The tally of death and destruction
keeps growing in the Northern California wildfires.
Thick clouds of ash are turning day into night.
2020 has been another
record setting wildfire season.
Over the last few years, wildfires have been raging
not just in the Western US, but all around the world.
Fires in the Amazon rainforest
and Australia's brush fires are so massive
that they can be seen from space.
And while fires have long been a natural part
of many forest ecosystems, higher temperatures
and longer droughts caused by climate change
are drying out forests and turning trees into tinder.
Meaning that in areas like California
wildfire seasons have become supercharged.
Towns like Paradise, California,
where the 2018 Camp Fire destroyed over 80% of its homes
are now grappling with how to adapt to this new age of fire,
starting from essentially the ground up.
It is literally like the surface of the moon there.
Two years later, as the town still works
to rebuild, the local parks and recreation district
is beginning an ambitious plan
to not just restore Paradise but make sure
it can better defend itself from the next fire.
CityLab reporter Laura Bliss went to see this firsthand.
So Laura, you just went to Paradise.
Can you sort of explain what's it like to be there now?
It was a pretty haunting experience.
Just thousands and thousands of homes literally reduced
to shells, kind of gutted out foundations.
It really still is this landscape of disaster.
So I guess what has the scale of rebuilding been like?
I checked with the city
and there's been about 400 homes
that have already been reconstructed
and about 1200 that are currently permitted.
Even as this kind of instinct to rebuild
is sweeping over the town and over former residents,
there are some people who are thinking
a little bit differently about what the future
of Paradise should look like.
One resident I spoke to has actually gone forward
with selling her land so that eventually
it might become part of a large green belt encircling
the city to potentially protect it from future wildfires.
And the person who's leading this project
is not a member of city government.
He's actually the manager
of the Paradise Recreation and Parks District.
My name is Dan Efseaff, I'm the district manager
for the Paradise Recreation and Park District.
So we've provided everything from swimming lessons
to people's first sports experience,
to hosting a variety of clubs.
And we've been a fabric of the community for decades.
There were quite a few lessons from the Camp Fire for us.
One of them was the role
we potentially have as a parks district.
And Dan believes what the park district
can start to do is improve.
What's known as the wildland urban interface
It's that line between full-blown nature
and wildland areas, and then the more developed space.
In Paradise that line was very much blurred
or a razor's edge.
So the idea here is that we would take that
very narrow razor sharp wildland urban interface now,
and expand it out in such a way that we would have a buffer.
At the same time, providing these kinds
of extraordinary recreational resources and opportunities.
Dan and the parks and recreation district
are in the very early phases of acquiring land
in hopes of connecting them in what would
be basically a giant moat of green space.
So if the nascent plan is fully realized,
thousands of acres of land could be used
for respite and play by the residents of Paradise.
Parks and baseball fields could also double
as future fuel breaks for fire.
So areas that could be parks
they could be returned in some cases to orchards.
We're interested in ag-tourism in the area.
So we're trying to do is take this idea
of defensible space around a house
and expand that to defensible space around the community.
This plan is taking shape now as California
and all of the Western US is on fire.
Already this year, millions of acres have burned,
tens of thousands of people have had to evacuate.
With climate change driving up temperatures
and drying out forests there's no question that the risk
of catastrophe recurring in communities like Paradise
and Paradise itself, is very, very real.
But for Dan, he's hoping that this plan
can make Paradise not just a dire warning
of the damage wildfires can cause
but rather a model on how to better protect communities
in fire prone regions.
Earthquake!
If major cities all up and down the West Coast
that sit on major earthquake faults.
We've mitigated that, we've engineered our way
into having less danger associated
with earthquakes in major cities.
And we can do the same with fire.
We just haven't done it yet.
This is Crystal Kolden.
She's a geographer by training.
I call myself a pyro geographer
because almost all of my work over the last 15, 20 years
has been across this really broad spectrum
of understanding how humans and the environment
are affected by and interact with fire.
There are a lot of different factors
that contribute to changing wildfires,
but climate change is the thing
that amplifies all of those changes.
So when we have a high temperature, there's a lot more heat
and that heat translates into fires
being able to burn more easily
and because they're able to burn more easily,
the conditions are dryer,
they're able to burn a lot hotter and a lot faster.
And they're much, much more difficult
for firefighters to contain.
While around the country the number of wild land
fires have actually been going down since 1990.
The acres burned has at times doubled.
The idea in Paradise is to use what's called a greenbelt
to help slow the destructiveness of future fires.
Green belts are a type of fuel break, right?
Greenbelts are of course, these areas where a lot
of the understory is removed under trees
so that they become essentially park-like grasslands.
This is one of the jewels of our area.
This is Paradise Lake.
This was a location where the fire slowed down
and stopped on its own.
