The vulnerability of the people living in and near Paradise, California, to a major wildfire was made clear in a 2009 investigation. Still, the warning and evacuation process — including steps taken since the report — failed to prevent dozens of fatalities in the fast-moving Camp Fire that ripped through the city Nov. 8.
As of Wednesday evening, the fire was 35 percent contained after having burned across more than 215 square miles (138,000 acres). The Camp Fire is the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history, with at least 56 fatalities and at least 10,321 structures destroyed.
One of the biggest problems in evacuating the Paradise region is sheer geography. As NPR reporter Paige St. John put it, “The problem in Paradise is that you can't get out. ... Once they needed to move and you had an entire town that needed to get out all at once, the roads quickly turned into parking lots.”
Much of Paradise was built during a growth spurt in the 1960s and 1970s, when the city’s population tripled from about 8,000 to around 24,000.
The most populous part of Butte County’s higher terrain includes Paradise (population around 26,000 as of 2008) and a set of smaller communities just to the north (total population about 18,000 as of 2008) that are known collectively as the Upper Ridge.
A route called the Skyway connects the Upper Ridge to Paradise, then continues toward the Central Valley as a broad, four-lane divided highway. Many people used the Skyway as an escape route from the Camp Fire.
The multi-pronged wildfire risks of Paradise and surrounding areas were studied in 2009 by one of the grand juries that are routinely impaneled each year to investigate civil and criminal matters for Butte County. In 2008-09, the county’s grand jury looked into wildfire and safety considerations in response to devastating fires in June 2008 across the Sierra foothills that make up the northeast half of the county.
The 2008 blazes, including the Humboldt Fire, burned more than 93 square miles (59,500 acres) in Butte County and destroyed at least 74 homes in the Paradise area. The only fire-related fatality was a woman who died of a heart attack while trying to flee, although her home was not in an evacuation zone, according to SFGate.com.
In contrast to the Camp Fire, which moved into Paradise from the northeast, the Humboldt Fire approached town from the southwest.
“By some miracle, the Humboldt Fire Incident did not cross the West Branch of the Feather River,” the jury noted in its report. “Had this occurred, property damage could have been huge and thousands of lives could have been threatened in Paradise and the Upper Ridge.”
Highway Evacuation Options Are Limited in Rugged Terrain Near Paradise
Although hundreds of people successfully escaped the 2018 Camp Fire via the Skyway, some did not make it. Three other paved routes extend south from Paradise—Neal Road, Clark Road, and Pentz Road—but they are far less suited for escaping a wildfire.
The 2008-09 jury noted that all three of these two-lane routes had narrow or absent shoulders, moderate to sharp curves, and fire hazards adjacent to the roadway (steep slopes and dense fire fuel).
In the Upper Ridge area, Skyway is the only major evacuation route leading south from the foothills. The jury noted that current building requirements specify at least two exit roads from any developed area.
During the 2008 Humboldt Fire, the Skyway, Neal Road, and Clark Road had to be closed in that order, so all of the traffic evacuating through Paradise was forced onto Pentz Road, whose posted speed limit was 40 mph.
“It took three hours for vehicles to travel from the intersection of Pentz Road and Skyway to Highway 70, a distance of about eleven miles,” the jury observed. “This is an effective speed of approximately 4 mph.” During the Camp Fire, the Pentz Road area was part of the first zone to be evacuated, at 8:03 am, about 90 minutes after the fire was first spotted.
Among the jury’s recommendations in 2009 were that the county work on creating emergency evacuation plans for all of its high-risk fire areas. Paradise did develop just such a plan, and the city tested it in June 2016. “We even took one of our peak morning hours and made the road a contraflow…so we could show our citizens how it was going to work,” Paradise mayor Jody Jones told NPR.
“What happened, though, is typically you are evacuating a zone or two or three zones. You're not evacuating an entire town all at the same time.”
Communications Limited as Fire Swept Toward Paradise
As the Camp Fire grew rapidly and spread toward Paradise and the Upper Ridge on Thursday morning, evacuation messages were reportedly sent to both land-line phones and cell phones through the county’s CODE RED mass notification system. However, it appears that officials sending the CODE RED messages and going door to door were hard-pressed to keep up with the fire’s pace.
“I wish we had opportunity to get more alerts out, more warning out,” said Sheriff Kory Honea in a community meeting on Monday night, as reported by the Bay Area News Group. “We try to use any many systems as we can… But in the heat of this, it was moving so fast, it was difficult to get that information out.”
Moreover, residents with cell phones had to have signed up in advance in order to receive the phone alerts. A state law passed in September will allow counties to automatically sign up residents whose cell-phone numbers are associated with utility bills.
The overarching Wireless Emergency Alert system (WEA) for cellphones was not employed in Butte County during the Camp Fire, reported the San Jose Mercury News. The WEA sends certain emergency messages such as tornado and flash flood warnings to newer cellphones as long as the phone owners have not opted out of the service.
Some California counties have hesitated to use the WEA for fire evacuation out of concern it would serve as a blunt instrument, alerting too many citizens outside precise evacuation zones and causing traffic tie-ups. Sonoma County officials chose not to use the WEA during the catastrophic fires that struck in October 2017, including the Tubbs Fire—the state’s most destructive blaze on record prior to the Camp Fire.
Another option not employed in the Camp Fire is a “fire weather warning," a seldom-used product that can be disseminated by the National Weather Service at the request of local officials.
“Such a warning must be requested by someone outside of the National Weather Service, such as an emergency manager, rather than being initiated by Weather Service staff themselves,” Andrew Freedman noted in Axios. “That's the rule even if forecasters can see on Doppler radar or by looking out the window that a fire is headed for a populated area.”
The upshot is that many residents of Paradise apparently saw and heard little to nothing about the fires until the last minute.
“We didn’t get a robo call, announcement or any notice from Cal Fire or city," one resident told the Mercury News. "We had to find out about it second-hand.”
November 14, 2018
The Weather Channel
By Bob Henson
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