Evacuation plans: the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men (Part II)
[NOTE: Part I can be found here.]
In my research so far about what happened in the Paradise fire and why it went so wrong, I kept trying to get a good timeline, with distances. When exactly did the fire start? How many miles from Paradise? How fast did it travel? When did it first hit the town? When did authorities order the evacuation? It has proved very difficult to get that information, but finally I’ve gotten some of it (although I’m not 100% sure it’s correct).
What is coming out is that the method and timing of the notification of the residents was deeply flawed, despite all the preparation. In addition to the natural and perhaps-inevitable obstacles, there was some sort of disorganization in the notification of the population of Paradise:
A resident of Magalia, about 8 miles west of the fire’s starting point, confronted Butte County Sheriff Kory L. Honea and other officials Monday about why he and his neighbors could not find any information about the dangerous blaze, a full three hours after fire crews first responded to the ignition point, near Highway 70 in Plumas National Forest.
“We use the emergency broadcast system for a tornado warning. But this is a deadly fire,” said the man, who was not identified by county officials whom he addressed at the meeting in Oroville. “I don’t remember any alert coming over my radio. … People in the community are freaking out, you need to get some information up here.”…
The Butte County sheriff’s office said it did deliver notifications about the fire danger: 5,227 by email, 25,643 via phone (to both land lines and cellular devices) and 5,445 by text message.
“I wish we had the opportunity to get more alerts out, more of a warning out, but unfortunately we didn’t,” Sheriff Honea told the public meeting on Monday.
At a news conference Tuesday evening, Honea stressed that the fire’s unusually swift progress south and west into Magalia, Paradise and other mountain communities made timely notification difficult.
“You have to keep in mind that this was an extraordinarily chaotic and rapidly moving situation. The fire started in a remote area. It takes awhile for our fire resources to get there and from that point, trying to determine the path of travel and whether or not that’s going to effect populated areas, that takes time,” Honea said.
He added that it’s possible some people were warned and didn’t immediately act to get out of harm’s way. “We were trying to move tens of thousands of people out of an area very rapidly with the fire coming very rapidly. And no matter what your plan is to do that, no plan will ever work 100 percent when you are dealing with that much chaos.”
Honea, who took office four years ago, also suggested that emergency officials have to be concerned not to over-burden people with excessive or unneeded evacuation orders. He said the region had already lived through evacuations from earlier fires and last year’s threatened collapse of the Oroville Dam, which caused nearly 200,000 people to flee…
Like other counties, Butte has a system that allows residents to sign up for “reverse 911” telephone alerts in times of emergency.
Savannah Rauscher told The Sacramento Bee that by the time she got the 911 alert at 8:30 a.m., embers and dust were already flying around her family’s Edgewood Lane home….
But even signing up for the warnings was no guarantee they came through. Johnson said her aunt, Peg, applied for the 911 alerts, but received no notice at her Paradise home of the Camp Fire. “She said she didn’t get anything,” Johnson said. “It was friends and family calling, or neighbors coming by. That’s how many people found out.”
Taft said she argued fiercely with her mother for more than an hour, trying to convince her to flee. But there were no sheriff’s deputies demanding the neighborhood evacuate. Fire crews, busy on the front lines of the blaze, did not stop by. No one she talked to in her neighborhood was ordered out…
Even a system designed to push warnings to all cellphones, tested recently by the Trump administration, did not reach everyone.
Lewin said he had two cellphones side by side during that test, both serviced by the same phone company, and only one received the emergency alert. “And we don’t know the reason why,” he said.
An exacerbating factor in Butte County may have been the advanced age of many residents. Paradise and its environs are popular with retirees, some of whom are reluctant to leave home because of mobility problems…
Cell phone service is apparently very bad there, and many people don’t even have cell phones. To call landlines and leave voicemails—even with an automated system—is much slower, and my guess is that the majority of those evacuation messages needed to be left on landlines.
The fire started in the early morning, and got to town pretty early in the morning, too. If a person was a late sleeper, or even a moderately late sleeper, and habitually turned the cellphone ringer off at night (or slept in a room without a landline), none of these messages would have been received. Also, of course, disabled people or elderly people who don’t drive would have had to rely on neighbors, friends, or relatives to come and get them out.
