Paradise?

I am really bummed out seeing all the photos of Paradise California going up in smoke. I have spent a lot of time there and it really was Paradise. Beautiful little small town that you expected to see Richie and the Fonz walking the street. My mother remarried in 1970 to her boss who was born in Paradise. His mom still lived there and my step dad and I spent a week visiting in the early 70s. Then Grandmom went into a rest home and my mom and step dad moved to Paradise to be closer to her and to help take care of her and the property. Then my sister got a divorce and she moved to Paradise. By 1980 Grandmom had dies so they sold the house and moved to Reno and my sister moved back to the bay area. I visited them many times. Here I am playing Lady Madonna on a 160 year old piano in the Bidwell Mansion located in Chico, the closest large town to Paradise. I am glad that Trump is going to visit the fire victims tomorrow. They probably need some paper towels. : Just last year I was totally bummed about Ventura, the town I lived in for many years, going up in smoke. I am really glad I have moved to Florida. California is on fire and most of the east coast is in the middle of a raging snowstorm.

It is very, very sad Tom.  I just cannot imagine what people must go through in those situations, particularly when they lose friends, family or pets.  It is just awful.

Sounds like your family has a lot of history with that area.

I hope they find a way to better manage the forest areas close to communities.

Those fires a calamity for sure and I don't think it's over yet.  I have relatives out there that I worry about.  On the other hand I have good friends in the Carolina's that I cannot contact since the hurricane a couple months ago. Don't know what happened to them.  Then there are the folks in the Florida pan handle that lost everything to the hurricane down there.

With the large economy that California has they should be able to recover themselves quite quickly I would think.

It's so sad, even being an unmaterialistic person, I can't imagine just suddenly losing it all. Hopefully, due to being a digital age, people may still have their photos and important documents.

I flipped on the news this morning while getting ready for work (well, actually Kim did - I hate the news) and the top story on the Today Show was the snow storm that "crippled" the Northeast. Good Lord - the way they were talking about it, it sounded like every state that had any snow was buried 10' deep. And the inflection in their voices made it sound like a terrorist attack. Yes snow causes havoc with the roads, power outages, etc. but you know what...the snow will be cleaned up in a day or two with minor, if any, long term effects...I can't imagine what those poor people in CA are going through!

Back in the 1960s we had a good friend who grew up in Paradise.  We visited him and his mother and I'm glad both of them are deceased so they can't see the destruction.  Those poor people didn't have a chance to grab much of anything so they've truly lost everything, including important papers and photos.  So very sad.

I don't want for this discussion to get political but the environmentalists who won't let anyone clean out underbrush and manage the forests need to back off.  I wonder if they're proud of the fact that their intentional lack of action has caused so much loss.  It's about time some of them wised up and changed their attitudes which have caused significant loss of life and property.  I truly hope some of them have trouble sleeping at night!

ArdraF

Ardra, please post some evidence that forestry mismanagement is what made the fires so bad. I have a friend who is a retired forester from Oregon, and he disagrees. He said the issue is the urban/forest interface isn?t enforced, primarily by people leaving combustibles around their houses. Things like flammable trees and shrubs plus shake roofs. They then had winds of 60-80 mph, and he says nothing can stop a fire in winds like that. Add in very dry conditions, and it was just waiting to happen. I asked him for evidence too but he hasn?t gotten back to me, I thought this fire is believed to have resulted from a malfunction in a PG&E electrical line.

