Five years ago today, the deadliest fire in U.S. history in more than a century destroyed Paradise, California. The blaze broke out around 6:30 a.m. and moved quickly. Twenty-five thousand people tried to escape down one narrow road. Eighty-five people died, and most of Paradise’s structures burned down. Now residents are rebuilding.
Prior to the Camp Fire, Paradise was nestled in greenery. But now, according to NPR Correspondent Kirk Siegler, the area is bare.
“You can see out to the coastal range across the Central Valley. You can turn around and see the other direction toward the Sierra foothills and up into them. A million trees have been taken out of that landscape, most of them of course burned. So it's just a totally, totally changed landscape. Some of the town leaders told me it's the largest construction site in the world.”
So far, about a third of the town has been repopulated, consisting of fire survivors and new residents. That includes former Paradise Mayor Jody Jones, who now has a new house and told Siegler, “Considering it's only been five years, and we had a pandemic in the middle of that, what we've accomplished is just a miracle.
Siegler notes that the town is facing supply chain issues, and a lot of disaster aid actually goes toward rebuilding infrastructure rather than private homes.
“You're in a community like Paradise that is largely underserved. It's poor. it was more elderly, [a] larger senior citizen population on fixed incomes. And if you're trying to rebuild today in California, it's a lot different than what it looked like in the 1950s and 1960s.”
Big changes are in store for Paradise, including tougher building codes and more climate-resilient standards, Siegler says. “There's a tougher code that you can only put certain things within five yards of a house, like all of the vegetation. … We're learning more and more that even just [wood] chips by the house can be the make-or-break deal when the fire comes through. … They've also implemented a new early warning system, sirens.”
He adds, “People there told me, ‘We're actually rebuilding a town that's probably the safest or among the safest in the Sierra Nevada, if not California, right now because we've got all these tougher standards.’”
As new homes crop up, Paradise will have to grapple with affordability. “It's not going to be as cheap, and it's not going to be what it once was. And this is the rub we're seeing across California and across the nation right now, as we're seeing more and more of these disasters hit communities. … What kind of community do they want to see?”