The evidence so far is that the vast majority of deaths occurred at home. Were the people asleep, in bed? Or were they somewhere else in the house? Because of the nature of the fire—its extreme heat causing what amounted to cremation—we may never know the full story. But I believe that some sort of more comprehensive warning system, and perhaps a buddy system for the disabled (paired with someone able-bodied), would have helped.
The plans for Paradise called for an evacuation in stages, in order to forestall the problem of backup on the roads. Ordinarily the officials would have enough time, but this time they didn’t:
…[T]his time [because of the history of the 2008 fire, officials] decided not to immediately undergo a full-scale evacuation, hoping to get residents out of neighborhoods closest to the fires first before the roads became gridlocked.
But it soon became clear that the fire was moving too fast for that plan, and that the whole town was in jeopardy. A full-scale evacuation order was issued at 9:17 a.m., but by then the fire was already consuming the town.
The fire is reported to have begun around 6:30 AM in a remote area. I’ve read wildly differing accounts of how far away it was from the town (from 65 miles away to 25 miles away to just a few miles away). Most accounts agree on the time it was detected, and if that’s correct then this full-scale evacuation was about 2 hours and 45 minutes afterward. But it had already traversed the distance to Paradise.
The article gives a fairly close-to-Paradise origin for the fire, around Pulga at 7 miles away. But if you look on the map, Pulga is more than 7 miles from Paradise (by car it’s actually 26 or 27 miles, but of course as the crow flies it is much closer, although it’s hard to tell how close). And the article has the very first (partial) evacuation notice for Paradise being issued around 8 AM, which is about an hour and a half later):
In the chaos of the Paradise fire, many residents said, they never got warnings by phone from authorities to leave. Some said they got warnings from police driving through their streets using loudspeakers. Others got texts from neighbors. But few said they got official text alerts or phone calls from the government.
The fire was first reported near the community of Pulga — about seven miles from Paradise — about 6:30 a.m. By 7:35 a.m., it had reached the nearby hamlet of Concow.
The first evacuation order for Paradise came at 8 a.m., a minute after the first flames were spotted in town. The order was limited to the eastern side of Paradise. The hope was to get the residents closest to fire out immediately, with the rest of the town to follow if needed.
But the fire was simply moving too fast.
“The fire had already outrun us,” said John Messina,
Technical problems were inherent in the phone system used:
The evacuation orders were sent using a phone system called CodeRed, which covers all landlines as well as cellphone numbers voluntarily submitted by residents. But the system doesn’t cover all phones in the town. “In the town of Paradise, I think we’d be lucky to say 25% or 30%” of phone lines are in the system — and that’s after local officials urge residents to sign up, said Jim Broshears, who directs Paradise’s emergency operations center.
Also, the system can reach only so many phones per hour. “I can’t give you the raw numbers, but there’s a capacity per hour of calls. So CodeRed can’t [make] 12,000 calls at once. It’s really fast, but not this fast,” Broshears said.
These types of systems have been criticized because they reach so few people. Instead, some safety experts have advocated using the federal government’s Wireless Emergency Alert system, which sends Amber Alert-style warnings to cellphones within a certain geographical area…
In Paradise, Broshears said officials did not employ the Wireless Emergency Alert system because they initially wanted to stagger the evacuations by neighborhood. He also said that Amber Alert-style alerts do “not go to every phone at the same time.”
According to the Federal Communications Commission, Wireless Emergency Alerts are broadcast to coverage areas that best approximate the zone of an emergency; mobile devices in the alert zone will receive the alert. There has been criticism that the geographical targeting of the system is not terribly precise, and in late 2019, wireless carriers are supposed to improve geo-targeting of the alerts.
Again, remember that most people in Paradise may not have even had functioning cellphones.
What about the good old-fashioned siren of my youth? Do towns still have them? I hated that siren; it terrified me because it sounded like an air raid siren in World War II movies, with which I was very familiar. But boy, could you hear it.