You can definitely see evidence of fire through this area,
but the flame lengths are relatively low on these trees.
Look at all of these small trees that were cut.
These were cut before the fire.
So that created a more open understory
which carried the fire less than it would have otherwise.
Dan wants to use the land that they acquire
to create more areas that look like this.
We are going to pursue a strategy here.
These oaks that are sprouting up, make them less bushy
make it less of a brush field over time
and encourage one particular leader out of here
to grow into a tree.
It's really important to note that it's not gonna be
as simple as just planting some trees and grass
and hoping for the best.
Firebreaks are not invulnerable to the spread of fires.
High winds, especially the ones that we've seen
igniting some of the fires of these catastrophic events
in the last couple of years
can carry burning embers as far as a mile.
A common misconception that people have
is that a fire break should just stop a fire, right?
That's the definition, right?
It's meant to break a fire's forward progress
and it should do it all by itself.
And that's really a misconception
because that is not what the goal of a firebreak usually is.
It is specifically meant to be a safe place
for firefighters to take a stand
and try and modify a fire's forward progress
as it's coming into a community.
You know, I keep thinking about this with a story that
pulling off this green belt feels like a lot
for a parks and rec district to pull off.
How much does something like this cost?
I think Dan's back of the envelope calculation
was that this is going to require upwards of $10 million.
And then that's not even including,
what it's going to take to maintain all of these lands.
So just to give you a sense of what this would entail,
one of the sections that Dan is targeting
for this green buffer idea is a stretch of land
that runs parallel to the Feather River Canyon.
It's about seven miles long and about 4,000 acres in total,
containing hundreds of properties,
about 80% of that area is privately owned.
So on top of the costs of acquiring the land,
it's also just the time and resources that
a little parks districts may be challenged to work up to.
Turning these former homes into parkland
also hits on the ultra-sensitive question
of planned relocation, which is this idea
of government basically coming in to assist
whole communities of people move to an area that's safer
from a climate change perspective.
And that's a really difficult question
in a community that's already been deeply traumatized
by this catastrophic experience.
We're absolutely of the mind we have to be respectful
of all our decisions by landowners.
I think the idea is right now
that there is such a receptivity
to people wanting to do some things that help the community.
Even if they choose to rebuild,
then maybe they will provide an easement
or permission to have that trail that goes
through the bottom of their property
that allows for fuels reduction,
It protects their property
in exchange for a little bit of recreational value.
I think that idea is pretty persuasive
for a lot of people in our community.
Another issue Dan faces is that while
there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that greenbelts can help
there actually isn't that much scientific evidence
that confirms their effectiveness.
One conservationist I talked to for this story
referred to green buffers
as this funny combination of common sense
with not a lot of scientific backup,
but experts say that the signs are definitely out there
that it can work.
It's something that is not really making it
into the scientific literature
because it's been relatively rare.
We don't have this rigorous reproducible scientific process
that is often favored by scientific journals.
But the anecdotal data are very much supportive of this.
I actually published a study last year
about a series of firebreaks
and what was essentially a green belt
around the community of Montecito California.
Between the years of 1999 and 2017
Montecito would spend over $1.6 million
on wildfire vulnerability reduction activities.
And over years they did it little by little.
It's individual properties, it's along roads
where they have space to work.
And when we actually went back
and looked at the satellite data
it looks a little bit like a green necklace.
And in 2017, the Thomas fire
would put that work to the test.
The calmer conditions in Santa Barbara County Wednesday
didn't mean flames stopped threatening
multimillion dollar homes in Montecito.
This is the fifth largest fire in California history.
And when that fire hit Montecito
there were winds blowing over 60 miles an hour.
There were gusts up to 72 miles an hour.
And that was the last thing we had recorded
before the weather station burned down.
And when it got to that green belt
along the edge of the town, it basically did exactly
what the Greenbelt was designed to do,
which is it died down, it allowed firefighters
to move in close and work safely to put water
on the edge of the fire to actually drop it down
to the ground and put it out.
And it is one of the few cases that is really
well-documented retrospectively and spatially
of a greenbelt working well.
We're trying to find more of those, but it's a challenge.
What we're talking about is an idea
how do we live with fire on this landscape?
Potentially we could serve a model
on a whole bunch of different levels,
not just the parks and how to protect the community
but how do we take care of our people?
We can do all the science we want
but if people don't see how it applies to them
and how it can translate into an action
that they can actually take, then the science
doesn't actually become applied in any way, shape or form.
And we don't change actions on the ground.
There's been a lot of interest
in how do we protect Paradise.
There's lessons here.
We're far enough along that we can demonstrate
some of those lessons to those unfortunate communities
that have suffered very similar situations.
But also there's models in here that are gonna
help people live better lives in these mountain communities.