep doing that.”

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