Of course, a siren has three drawbacks in a situation such as that faced by Paradise. The first is that it’s tested a lot and people sometimes have trouble telling test from real alert. The second is that it’s non-specific and doesn’t say what the danger is or what to do about it; it’s just an alarm, unless there’s a sort of code of blasts, and then people have to remember the code. The third is the previously-mentioned problem of a mass exodus all at once. Even if the evacuation notice is given promptly and people receive it, how do you avoid a bottleneck of traffic, particularly in a town with the sort of road geography Paradise has?
[NOTE: For now, I’ve given up on calculating the speed of the fire, except to say it was very very fast. The problem with the calculations involve the differing reports of speed and of distance. Most articles say that at its fastest, the fire moved at the rate of more than one football field a second. The slowest rate I’ve read is that the average speed of this fire was a football field every three seconds. Either way, that’s tremendously fast.]
By my calculations, the speeds you quoted are between 68 and 204 mph. I’m guessing that these refer to the speed of the fire going up a mountain ridge and not on a flat. No one is going to out race the flame front at those speeds.
Paul in Boston:
Well, if the start of the fire really was only 7 miles away from Paradise (which I doubt, actually), and the first evacuation order came an hour and a half later, that’s much slower than the speeds you’re listing. However, fires don’t follow a straight line from point A to point B, which is another reason it’s very hard to tell what the true speed was. I think there’s little doubt it was very fast.
I also read recently that there has been a beetle infestation in the trees in recent years, leaving a lot of dead trees. Dead trees burn fast, compared to living, healthy trees.
football field per 3 seconds
900 feet per 3 seconds
18000 feet per minute
3.4 miles per minute
204 miles per hour
Would be at the coast in one hour – clear to Sacramento in 30 minutes – very doubtful.
Your calculation difficulties originated with commenter Cicero, who had the fire traveling 65 miles to reach Paradise, when in fact it traveled a little more than one-tenth that distance. A few minutes with Google maps will show that the town of Pulga, where the fire began, is about seven straight-line miles from Paradise (access the “measure distance” tool by right-clicking on the map).
As for the siren in coastal Washington (and other coastal areas I imagine) they have tsunami warning sirens and they periodically run tests and they are widely announced in advance so the scaring people shouldn’t be an issue. So everybody knows it is a tsunami alert as that is the only thing it is for and they could have a fire alert system in danger areas. Plus my experience in traveling around the west is that during fire season virtually everybody is aware and fretting about how dry it is and fearing lightning.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen such happy people as when in Butte, Montana a few years ago they had a big time downpour in August with no lightning. Everybody was talking about it. So I would imagine that the people In Paradise were on edge to varying degrees.
Griffin:
Announcing that a siren blast is a test—however “widely” you announce it—doesn’t mean all that much, in my experience. A great many people still don’t get the news, or they forget, or they think it’s a test when it’s the real thing, anyway (forgetting that that one wasn’t announced). Nevertheless I agree that there could be some sort of system using sirens, and it probably would represent an improvement.
And in that part of California you smell fire and see hazy smoke a lot, so people learn to ignore it (especially at first, when the going would be good) unless it’s close, and unless they receive an evacuation notice. If they left every time they smelled smoke or saw hazy smoke, they’d be practically commuting. Most forest fires stay in the forest till they’re burned out or put out.
Earnest Prole:
I don’t think the 65 mile figure came from Cicero. I think it came from me, from something I read a while back about where it had started.
And as I wrote in a recent comment, if Pulga really is something like 7 miles away as the crow flies, that doesn’t mean it burned in a straight line right to Paradise. Although it might have. Depends on wind direction, etc.
However, if it really was 7 miles away, it’s hard to understand why Paradise wasn’t evacuated immediately, if authorities knew the winds were 50 mph.
Neo,
Well. on the Washington coast they put up electronic reader boards announcing when the system tests are they put up other signage all over the place it is announced on radio stations in newspapers for days in advance also. Now of course a tsunami warning can be issued for many hours in advance unlike this fire.
