As we have mentioned before, the reporting of NPR along with Propublica, Reveal, and Marketplace looks really good in retrospect. Perceptive, prescient, nuanced. This 2019 piece is if anything more relevant now than it was in the aftermath of the Camp Fire. It also presents a strong counterargument to the party line of the New York Times et al with respect to developing areas such as La Cañada Flintridge.
Dan Efseaff, the parks and recreation director for the devastated town of Paradise, Calif., looks out over Little Feather River Canyon in Butte County. The Camp Fire raced up this canyon like a blowtorch in a paper funnel on its way to Paradise, incinerating most everything in its path, including scores of homes.
Efseaff is floating an idea that some may think radical: paying people not to rebuild in this slice of canyon: "The whole community needs some defensible space," he says.
Residents would get expanded green space for recreation and a vital safety buffer to help protect Paradise from future fire calamities. "We would work with either landowners on easements," he suggests, "or looking at them from a standpoint of some purchases in here."...
Encouraging people to have an evacuation plan and create a 100-foot buffer of "defensible space" around their home — what firefighters have traditionally called basic wildfire preparation — are definitely important, [retired Cal Fire director Ken] Pimlott says.
But it's not enough. He would like to see the Paradise tragedy spur broader discussions about where people can safely live.
"Certainly I'm not advocating a ban on building in the urban interface. I think that obviously people are going to move and [there's] landowner rights, all of that," he says. "But at the end of the day we need to be looking at every development at every home and seeing if we can mitigate all aspects of [wildfire] before we build. And if we can't, then maybe we have to make a decision that that's not the right place."
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