PARADISE, Calif. _ Chainsaws were humming and backhoes were beeping. Wood frames were being hammered into place.
It was the sound of Paradise rebuilding, one nail at a time.
"I love it up here _ it's beautiful," said Holly Austin, watching from a camper as her husband and a small crew worked on their new garage on Paradise Avenue.
One year after the Camp fire destroyed much of the town in California's deadliest wildfire, Paradise is coming back to life. Eleven homes have been rebuilt, and the town has issued more than 300 permits to those who lost their homes and wouldn't think of moving elsewhere.
But in Paradise, emotions are raw and fears are easily stoked. A few weeks ago, when they spotted smoke in the air, Austin and her neighbors reflexively braced themselves for another disaster _ even though it turned out to be someone's fireplace.
"It was all over the internet _ 'oh, did you smell smoke?'" Austin said.
"We are all jumpy."
So are millions of her fellow Californians.
The state remains as vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires as ever. A crisis that's been brewing for years nearly boiled over again in late October, when the relative calm of the 2019 fire season roared to life in powerful wind gusts and a flurry of new fires.
The Legislature, galvanized by the Camp fire and a 2017 wine country disaster that burned 200,000 acres, approved hundreds of millions of dollars this year for new engines and aircraft, more firefighters, remote cameras and improved emergency-alert systems.
Lawmakers ordered the big three utilities to spend a combined $5 billion on "fire risk mitigation." Separately, PG&E Corp. promised to spend upwards of $1.6 billion this year alone on accelerated tree removals, line inspections and other efforts.
Nevertheless, California's inability to quash its wildfire crisis since last November took on many forms.
PG&E's "enhanced vegetation management" program struggled to stay on track and will take years to finish. Its grid remains so fragile that it has to plunge millions into darkness when winds kick up _ and its faulty equipment may have ignited the Kincade fire in Sonoma last month.
While state and federal agencies have scrambled to thin out California's vast forests, drought and disease left a staggering backlog of 147 million dead trees _ tinder waiting to ignite.
This year as well, the Legislature rejected a lawmaker's request to spend up to $1 billion in loans to help rural Californians retrofit their homes against wildfires. Lawmakers also failed to pass a bill that would have made it harder to build new homes in high-risk fire zones.
And throughout rural areas of California, thousands of homeowners have been dropped by their insurance companies, a simmering crisis that has created a ripple effect in the real estate market. Sacramento has done little beyond passing a law giving homeowners an extra month to find new coverage.
Michael Wara, an energy and climate expert at Stanford who's advising the Legislature on wildfire issues, said California has had some successes worth celebrating. One big win: Unlike two years ago, when wine-country residents had almost no time to flee the fires, the early-warning systems in Sonoma County worked beautifully when the Kincade fire ignited. No one died.
"But that's not actually risk-reduction," Wara said. "We have not actually reduced the scale of the problem."
Most perilous was the Kincade fire rampaging through Sonoma wine country, fed by 60 mph-plus gusts. It forced 180,000 residents to flee, rekindled awful memories of the 2017 fires _ and seemed to make a mockery of much of the work state officials had undertaken in previous months to make California safer.
"We still have hundreds of thousands of homes all across California that are prone to burn," said Chris Dicus, a forester and fire ecologist at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. "We're certainly safer in some areas but unfortunately there are communities all across the state that look just like Paradise did last year."