But most places in the west have those fire danger signs all over the place with ‘low’, ‘moderate’, ‘high’ and ‘severe’ warnings so the people should be aware on some level of the situation. My experience has been that people are really aware of the danger at certain times of the year so unless the siren cries wolf too much it could be an effective tool.
Of course there is also some situations where it all just a perfect storm of fast moving very hot fire hitting very inaccessable area and no matter what was done it was going to be bad.
I think this was the “perfect storm” scenario. Very fast-moving fire, winds sending it exactly the wrong direction, phased evacuation not possible because of the fire speed.
I read the link on the other thread from Anthony Watts. He moved out of Paradise to Chico after a previous fire scare. The location was a fire trap. Unfortunately, it moved from “potential” to a horrible event.
Griffin:
This was a perfect storm, and Paradise and the area has “high” fire danger most of the time except during the rather brief rainy season (a rainy season that does not always come).
If you live in a place where the danger of something is often very high, and nothing all that bad has ever happened, you tend to think it will continue to not happen.
I do think a siren could be helpful, particularly in an area with poor cell phone service. I wonder why it’s not used more.
I’m with you on the siren idea, Neo, except I imagine the city authorities were afraid it would trigger an everybody-at-once evacuation and gridlock — which is what happened anyhow.
Kate:
Exactly.
It just sounds like there was not many options here short of spending millions on a much wider road out of town which could have been never needed. And it seems like California doesn’t much like spending big money on projects in rural northern California.
I have always wondered what it must be like to live in Yreka or Alturas or Susanville and be governed and taxed just like the elites in Palo Alto or Malibu while living an entirely different way of life.
It took me a few seconds to remember. Growing up in a small town, if you heard a siren that sounded like an old fashioned fire siren, it was a fire alert. If the siren pitch and volume went up, and stayed up, it was a tornado alert. We had one test of the newly implemented tornado add-on, of which everyone was aware. We had three or four real tornado alerts, two of which were very close near misses.
Paradise would have required several sirens given its size. Still it seems like the obvious choice.
For what it’s worth, here is an analysis from University of Washington Atmospheric Sciences professor Cliff Mass of the climactic conditions when the fire started: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2018/11/why-did-catastrophic-camp-fire-start.html.
Miker,
Cliff Mass is a very balanced scientist. He definitely believes in man made climate change but he has written several very critical takedowns of the climate alarmists. And they don’t like that much at all.
As to your siren system: I worked 9-1-1 for a small (~16,000) city with a siren system due to a nuclear plant nearby. Even with TV, radio, newspaper and inserts in electric bills of an upcoming test of the system (on a Saturday at noon, and again 30 minutes later), I would still get about a dozen calls from citizens on 9-1-1 when the siren went off (and a few more calls on the regular business line). Some people just never get the word that it is a test.
Neo, there’s a decent summary of the timing of evacuation orders in the Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/amp-stories/how-the-camp-fire-overwhelmed-paradise/?noredirect=on
Ernest Prole:
Thanks, but I saw that when it was first published, and it made little sense to me.
For starters, that was one of the sources for my (apparently erroneous) idea that the fire had started around 60-something miles north of Paradise. It says in that WaPo piece that the fire started about 150 miles north of Sacramento. Well, Paradise is about 90 miles north of Sacramento. So I subtracted. If the fire started at a spot that’s really 7 miles from Paradise, that’s a big difference from 60 miles.
Then the WaPo piece also says the fire was discovered at 6:33 AM, the first firefighters arrive at the scene at 6:43 AM, and the evacuation orders are issued “minutes later.” However, the evacuation order they show (for Pulga, the nearby town) has a timestamp of 10:23 AM, which is about three and half hours later. The article made no sense to me as a timeline, so I disregarded it.
I saw other articles too, at other sources, and none of them made sense.
Neo, the timestamps on the alerts WaPo published are Eastern time, which is three hours ahead of Pacific time.
Ernest Prole:
Well, that certainly explains the time discrepancy (although not why they didn’t put “Eastern Time” after it), but not the distance discrepancy. I knew anyway that Pulga was evacuated fairly early on; my real question was about when the call went out to Paradise. I think I got some of the answers in later articles, though, that I quoted in this post.
