Paradise was ‘well-prepared’ for deadly Camp Fire. But it wasn’t enough, new study finds

Paradise had geared up for disaster.

The Butte County town had an evacuation plan and emergency-notification systems. Paradise, neighboring communities and the county had undertaken “vegetation management” programs to reduce wildfire hazards.

Yet for all its preparation, Paradise wasn’t truly ready for something like the Camp Fire.

Within minutes on the morning of Nov. 8, 2018, the town was overwhelmed by a fire burning with a ferocity that defied belief. In more than a dozen spots, the fire quickly created “burnover events” in which residents were trapped in their homes or cars and unable to escape the flames. The Camp Fire killed 85 people and destroyed more than 10,000 homes and other buildings, leaving much of Paradise in ruins.

“Very few people appreciate how quickly things developed,” said Alexander Maranghides, lead author of a new federal study on the Camp Fire’s swift and lethal progression through Paradise.

The 421-page report, released Monday by the federal government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology in cooperation with Cal Fire, represents arguably the most exhaustive look at the deadliest wildfire in California’s history and the costliest disaster — anywhere on earth — in 2018. Total damages from the Camp Fire have been estimated at more than $16 billion.

The report paints a sobering picture for every forested community in California and for PG&E Corp., with its thousands of miles of power lines and transformers, as they work to clear trees, build defenses and adequately prepare for the next round of wildfires.

Maranghides said evacuation preparedness and other emergency-related issues will be addressed in a follow-up report by the national institute, to be released about a year from now. Still, he said that the Paradise community was well-prepared for a big fire — or about as well as a community can be in a heavily wooded region.

“People were living in the forest,” he said. “This is as well-prepared as you can have a community.”

Among the report’s most startling conclusions: The seven miles that separated Paradise from the source of the fire, rather than serving as a buffer, actually made things worse, enabling the fire to gather fury as it approached the town.

The distance meant “the fire front has more time to develop and expand,” Maranghides, a fire protection engineer, said in an interview. “We had a full hit on the east side of Paradise.”

The report comes as California, struggling with drought-like conditions, confronts another potentially difficult wildfire season.

PG&E — whose transmission tower caused the Camp Fire — unveiled its 2021 wildfire-safety plan last Friday but acknowledged that fire risks remain high even as it accelerates efforts to eliminate hazardous trees and replace vulnerable power equipment. The utility is under investigation in another deadly fire — last fall’s Zogg Fire, which killed four people in Shasta County — and is facing sanctions from a federal judge over alleged shortcomings in its tree-trimming program.

The national institute’s report made clear that wildfire risks are intensifying.

“Going forward, there’s no reason to believe that fire activity and severity is going to lessen anytime soon,” said Steven Hawks, a Cal Fire chief and report co-author.

Some homeowners refused to cut trees

Ignited around 6:20 a.m. Nov. 8, 2018, and fueled by 50 mph winds, the Camp Fire moved three miles in its first 90 minutes, blowing through Concow, the report said.

By 8:30 a.m., wind-blown embers had already started at least 30 spot fires in Paradise, even though the main front of the Camp Fire was just reaching the town. Within two hours, another 35 spot fires were burning in the heart of Paradise, and residents were being trapped in their homes and cars.

The report doesn’t cover every aspect of the Camp Fire — notably its origin. PG&E has admitted that a broken clamp on an aging transmission tower lit the fire. The utility, which pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges last year and was driven into bankruptcy by the damages, isn’t mentioned in the report.

Assessing PG&E’s involvement in the fire “is not our role,” Maranghides said in the interview.

Nor is there any reference to a 2019 report by California’s state auditor criticizing Butte, Ventura and Sonoma counties and the state Office of Emergency Services for their wildfire preparedness. That report said, among other things, that clogged evacuation routes and overwhelmed alert and communications networks contributed to the horrors of the Camp Fire and fires that ravaged the other two counties. The Sacramento Bee and other media have documented how emergency-alert systems have faltered during major wildfires.

The researchers said Paradise and nearby communities such as Magalia had conducted fuel treatment projects to reduce brush and other vegetation over the years, which appeared to help protect “critical infrastructure such as the primary pumping station and treatment plants of the Paradise Irrigation District.”

However, the report added that the absence of fire over the decades — and a scarcity of rain and snow in the previous 200 days — left the area extremely vulnerable.

“The absence of fire within most of Paradise and Magalia for many decades had resulted in significant vegetative fuel accumulation,” the report said. “The vegetative fuel loading was further increased by diseased vegetation (specifically pines).”

Plus, the report notes that some homeowners refused to participate in programs to cut trees and brush on their properties, and the few evacuation routes out of town were overgrown with trees and brush, making burnovers along the roads more likely.

Nonetheless, Maranghides said it wasn’t surprising that the community’s vegetation treatments didn’t eliminate fire hazards completely.

“You cannot treat an entire county,” he said.

Study recommends more home-hardening projects

The report’s authors said they hope their findings will allow community planners and fire agencies to take a number of steps to reduce the risk of future fires.

Among other things, the national institute recommends that communities in the fire-prone West identify trouble spots where burnovers can occur, as they did in Paradise, and create fuel “setbacks” to make sure evacuation routes stay clear.

Moreover, they called for “hardening” projects — retrofitting homes and other buildings to increase fire resiliency — particularly in areas where homes are spaced too closely together.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration says it is committed to carrying out many of the scientists’ recommendations. It signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Forest Service in which both sides pledged to manage forestlands more aggressively, and his budget for the upcoming fiscal year includes several hundred million dollars for forestry projects.

It also calls for $38 million for “hardening” homes in fire-prone communities, although that’s well short of what many experts believe is needed.

Many fire scientists have warned that plenty of other communities in California face similar risks as Paradise, and last year’s wildfire season — the worst in modern history — left 4 million acres scorched. A fire racing through tiny Berry Creek, just a few miles southeast of Paradise, left 15 people dead.

Maranghides said the national institute’s scientists have been bracing for a massively destructive fire along the lines of the Camp Fire — but its researchers remain stunned by the damage done in Paradise.

“This has been a concern of ours for a half dozen years, that we could see an event with over 10,000 structures destroyed,” he said. “But the scale of this event was unprecedented.”

This story was originally published February 8, 2021 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Paradise was ‘well-prepared’ for deadly Camp Fire. But it wasn’t enough, new study finds."