My sister and BIL live high above Lake Tahoe and I have been very worried for a long time that the same thing could happen to them. It is moronic to blame forestry management for this fire and the destruction. Short of cutting down every tree there is nothing that could have stopped this fire. If you live in a forest then a forest fire will be your biggest enemy. Not much you can do to stop a fire like that especially in Santa Ana wind conditions. For all of you who have never experienced a Santa Ana wind storm you just can't imagine it. Every year from September to December there are periods where the Santa Ana winds blow. They usually blow for a few days to a week and they come from the east, off the desert. The winds blow between 20 and 80 miles per hour and it is extremely dry. When you live there you walk outside and immediately you know that a Santa Ana is blowing. There are always major fires somewhere during a Santa Ana. People who don't live in California think earthquakes are the main problem in California but it is really the Santa Ana winds that are the major problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_winds

I lived in California for 40 years and base my opinion on all the comments I heard over the years.  Also, I'm not just referring to the fire at Paradise but to all of them in the last few years.  Yes, when Santa Ana winds blow and there's a drought it doesn't really matter what starts the fire, but common sense tell me that the more fuel it has (lots of dry underbrush) the worse the result.  It also can apply to other states.  The number of deaths and billions of dollars in destruction require a change in forest management thinking.  I believe they need to be much more proactive in preventing such loss.

By the way, we hear that some of these fires are "historic".  Maybe in our modern times, but tree ring analysis shows that about 1100 A.D. there were huge fires that burned the entire length of California.  That also was a time of drought and lightning probably started most of them but all that dry underbrush in virgin forests undoubtedly made it much worse.

ArdraF

The Elks lodge in Chico, located north of Paradise, has an RV park and it is packed with people from the fire.. The Elks lodge is feeding them and letting them setup tents, etc all for free. 

All our other Lodges are sending money and doing whatever they can to help.

We have some  friends and relatives from there who lost everything but are happy to be alive. They have found housing with friends and relatives that live in Chico and the surrounding area. 

It's times like this that make you count your blessings for sure.

The Chinook winds in Colorado are essentially the same thing as the Santa Anas in CA, and they have similar effects on fires. Most other high mountain areas (at least in the western US and probably Canada) are subject to the same kind of winds.

Forest mismanagement was an ongoing thing through most of the 20th century, likely what Ardra is talking about, and the problems caused are no where near being fixed now. When I was a kid in the late 40s through the 50s, I recall large areas of the Colorado and Wyoming mountains being almost parklike, with little undergrowth, so you could walk almost unobstructed between the trees, with just a surface coating of pine needles. And there was a short rain shower almost every afternoon through the summer.

Today, most of those same areas are rife with underbrush, and the daily showers aren't there to the same extent. It's my understanding that the put-out-the-fire-at-any-cost mentality of that time is a large part of the cause of that underbrush being so rampant. The drought in many of these areas makes some of that tinder-dry, to the point that almost breathing on it is enough to start a fire (figuratively), and things are worse because so many of these areas that were nearly virgin forest, or at least relatively remote, are now communities with folks building cabins, and even full blown houses, in and among these often dry forests (beautiful but dangerous).

That, along with shifting weather patterns, is why fires that were minor problems 60+ years ago are causing so much havoc today.

UTTransplant said:

Ardra, please post some evidence that forestry mismanagement is what made the fires so bad. I have a friend who is a retired forester from Oregon, and he disagrees. He said the issue is the urban/forest interface isn?t enforced, primarily by people leaving combustibles around their houses. Things like flammable trees and shrubs plus shake roofs. They then had winds of 60-80 mph, and he says nothing can stop a fire in winds like that. Add in very dry conditions, and it was just waiting to happen. I asked him for evidence too but he hasn?t gotten back to me, I thought this fire is believed to have resulted from a malfunction in a PG&E electrical line.

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That's part of the explanation, but to get a more comprehensive answer you have to look at California's unique geography and history.

Compare photos of the Sierra foothills during the 1850s Gold Rush to now.  Back then California's forests were virtually denuded of trees to supply the wood to build the towns and the Transcontinental Railroad and provide fuel for the steam engines that powered the trains and the mines.

The current Sierra Nevada forests are almost completely man-made and were a managed, renewable resource until the environmental movement virtually shut down commercial logging in the 1980s.  The resulting fuel build-up over the last half-century, including the vast number of dead and dying trees that haven't been cleared, directly causes the massive infernos we're now seeing.

