[minka1]

How much time did they have? Did they get warnings?? Or was this a ridiculously ferocious fast moving fire that there was no way for people to be able to leave hours earlier?
Horrific

[Overlord86]

This is the Paradise Fire from a few years ago. My opinion on things changed when I watched a video from the onset vs the news coverage. Paradise was literally built in the middle of a forest full of towering trees. If you go back and watch Emergency!, the TV show from the 60s/early 70s, they are watching the fires around Los Angeles on TV before getting dispatched to go. The fires look the same as they do now, so it isn't a new threat to California. When you build into a forest that needs regular fires to control the ground cover and dead trees, those fires can't happen. So the fuel load literally piles up so when a fire does happen, it has explosive growth. The people of Paradise had warning ahead of time. Even once the fire started, there was time for most of the town to evacuate when the order came. Those that failed to prep, and wanted to hang around to pack, got caught. No where to run. Remember fire is the only thing on the planet that runs faster uphill...and some of those people lived on decent sized hills. The news coverage made it seem like it came on instantly with no warning. There was a red flag warning in effect, which means extreme fire behavior due to low humidity, high winds, and high temps. People chose not to prepare even though they were told to prepare to evacuate immediately when ordered to do so. Horrible way to die. And yet across the country, areas aren't being properly developed to take regular forest management fires to take place. If there are large fires that spread rapidly where you live, you need to prepare now with defensible space around your house. Sometimes that defensible space needs to be measured in fractions of a mile.
It will happen again.

[Tyrantus]

When I lived in Cali, it used to surprise me when people would buy or build a brand new home in an area that was known to have the occasional mudslide, earthquake and/or brush fire, and then hear they lost everything and how they were "taken by surprise."

These are the same people who saved money by skipping the natural disaster insurance.

[heartsong]

I'm right in the middle of all this now.

[Padraig Flaherty]

Tragic, yes....but did they wait too long to evacuate, thus a very much preventable death(s)?!

[Tyrantus]

I found another news article and the scope of this fire was actually kind of crazy.

- It ended up displacing ~50,000 people.
- The final death toll was 85.
- 11,000 homes were destroyed, only 11 have been rebuilt (as of 2019)
- The cleanup was massive. Crews had to remove more than TWICE the amount of debris and rubble than was left behind from the Twin Towers on 9/11.
- The Camp Fire was estimated to be the most expensive natural disaster in the world for 2018. Just removing the toxic debris cost almost $2 billion.
- The federal government is paying for about three quarters, including $200 million in direct aid to victims.
- And the people that have moved back don't consider themselves victims. "We never were victims, we're no longer survivors, we're pioneers," she says. "We're building a whole town from scratch, we're really proud of that."

All things considered only 85 dead seems relatively good, and Id be willing to bet most of those deaths were from the elderly that lived there. And just to be clear, Im not saying, "they're old and were gunna die soon anyway..." I'm suggesting that there were probably transportation/health/communication issues that prevented them from escaping.

https://www.npr.org/2019/11/09/77780...e-been-rebuilt

[DarthArchon]

let's stop polluting like hell guys

[zeb247]

His cripple friend. Lol.

[EYESwide85]

I live close to this area, remember when this happened. This guy has had some trouble for filming his dead neighbors, caught a lot of flak. Mostly elderly and immobile people living in isolated, one road in/one road out, areas. any one post the DB video yet? A "suspected" murder, high speed chase, police dog vs DB's pitbull, all 3 dead, anyone?

[ThaReapa]

Hail to the XJ jeep. It went through a wildfire and is still rollin.