Could a buffer shield Californian homes from wildfire?

Four years ago, the town of Paradise, California was devastated by fire. Could a buffer around the town protect it from future disaster?

For almost 10 years, Marlyn Stark and her husband lived in Paradise – literally and figuratively. They owned 80 acres (32 hectares) in the northeastern edge of the town of Paradise, a small community in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Northern California.

Their property began at the lip of a forested canyon, ran down its steep cliffs some 1,000ft (300m) to a branch of the nearby Feather River, and carried on right back up the other side. There were no neighbours or streetlights, just eagles gliding on the thermals during the daytime and a sky brimming with stars at night. In the winter, they could see five different waterfalls cascading to the river below.

They’d carefully designed their home, picked out every detail and finishing touch, imagined it was where they’d live out the rest of their lives – the sweeping views, the kitchen perfect for entertaining, the vegetable garden. “It was truly our paradise,” she says.

But on 8 November 2018, the Starks lost all this, when the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history tore through their community.

Driven by winds gusting more than 50mph (80km/h), the Camp Fire, as it became known, ripped across nearly eight miles (13km) of tinder-dry landscape in its first 45 minutes. Within 12 hours, it had levelled Paradise. It killed 85 people – including two of the Starks’ neighbours – and destroyed more than 19,000 buildings, including their home.

The Camp Fire was the worst fire ever to hit Paradise, but it was not the first. Since 1999, 13 large fires have burned in the same area, including two in 2008: the Humboldt Fire, which destroyed 87 homes in the town, and the BTU Lightning Complex Fire, which came right up to Paradise’s eastern edge.

As this latest was extinguished, its survivors were left facing a series of difficult questions. Evidence continues to emerge that climate change is making California autumns warmer and drier, leading to a notable increase in days with “fire weather” – when conditions are hot, dry and windy. Should they stay and rebuild, with the knowledge that another catastrophic fire could strike? Or had the time come to look for a different response to disaster, a new way of rebuilding homes and lives that might keep people safer in the future?

It is a question facing not only the survivors of the Camp Fire, but many other communities around the world as the impacts of climate change continue to dramatically increase the risks to their homes and lives.

The Starks, who were in their late 60s when the fire struck, knew they didn’t have the emotional energy to rebuild immediately. Plus, the town they loved was in ruins, its forests burned to a crisp, its roadsides littered with charred cars abandoned during the evacuation. “Every time we go up there, I just get depressed,” Marlyn says, nearly four years after the disaster. “It just reminds me of everything we lost.”

The Starks had the financial means to start over elsewhere without selling their land on “the ridge”, as locals call Paradise. So they “just decided not to make a decision” about rebuilding for now, says Marlyn, and instead bought a lakefront house a few hours drive southeast of Paradise. Marlyn recognises that she and her husband were fortunate. The median income in Paradise is almost $30,000 (£26,000) lower than the state average – meaning not all homeowners who wanted to move were able to without first selling their fire-scarred property.

But as those who had lost their homes adjusted to life after the fire, others were thinking of how similar disasters in the area could be avoided in the future – and with good reason. In 2020, another wildfire came close enough to trigger an evacuation warning for what remained of Paradise, and last year, the second-largest fire in state history started about a dozen miles from the town.

In the immediate aftermath of the Camp Fire, Dan Efseaff, the district manager for the Paradise Recreation and Park District (PRPD), found himself wondering, if you had two hours, days, weeks, months, years or decades to prepare for such a devastating fire again, what would you do?

He concluded that, given enough time to prepare, “you’d probably create defensible space around the entire community”.

The idea sprouted, and Efseaff and other members of the community now hope to build a ribbon of public parkland devoid of homes that would encircle and protect Paradise, its land managed to reduce the risk of fire. Known as a “wildfire-risk reduction buffer”, this landscape would be managed so the trees are far apart, with less brush in the understory, thus avoiding the dense, dry vegetation that can help a fire spread. This idea represents a novel approach to recovering from a wildfire, one that focuses not simply on “getting back to normal” as quickly as possible, but that imagines a new normal.