Juan Browne is an amateur reporter who lives in Nevada City in the Sierra foothills.  He did some outstanding work on his YouTube channel over the past year translating into layman's terms the progress of the massive Oroville Dam spillway rebuilding project. In August he turned his talents towards explaining the history and conditions behind today's massive infernos.

After the introduction, jump ahead to 3:40 to avoid a lot of outdated fire information that preceded the current conflagrations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajPpP3vbD5c

Larry N. said:

Forest mismanagement was an ongoing thing through most of the 20th century, likely what Ardra is talking about, and the problems caused are no where near being fixed now. When I was a kid in the late 40s through the 50s, I recall large areas of the Colorado and Wyoming mountains being almost parklike, with little undergrowth, so you could walk almost unobstructed between the trees, with just a surface coating of pine needles. And there was a short rain shower almost every afternoon through the summer.

Today, most of those same areas are rife with underbrush, and the daily showers aren't there to the same extent. It's my understanding that the put-out-the-fire-at-any-cost mentality of that time is a large part of the cause of that underbrush being so rampant.

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I was in Durango, CO this past summer and rode the Durango-Silverton train through part of the area burned by the massive 416 fire.  I was struck by what you pointed out in your first paragraph, that despite the drought what burned was largely underbrush, which at least in the areas visible from the train was thin enough that the tall trees weren't harmed to any extent.

Yes, there were heroic efforts to protect human property inside the fire line, but for the most part the burned area remained remarkably healthy, to the point where the fire was left to burn in remote areas until winter rains and snowfall extinguish it.

That's in direct contrast to the tree-crowning wildfires in California caused by the uncontrolled fuel loads and excessive underbrush in their forests.

For 100 years the policy as Lou pointed out was to extinguish forest fires no matter what the cost. In the 1960s Dr. Richard Hartesveldt got permission to burn an acre in Sequoia Forest and discovered the reason sequoia trees were no longer reproducing was due to the fact that sequoias need fire to reproduce. The cones do not open up and release their seeds until the temperature reaches a certain point. This is done so that the trees don't reproduce continually but only when a fire clears out an area. Then the seeds are released and saplings can grow. They had not had any new sequoia trees grow for many years in the National Park and when the Dr burned an acre they had 1000 sequoia saplings the next year in that acre.

It was 100 years of not putting out fires that caused the problems we see today. The under story built up to ridiculous levels. In 1987 Yellowstone caught fire and 2/3rd of the park burned up. The army, air force, marines and fire departments could not put out the fire which raged for three months. Finally in September the snow put the fires out. It took a radical rethinking of fire management to get them to finally realize that fire was a necessary component of nature and putting out fires was a bad thing. It is not logical that fire is a good and necessary thing. But a natural fire left to burn will remove the litter on the forest floor. If it is allowed to build up then the fires becomes more intense and the fires leave the forest floor and become a crown fire which is really bad news.

I wonder how many of those people who have died had the chance to get out.

Since Paradise is listed as a retirement community perhaps all of them had to chance to get out, but did they have the ability?

It was a very fast moving fire and old people move very slow (don't ask me how I know).

Our retired relative there would have probably died had it not been for a neighbor who came to their house and started banging on the door and woke them up.

They threw some stuff in their two cars and took off as the fire hit their neighborhood.  I think there a lot of people who never made it out due to no warning. The roads were clogged and some were trapped that way too.

I too am saddened to see those photos and even more saddened by some of the political comments and some of the other comments made by idiots who have never seen the aftermath of a fire like that before and insist it's faked. TRUST ME FOLKS. NOT FAKED.

The good news is that there are several more towns named Paradise. INcluding one that is surrounded by Las Vegas (My daughter used to work there) and one in the Upper Part of Michigan where I have been... (Been to both of those) a few others scatterd about.

Not one town in North America (US, Canada, Mexico) EVER named Heaven.  BUt we do have a HELL (Lower Michigan).

But the California Paradise.... Sad that the fire was allowed to burn that far.

But the California Paradise.... Sad that the fire was allowed to burn that far.

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Allowed? John, it wasn't allowed, it happened in spite of attempts to keep it away.