@Magnetron, I am so sorry your parents lost there. They must be devastated. But what a relief for them and you and your siblings that they were out of town when it happened. Things can be replaced.
I am so sorry, @Magnetron I’m glad they were away and that your family escaped, but what a horror for all.
I’m sorry, too, and hoping TatinG fares well.
Forest management is just not easy when the acreage is as vast as in CA. It’s selective grooming, building the right fire breaks ahead of time, keep fire roads clear, but guessing where the next trouble would be. There is no perfect, not on that scale. And we drove through the last fire-ravaged areas 6 weeks ago. Hours of it. It almost cant be comprehended until you realize it’s been hours with the traces evident.
We had fires periodically, in the mountains near where we lived in S. CA. There is no way to anticipate what and where. They try to keep evacuation roads clear and in decent condition.
I am saddened that @Magnetron parents lost their home. We know of another older person who also lost their home in the Paradise Fire. I think adding to the lose is that many of the residents of Paradise were retired and older people. Most will not likely rebuild. They have lost their homes but they have also lost their community. Many will also likely lose their independence.
? for everyone touched by these horrific fires. Lives. Personal property. Hopes. Dreams. Pets. Livestock. Entire communities decimated. I’m struggling to concentrate at work 100 miles from the Malibu fire. I want to “help” but as of yet don’t know how. ?
Thanks for all the love. I don’t really relish the idea than my CC notoriety is due to family tragedy.
Like mom60 says, I don’t foresee my parents itching to rebuild in the same spot. It is beautiful there but they were probably only a few years away from needing something less remote, less on a slope, fewer stairs. Most of their little dead-end street were also retired.
OTOH, my cousin’s kids are in HS and will have an interesting topic for their college app essays. They are rooted and will likely rebuild if their home has burned. It will be interesting to see the before/after population figures.
Still out of my house. Our fire has nothing to do with forest management. This is chaparral country. It has everything to do with PG & E and Edison management. Although not official, the electric company admitted that they had a transformer problem 2 minutes before the fire started. The legislature in 2016 passed a bill that would have required them to upgrade or bury lines in wild areas. It passed unanimously! When does that ever happen. But the Gov vetoed it. The Thomas fire. The wine country fire and now likely this one all caused by electrical equipment failure. Billions of dollars. Many lives. Peoples homes. Yes I am livid.
Magnetron and TatinG, my heart goes out to both of you and your families. TatinG. I am so sorry for the loss of your parents’ home, Magnetron, and that you must wait and worry about the fate of your home, TatinG. This is so horrible.
@Magnetron that is just awful. I hope your parents can move forward. I guess the silver lining is that they were out of town and didn’t have to also have the physical experience and trauma of leaving in the midst of the fire.
Completely accurate. However, it is not just that forest management is not to blame. Also, Jerry Brown, global warming is not to blame; and, Neil Young, Donald Trump is not blame.
But someone (a company) is to blame. And that company should be seized from them in receivership. They would have gone under completely if the selling of their stocks, in free fall, hadn’t been forcibly stopped today on WS. I’m almost as angry as people who lost their homes.
@Magnetron, I think of you as a wise and thoughtful poster. That’s what you will be known for, not current events.
@Magnetron, so sorry about your parents’ house, but glad they are okay.
Magnetron and and TatinG, am so sorry for the traumas in the past week. I really appreciate hearing your stories and perspectives. Paradise was dear to me, Butte Canyon as well, discovered when living in Chico for a year. The school did not thrill me but the surrounding areas were truly paradise.
I spent hours last night watching dashcam video as Rick Silva, editor of the local paper Paradise Post, drove through the burned out neighborhoods of what used to be Paradise, California, narrating as he goes along. He made his FB public and linked them on there. It’s like, “This neighborhood all gone, nothing left here. Oh! Here’s a house! 5840 Skyway still standing.” The vagaries of terrain and luck left some houses intact, maybe 10%, a few more damaged but standing.
As they sift through the ashes of the homes looking for bones and teeth, they are compiling a map of structure damage. It looks like they started in the middle of town and are working their way to the edges. If so, my parents’ home will be one of the last they get to, on a dead end at the edge of the valley. Their neighborhood is not yet assessed on the map.
FEMA is in hauling away anything considered hazardous waste. Estimates as to when we will be allowed in to look around start at November 30 and range out as far as June. By then, the rains will have come and washed the place clean. Someone will have hauled away the husk of their van and most of the big chunks of stuff. We are expecting nothing to be left to recover.
The bad news is that the vultures are out, scamming people, looting, setting up fake gofundme accounts.
The good news, or at least rumor, is that they appear to have stopped the fire before it got to upper Magalia and my Aunt and Uncle’s house. A benefit of a November fire is that fire season is over in most northern and mountain states. Firefighters from as far away as Alaska are down there keeping it out of Chico and Oroville.
The D of our good friends evacuated from East Chico on Saturday and is going back to her place today. Our friends are still in Oroville and sheltering their friends from Paradise. Bless those firefighters who are holding the line along Hwys 70, 99 and 149, preventing the fire from jumping.
The Oroville Dam spillway repairs are not yet complete, so there is that to worry about if the fire heads south. Hard to imagine that the dam was dangerously overflowing just 18 months ago.
Sadly, global warming is to blame. California is getting hotter. The rainy season is being compressed into a shorter time, leaving fire season longer, drier and hotter (and making rainstorms, when they come, more severe). Before global warming really took hold, we didn’t have these horrific firestorms that melt cars and flatten neighborhoods. We had fires, but not like this. Before global warming, we didn’t have dozens of people incinerated in their cars because they couldn’t get out fast enough.
If you’ve lived in California for a long time, you know it’s different now.
Not every hot place experiences epic conflagrations. Clearing brush is also an endemic and persistent problem in CA – something often resisted by people who have chosen not to live in more trimmed areas, **which is not to blame homeowners/b, but to recognize that locations with similar temperatures are not necessarily as subject to the same natural disasters. Some of these counties have a long history of regular fires. It is “merely” that the intensity and ferocity of this one is unmatched in CA or Butte County history.
Given similar disproportionate extremes in other natural disasters (not fires) in other states and sections of the world, I think something else is at play, and it relates to instability, which is a more universal phenomenon being observed and experienced.
It’s also frightening and disheartening that overnight the fire has grown 8,000 acres and leveled another 600 structures. Like a monster out of control.
Which had nothing to do with either the Camp Fire in Paradise or the Woolsey Fire in Malibu. When a fire is burning as fast and hot as the Camp Fire, having brush cleared around a house isn’t going to help. The Camp Fire just jumped over Lake Oroville; a few tens of feet of cleared brush wouldn’t have helped stop it.
But there are brush clearing regulations and penalties for not. That helps with smaller, slower moving fires. No magic for the big threats.
In ways, these big ones are a “perfect storm,” many factors coming into play.
Kudos to the brave folks who fight these.