Stores have opened, and thousands have moved back to Paradise a year after a wildfire nearly wiped it out. But residents are divided on whether the California town is going too far or not far enough to make it safer.
In this Thursday Oct. 24, 2019, photo, Bill Husa displays before-and-after photos of his home lost in last year's Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif. Husa's home is one of nearly 9,000 Paradise homes destroyed in the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. She’d thought she was going to die during the six hours it took her to escape the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history.
“Rebuilding the Ridge” is a rallying cry on signs around town, evoking the beauty and peril of rebuilding on a wind-swept jut of land poking out of the Sierra Nevada and begging the question: Will the resurgent community be safer this time? Paradise is now largely populated with travel trailers. They are parked on lots scraped clean of more than 3.66 million tons of charred and toxic ruins, the equivalent of four Golden Gate bridges or twice the tonnage that was removed from the World Trade Center site.
“We’re not going to keep fires from burning through Paradise, so whatever they build up there should be something that can survive a wildfire,” Lunder said. “But just building a bunch of wooden houses out in the brush, we already saw what happened.”“If you take away all the trees, it’s what we’re here for, is for the trees,” resident Vincent Childs told town council members in June as they prepared to vote on new building safety standards.
Improving evacuation routes and emergency warnings are still under consideration, while city leaders last month required people to remove hazardous trees that could fall into a public right of way. But the removal of nearly 100,000 trees is still less than a third of those that need to go, council members say.An American flag he and his wife, Joyce, left behind a year ago became a symbol of the town’s resilience when photographs showed it flying in the ruins of their neighborhood.
“If this is going to be our new normal for 10 years, I can’t do this for 10 years,” she said, referring to PG&E’s estimate of how long the outages could go on. California’s growing homeless population is one reason there is little talk of prohibiting construction in high-risk areas like Paradise. Rural areas are generally much more affordable than cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, which face their own dangers from earthquakes, fires and rising oceans.
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