A restoration ecologist, Efseaff says his years working in floodplains taught him that “in places that you can give nature some room, you actually help fortify our infrastructure” – a principle he believes also applies to fire. A buffer which gives wildfire some room to burn more slowly, he says, could help protect the community from fires that start in the wildlands.  

The buffer’s primary benefit would be helping keep future fires from getting out of control. But the land would also provide habitat for plants and animals and recreational opportunities for people. Efseaff says that the buffer could also double as a backup evacuation route or a place for firefighters to stage equipment and establish lines of defense, or could even serve as a refuge of last resort for those who cannot escape a fire. (During the Camp Fire, dozens of people who couldn’t escape in time survived by sheltering in a large park on the town’s western edge.)

“In California, 11 million people [live] in the wildland-urban interface,” says Sarah Cardona, deputy director of the Greenbelt Alliance, a Northern California non-profit dedicated to preserving open space. She believes that protecting people in this interface – where urban areas bleed into uninhabited, wild land – from future catastrophic fires will require considering where and how we build. It also needs a wide range of people sharing “this new view of greenbelts as wildfire risk-reduction measures”.

In 2019, PRPD teamed up with two non-profits, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Conservation Biology Institute (CBI), to formally study the idea of a wildfire buffer that would encircle Paradise and the adjacent town of Magalia, which also sustained heavy losses in the Camp Fire. The partners used an existing model designed by Alexandra Syphard, a senior research scientist at CBI, to identify areas of wildland around the two towns, as well as areas inside the towns, with high fire risk.

They then identified parcels within the towns that are either directly adjacent to high-risk wildlands or likely to be in the path of flying embers in a wind-driven fire. They identified more than 2,200 individual parcels of land totalling more than 32,000 acres (13,000 hectares), then divided them into five zones encircling the towns based on factors like topography and vegetation type.

The team ran a simulation of how strong winds would blow embers from these high-risk wildland areas into the community, says Deanne DiPietro, a senior science coordinator with CBI. It then re-ran the simulation with the assumption that work had been done to reduce the risk of ignition on wildland parcels outside the town by one step. “If it was ‘very high’ we made it ‘high’, and if it was ‘high’ we made it ‘medium’,” DiPietro says.

The final report, published in 2020, found that the buffer did indeed dampen overall fire risk in the developed cores of Paradise and Magalia (although results for each parcel varied). Reducing the chance of ignition in one area of the buffer in particular – its “Inner Eastern” zone – would provide an especially strong benefit, the report found. In an extreme northeasterly wind event like the one during the Camp Fire, it could slash the number of urban areas at high risk of igniting by nearly two-thirds.

The team found scant prior scientific scrutiny of whether a wildfire risk reduction buffer would work. But the strong relationship between land use planning and fire safety is well established, and interest in the role a buffer might play in the area is growing. Last year, the Greenbelt Alliance, which wasn’t involved in PRPD’s report, published its own research looking at examples from recent severe fires in California. It similarly concluded that well-maintained green spaces can play an important role in protecting more developed areas from wildfire.

In Paradise, the buffer idea has been generally well received. A recent survey by Paradise’s local government found that nearly 70% of residents support the idea. Representatives from PRPD, TNC and CBI presented their final report to a technical advisory committee comprised of local people with expertise in fire protection, land use and environmental management. “They all have a different point of view, but we went away with the feeling that the greenbelt buffer concept is common sense,” DiPietro says.

Still, all involved are candid about the limitations of the buffer: It should help protect lives and property, but it can’t prevent wildfires to begin with. “We’re assuming that [it] would slow the fire down enough to allow more time for evacuations, and allow more time for emergency services to muster and do what they need to do,” Ryan Luster, a senior project director at TNC, says.

Jim Broshears, who spent 32 years as a firefighter in Paradise, including 10 as the fire chief, and served on the technical advisory committee, agrees that the expectation isn’t that the buffer would completely prevent all future fires. But he does think “it would make a significant difference” for a majority of the fires that threaten Paradise.

