Has California addressed the failures that led to the deadly Camp fire five years ago?
Five years ago today, around 6:15 a.m., a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. transmission line in the Sierra Nevada foothills malfunctioned. There was a spark, and soon the spark was a fire.
Flames gnawed through Butte County’s Feather River Canyon, where menacing winds shot through the slot and sent embers aloft, turning the blaze into a fast-moving firestorm. Within an hour, structures were burning in Concow, three miles away.
By noon, the fire was going strong in the neighboring town of Paradise.
By nightfall, the entire town would be gone.
The Camp fire went on to burn 153,000 acres and kill 85 people — the deadliest wildfire in California history.
The inferno shocked the state and the nation, not only for its speed and ferocity, but for the vulnerabilities it revealed about forest management, electrical equipment, city planning and evacuations. Now, on its fifth anniversary, experts say California has made strides against some of those shortcomings — but not enough to guarantee such a tragedy will never occur again.
“There are still some lessons that people can take away from an absolute worst-case scenario, where you have no hope of either fighting the fire or evacuating everyone at the same time,” said Jim Broshears, who was Paradise’s emergency management director on that fateful day.
“We’re making progress,” he said, “but I would say that there’s still thousands of communities that could experience the same kind