Neo,
That Cliff Mass website mentioned by Miker above has a few posts about the fire and why it started and the weather conditions. One of his points is the power should be shut off when the winds kick up. He made the same point last year after the Napa fires. Think that’s going too far personally but it might prevent some fires.
The answer is not to flee from the fire, that obviously cannot be done by so many. The answer is to be prepared to shelter in place underground from the fire. Just like midwesterners once did from tornados. A quick moving fire burns over and past fast enough that people would not have to shelter in place that long. Seperate siren sounds for training and real alerts and all clears prevent confusion and mistaken assumptions. But stupidity cannot be prevented and in life threatening situations, the truly stupid sometimes self-eliminate. Any mountain community that doesn’t learn from this tragedy has themselves to blame.
When we were riding out the Rat Creek fire in Washington in 1994, our best source of info was the Wenatchee, WA AM radio station. The sheriff and fire boss were passing info to them for dissemination to residents near the fire. It was invaluable to us from the minute the fire blew up near our house. We were in a relatively secure situation, so we opted to ride it out. But without the AM radio info we would not have been as informed or been as confident in defending our house.
Fires on flatter terrain are difficult because only a helicopter can get a perspective of what’s actually happening. When the wind is light the fire creeps along the ground and moves fairly slowly. When the wind picks up and the fire gets up in the crowns of the trees, it is off to the races. A terrifying thing, it moves as fast as the wind, which was quite strong in Butte County. A crowned out forest fire sounds like a huge freight train.
According to this account: “Satellite images reveal the fury of the Camp Fire. Wind-blown flames raced 12 miles and destroyed half of Paradise in its first four hours as residents were just waking up. Flying embers flew 2.5 miles ahead of the advancing fire front, according to UC Berkeley Landsat analyses.”
That from: https://www.dailydemocrat.com/2018/11/17/lessons-from-paradise-staying-alive-in-fire-country/
That would give a speed of about 3 miles an hour, but with the flying embers, there were a lot of fires being started out in advance of the main fire front. Wind direction and speed are big factors in whether a town is in danger, but the wind can shift and things can change quite rapidly.
In the foothills of California, during fire season, there ought to be a dedicated AM radio station providing fire info to residents. Also, it would be a good idea for each resident to have an evacuation plan and be ready to go. In the Navy we called such advance planning being “forehanded.” It doesn’t hurt to do some fire proofing, as the orchard owner in Paradise did, by building a fire break and keeping his trees watered. Maybe some of these foothill towns will consider fire breaks around their towns. It’s certainly a lot less costly than what has happened to Paradise.
Slightly off-topic, but worth noting (H/T Instapundit):
https://sacramentocitizen.wordpress.com/2018/08/08/ca-gov-jerry-brown-vetoed-bipartisan-wildfire-management-bill-in-2016/?fbclid=IwAR0Dfef8SgqbW84ShzY5IAuLZcU9OHWmbYiUOsdZLi7nyyOF33ikKFfjM6Q
John Moorlach, the state Senator referred to in that article above is a serious guy and his bill was passed unanimously by both houses of the legislature. Then Brown vetoed it. Moorlach is the guy who, as a private practice accountant, predicted the Orange County bankruptcy in 1994. The LA Times printed an editorial dismissing his warning and the bankruptcy came six months later. The bill would have helped create fire breaks around utility lines. The cause of this fire.
Yes, Jerry Brown (a member in excellent standing of the “Never-Let-a-Crisis-Go-to-Waste Club”):
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/416167-california-governor-on-wildfires-this-is-the-new-abnormal
AKA, no shame. (Moreover, I’m particularly interested in the conflict-of-interest angle noted in the one of the comments to the original post.)
Here is a good LA Times amount of the fire and its timing.
Shelter in place. Shelter in place. Shelter in place.
A cheap shallow box in your yard with a cheap fireproof cover would suffice.
A mask/filter for smoke inhalation over your face.
A local siren or cheap, battery-powered, plug-in-the-wall beeper (110+ db) to wake you up.
In less than ten minutes (three if you hurry) you would be perfectly safe.
