The report indicates that town officials in Butte County went to great lengths to prepare for fires, having cleared vegetative fuels near critical infrastructure and bolstered emergency communications in the weeks and months prior. It takes a much smaller bite out of the community, and people may have a fighting chance.” “But if it ignites closer, the fire can be so much smaller. By the time it hits the community it is so large and so powerful that it could wipe everything out,” Maranghides said. “If a fire starts far away, upwind, then it has time to develop and expand. The 200 days of drought preceding the fire had also transformed much of the region’s lush terrain into combustible ground.Īnd perhaps counterintuitively, Maranghides said, the relatively large distance between the fire’s origin and the edge of Paradise (about 11 kilometers, or 7 miles) contributed to the massive, 3.2-kilometer (2-mile)-long fire front that crashed into the town. On the day the fire broke out, wind gusts were powerful, blowing up to about 48 kilometers (30 miles) per hour, and were almost exclusively pointed southwest, toward Paradise and the smaller communities of Magalia and Concow. The team’s investigation revealed several conditions throughout Butte County that, taken together, created favorable conditions for an inferno. They also looked to images in social and news media to corroborate the sightings of discussion participants.īy the end of the painstaking process, the authors of the report incorporated more than 2,200 observations into the timeline, which is broken up into 15 separate segments to capture concurrent events throughout different sections of Butte County. With the help of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), Paradise Police Department and others, the team gained access to and reviewed large data sets, including radio logs, 911 calls, dashboard and body camera recordings, and drone and satellite images. The researchers sought to back up observations made during the fire with additional data sources before adding new puzzle pieces to the timeline. The team documented sightings of fire or smoke and efforts to fight the fire or evacuate, as well as insights into community preparedness and weather conditions. To piece together the puzzle of the Camp Fire, the team carried out discussions with 157 first responders, local officials and utilities personnel who were present during the fire. “The information we collected on the timeline is extremely powerful by itself, not only for Paradise but for other similar communities, to help them understand what they may encounter and better prepare, whether it is at a community or at the first responder level,” said NIST fire protection engineer Alexander Maranghides, who led the timeline reconstruction. But we can learn how to live with and work together to mitigate them." -Steven Hawks, CAL FIRE chief and report co-author We're never going to get rid of wildfires, natural or human-caused. “Going forward, there’s no reason to believe that fire activity and severity is going to lessen anytime soon. It also offers a detailed look at how a large and deadly fire advances - information that will become increasingly valuable as fire seasons continue to intensify. A new report containing the timeline identifies areas where more research is needed to improve life safety and reduce structural losses. What made the Camp Fire so devastating? And what lessons can we learn to prevent another disaster of this scale? Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have begun to answer these questions by investigating the conditions leading up to the fire and meticulously reconstructing the sequence of events describing the first 24 hours of its progression. The Camp Fire was the costliest disaster worldwide in 2018 and, having caused 85 deaths and destroyed more than 18,000 buildings, it became both the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history, two records the fire still holds today. In less than 24 hours, the fire had swept through the town of Paradise and other communities, leaving a charred ruin in its wake. Fueled by a sea of tinder created by drought, and propelled by powerful gusts, the flames grew and traveled rapidly. On a brisk November morning in 2018, a fire sparked in a remote stretch of canyon in Butte County, California, a region nestled against the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
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