What Happened When California Chose to Rebuild a Town Devastated by Wildfire

Before the fire that destroyed almost everything here, Paradise was one of those blunders of American suburbia, a misplaced place that made little ecological sense. It inhabited a California landscape that wasn’t quite rolling foothill or rugged Sierra but an in-between zone where Ponderosa pines, Douglas firs and incense cedars kept the earth from baking like the great valley below.

Psychically, it represented California affordability and escape, a refuge that drew a whole carnival of believers: hippie gun nuts and backwoodsmen, growers of pot and fruit, trailer park dwellers and two-income families in middle-class houses and retirees from the city who had enough equity to buy a lovely acre with a creek called Honey running through it.

Paradise sprawled along a ridge between two river canyons. It wasn’t long before the town was saddled with the sorry title of the largest community west of the Mississippi without a municipal sewer system. Politicians and citizens alike paid little mind to sound planning or zoning laws or to safe spaces between houses and all that was kindling. There were few good roads in or out.

If you counted the new suburbs higher up spawned by the original suburbs, some 40,000 people were living straight in the path of western wildfire. When the epic one came on Nov. 8, 2018, carried by an odd wind out of the east, hot and dry like the years of drought that preceded it, no one could say they hadn’t been forewarned. By the old Concow-Maidu Indian, by the old gold miner, by their grandparents and parents who understood the nature they were tempting.

Everyone who outran the flames that morning, dodging flying embers and bullets that ricocheted from stashes of ammo, might have kept on running. But within days of the town reopening, the builders and realtors and Chamber of Commerce evangelists had planted their signs deep in the ash. “Rebuild. Recoup, Recover.” “The Best is Yet to Come.” “We Are Ridge Strong.”