Forest fire fighters go into the field with masks and special fireproof blankets to wrap over themselves for this very reason. A shallow box would be much better.
In tornado country folks escaped to small root cellars or climbed in water wells
Neo, you mentioned Paradise resident Vanderleun in a previous post. He has written a moving account of the fate of a family-run orchard after the fire. The orchard itself survived, but the Noble family lost their home and everything else:
https://americandigest.org/wp/the-orchard-at-the-end-of-paradise/
Also at American Digest, a description of the very poor living off the grid in the back country around the area. It sounds like the “missing” list of about 1,000 may be an understatement. These very poor people had no cell service and often no landline service, and would not have received any warning at all.
http://americandigest.org/wp/bring-out-your-dead/
Shelter in place — like a tornado shelter, but ready for a fire — cement/brick, with a fireproof door, various smoke filter air vents (at least two).
Much, much higher fire insurance, with insurance folks involved in cost effective ways to save more buildings. Maybe require more brick, higher “fire taxes” on wood houses?
Also, higher “density taxes” on towns with poor roads that can’t handle emergency evacuation?
Sounds like a very beautiful place, except for the low risk of a very high damage fire.
Experimenting with highly watered / flame resistant plant firebreaks?
There’s lots of possible mitigation solutions, but all require money or inconvenience or both. And willingness to force all to do it.
One of the earlier comments took a stab at calculating the rate the fire moved on Paradise, citing some “facts”. I would like to inform the commenter that a yard is 3 feet… so a distance of 100 yards would measure out at 300 ft, not 900.
Using the correct length of a yard, covering 300 ft in 3 seconds, works out to be 100 ft/sec, or roughly 70mph. Not that 70 mph is not a rapid rate of advance. [I don’t know the source of the 3 seconds, so all these numbers could be bogus.]
And, since were are talking football fields, the area of the field, excluding end zones, is 45000 square feet, and an acre is 43,560 sq feet. So take the acreage stat and imagine that many regulation fields….
Big Bill:
Shelter in place? Better than nothing but worse than evacuation if you can. Many fire-fighters in wildland situations have died when forced to rely on shelter in place. They were trained professionals. Air purifying respirators (APR) don’t remove carbon monoxide, so you are depending on fire conditions to be favorable for your survival. Do you know how to wear an APR? Do you know how to test for a effective face seal? Do you have a beard? If so you are toast (can’t seal a respirator on a bearded face). Remember, your life depends on these things when you shelter in place. Oh, and they had fire retartand (FR) clothing.
Hawaii has a siren system. Primarily for tsunami and hurricane warnings. It is tested the first Monday of every month at 12 noon. This works very well. Everyone knows what is a test and what isn’t. If those sirens go off and it isn’t Monday at noon, we turn on the tv or radio and there will be a public service announcement giving information and instructions. One way I knew the cell phone text warning about a missile was an error – the sirens didn’t go off.
Hi Neo,
The problem in this part of California, is “conifers”. The needles on these trees contain terpenes and other volatiles, and they are highly flammable, even green.
In housing developments in forested Paradise, natural conifers were artfully selected for retention, to meet ‘green-belt’ goals, as the streets & home-plots were laid out. This was a mistake; all conifers should have been removed, and broadleaf, deciduous trees should have been planted. It should be illegal outright; should never happen, but it’s cheap and it’s pretty.
Fire travels very fast, Neo, by “blowing up”. Heat baking the conifers vaporizes flammables, ahead of the actual flames, and then the very air itself combusts with a huge WHOOSH, then the solids in the follow-up tree-combustion goes off with a howling chorus of incineration. The sudden vast release of heat creates a ground-level suction, pulling in more air to oxygenate the tree-fires. The thermal convection updraft sucks small burning debris 100s of feet up (without it burning, since O2 is too low), and then it falls down … now burning vigorously in the fresh oxygen supply.
That’s how fire sometimes gets outa control like this … leaping in big bounds, in ‘rolling waves’, and also by crowning, running through just the tops of (conifer) trees. Indeed, Neo, the green trees in dry weather can be more dangerous than the beetle-snags, because they contain the volatiles, and fine, loftable needle-debris. Especially, in terms of high-speed, and jumping.
