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PARADISE, Calif. -- Fire scientists are stunned at how many lives were lost in the Camp Fire, but they’re not surprised to see a fire burn as intensely as this one did in California.
“I can't think of a situation where you could have worse fire conditions,” said Hugh Safford, a leading research professor on forest ecology and the US Forest Service ecologist for the entire state of California.
Safford says the fire should serve as a wake-up call, for towns up and down the Sierra Nevada mountain range, about what’s possible when high winds deal a direct hit to a town in dry conditions.
The Camp Fire started in a canyon and burned uphill, where high winds carried embers for miles in the exact worst direction possible.
It was a direct hit.
Embers blanketed the Paradise area, igniting more than ten thousand homes, each sending more embers into the air.
“It's kind of like all bets are off because homes are the most flammable things on the landscape,” Safford said. “They're way more flammable than the forest.”
It’s unlikely that so many factors would line up in the worst way they could, but it’s not impossible.
With California’s climate trending toward more days of bad fire weather, Safford says other towns in forested parts of California should think about what they’d do to save lives if they ever suffer the same sort of direct hit.
“There are hundreds of towns in the Sierra that are realistically in areas that are just as risky fire-wise as the situation was in Paradise.”
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Watch episode 5 "Grieving Together" now: California’s leaders tell us we’ve entered a “new normal” of more intense wildfires. The truth is: Experts think the deadly mega-fires we’ve seen are just a preview of the new normal.