PARADISE, Calif. _ Driving toward Paradise on the afternoon of Nov. 8, Jonathan Pangburn was less worried about the flames burning through the forest than he was about the smoke. Black and thick, it billowed over the road like a dangerous fog, cutting visibility to less than 3 feet in places.
A member of the incident management team with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Pangburn knew the signs. Gray smoke meant vegetation. Black smoke meant homes, possibly entire city blocks. The Camp fire was no longer just a wildland fire.
"It was an urban conflagration," Pangburn said. "It was structure-to-structure-to-structure ignition that carried the fire through this community."
Located in the Sierra foothills at an elevation that favored Ponderosa pines, Paradise might have seemed susceptible to the ravages of a forest fire. But what Pangburn realized is that the Camp fire had changed its character upon entering the town _ and in that revelation lay the hope for preventing tragedies such as this from happening again.
Fires that spread from house to house generate a force of their own. Embers, broadcast by the wind, find dry leaves, igniting one structure then another, and the cycle is perpetuated block after block. Break that cycle and the fire quits, and destruction can be minimized.
Paradise, though, never had that chance. Defensible space and hardened structures could not have kept the firestorm, carried on gusts clocking in the low 50s and feeding on the homes and low-lying vegetation, from reducing the town to ash.
Most telling were the trees. Most of the pines that sheltered this community still had their canopies intact. The needles, yellowed from the intense heat, were not burned _ evidence that the winds that morning had pushed the fire along so fast it never had a chance to rise into the trees. But as a surface fire, it lit up the homes that lay in its path.
"I don't know if there was anything that could have been done to save Paradise," Pangburn said. "It was some of the most intense fire behavior that I have ever witnessed."
More than a week later _ with 79 fatalities and some 700 still missing, more than 10,000 homes destroyed and 150,000 acres consumed _ Pangburn says there is opportunity in this destruction.
"The Camp fire has been the most destructive wildland fire in the state of California, and we don't want to experience this again," he said. "We have to learn from this so that no one else will have to suffer through such an inferno."
Drawing lessons from tragedy is never easy, especially when those lessons have been known for years.
"Our problem is a society that is unintentionally, but actively, ignoring opportunities because of the cultural perception of wildfire," said Jack Cohen, who is retired from the U.S. Forest Service where he worked for 40 years as a fire research scientist.
That perception, he argues, is based on myth and fear and complicated by an ongoing narrative that attributes conflagrations such as the Camp fire to such factors as climate change, overgrown forests and urban encroachment into rural areas.
Each has played a role in perpetuating and prolonging recent fires, but they needn't be entirely solved to minimize losses. There are steps that can be taken to protect homes and communities, he said, steps that require cooperation and political will.