Wait for it, the Public Service Announcement is coming. “Conifers should not be used for landscaping, in these environs”. It’s a hard-sell, though … you can’t terrorize little kids anymore with horrific 16mm flicks of big fires, taken by urgent & edgy-sounding fire-professionals out on the front-lines of fearsome fires. And it’s cheap, and who doesn’t love nice trees.
Ted
Ted, your comment is highly descriptive and explanatory. Very well written. Thanks.
Ted Clayton:
This certainly is NOT my field of expertise, although I’ve been reading up on it. Somewhere in my reading I came across a description that indicated that in the Paradise fire, at least within the town, many of the conifers did not catch fire although the houses did. I’ll try to find it later.
Well Neo, I looked for & quickly found articles asking why the homes burned, and the trees did not. Thank you Julie.
“Why do houses burn but trees remain?” https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/photos-from-california-wildfires-reveal-lessons-for-b-c-1.4905324
Because of the smoke, I can’t tell for-sure if these foliage-bearing trees are green, or black. While usually the foliage burns-off, it can also just char-in-place.
Some Media & people are clearly surprised, that trees are still standing, or that they are intact. Forest fires often consume mainly the fines, or even just mainly the volatilized vapors. In a crowning-fire, there may be areas where the lower part of the tree remains green, and they may recover.
In a fire that is blowing-up, a burst can fly up … and right across a patch of forest, leaving it mostly unaffected … then fall down on the other side, setting off another giant torch. It’s common, that it hop-scotches.
Supporting your ‘head-scratching investigation’, it may be that at least in some parts of town, low-intensity fires gradually compromised homes, simply because nobody was there with so-much-as a garden hose, to put-down what otherwise might have been a manageable fire-threat. Without being severe enough to get into the trees at all (this is how natural slow-cool fires work).
I’m not (at this time) promoting a dropped-the-ball scenario (although that is certainly possible!) … and there are real, practical issues in this explanation. Like crudely, it could take every firefighter in North American to successfully defend every street, block & home in Paradise. And they had to get there, equipped, in under an hour.
Fire-patterns are not normally even, uniform or regular. The destruction varies. Some spots largely escape. Sustained “solid walls of fire” are usually temporary (they ‘isolate’ themselves, pulling low-lying air “in”, then sending up a huge thermal-convection “plume”). Big fires are very much a million spot-fires, especially (as probably the case here) when bounding or crowning. Bambi will come tottering down your fire-break, after you retreated from too-dangerous conditions, singed but very much alive.
The authorities must respectfully address the matter of the Missing List, carefully inspecting each ruin, without the Media. Hopefully it’s mostly a fruitless quest … but until they sign off on that, much or most of the town stays off-limits. When it opens up, we will have a whole new round of pics.
Basically, fire on the ground under low wind moves slowly. You have lots of time. If there is a good breeze, you can see ‘surging & racing’, especially in fingers. Under high winds, and dry conditions, the infamous Santa Anna, new dynamics arise and yeah it can spread too rapidly for Warning Systems, or First Responders. 20-30 mph, easily, and sometimes, or briefly, quite a bit more.
I’m curious just what did and did not happen inside the town itself … but it is not a mystery how the fire got there so quickly, from someplace else.
Ted
Thanks, Ted, for the descriptions. Yes, it’s not clear from pictures I have seen whether the conifers standing in Paradise after the fire are dead trees standing or actual survivors. The tops might have burned, it seems to me, and left the trunks in place. If it gets really hot, my understanding is that houses will burn from the inside out.
Thank you Kate for confirming it’s hard to tell if those trees are black-toast, or ok. It does look like there was a LOT of heat, for all those houses to be just gone. Even very ‘good’ house-blazes are not that ‘efficient’.
@ Molly Brown — I grew up in Anchorage, AK (probable target of 2-3 megaton warheads) in the 1960s/70s. The air raid siren was tested every Friday at 3:30pm, so we always knew when it was a test, and basically we all knew that if we heard it any *other* time we were screwed.