Still, making the buffer a reality in Paradise will require overcoming several obstacles. The vast majority of the property in and around Paradise is privately owned, so creating the buffer will require buying out residents and landowners, or, at the very least, negotiating long-term easements. PRPD will lead this effort, and has sent approximately 200 letters to landowners in the highest-risk parts of the buffer.

“The letters introduced the buffer concept and solicited interest in participating,” says Chris Thomas, a project manager with PRPD. But there is no formal programme for approaching landowners or acquiring properties yet, due to a lack of funding. And all involved are firm about only working with landowners who want to sell; using eminent domain – a government’s right to take private property for public benefit, with just compensation – is completely out of the question, says Luster.

Even with a willing seller, the department will need to pay fair market value for any land it acquires. By Luster’s count, purchasing the hundreds if not thousands of private properties that make up the buffer would take tens of millions of dollars, possibly as much as $60m (£54m) – some 17 times PRPD’s yearly budget of around $3.5m (£3.2m).

But an influx of funding is on the horizon. PRPD has been awarded a “Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities” (Bric) grant from the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema). While Fema funding typically goes to addressing disaster-recovery, Bric grants aim to help communities to reduce the risks they face from natural disasters. In this case, it will give PRPD the ability to hire more staff and set up a systematic program to acquire properties.

The cost of acquisition rises, of course, if those properties have homes. Many of the homes that once stood on them were destroyed by the Camp Fire, and the lots are currently undeveloped. But not all will stay that way, so it’s essential to get properties into the buffer before homes are rebuilt on them.

“We’re never going to have this opportunity again,” Broshears says. “Once people build here and there, it doesn’t take too many scattered homes to have an impact.” Nearly four years after the fire, some rebuilding is underway in Paradise. Still, “a lot of people know they’re not coming back”, Broshears says – and the buffer “may provide them with opportunities to walk away feeling good about it”.

The initial acquisition is just one part of the funding picture, however. The land will require ongoing management to keep fire risk low. Given the way the fire changed the landscape — destroying many mature trees that provided shade, thus keeping brush and grass from growing too quickly – Broshears estimates that, initially, maintenance will need to be done annually.

Like most large government grant programs, Bric won’t cover ongoing costs, so Efseaff and others are exploring various funding mechanisms. Nothing has been decided or studied as a specific solution for Paradise, but Efseaff points to nature-based solutions for flooding being funded through special levee protection districts, and suggested a similar mechanism could be possible through fire protection districts.

So far, approximately 50 acres (20 hectares) are “in the pipeline” to be brought into the buffer, which Efseaff described as “very significant” for a park district the size of PRPD. But he readily acknowledges that acquiring every property in the buffer zone, at least in the near future, is highly unlikely. This patchwork nature will make the buffer less effective.

Still, Efseaff believes the buffer might play an important role in the ongoing healing of Paradise. He’s currently working with one landowner who plans to donate their property to the project. Efseaff believes that for them, committing their land to the buffer is a final gesture towards restoring and protecting a place they loved. “It’s about sort of closing a chapter and moving on.”

The fate of the Starks’ land in Paradise, meanwhile, is “still an open question for us”, Marlyn says. They have not been officially notified that it is or isn’t in the buffer, nor have they received an offer to purchase it from PRPD. Furthermore, they are waiting for the settlement from a lawsuit against Pacific Gas & Electric Company, the utility which pleaded guilty to sparking the Camp Fire, before they make any decisions about rebuilding or selling.

Before the Camp Fire, Marlyn and her husband believed they had done everything possible to protect their property: Their house had fire-resistant cement siding; they’d removed low-hanging limbs from all their trees; they had a large irrigated lawn, a pond, gravel, and a paved driveway. It didn’t save them, and like Broshears, she believes that “for the conditions of a fire that day on November 8 2018, even a buffer wouldn’t have saved our house or probably even the town”.

If she and her husband do decide to let go of the land at some point in the future, ideally, they’d love to see someone else live there and love it as they did, she says. But she also finds the buffer idea interesting and would consider selling to PRPD for a fair price.

“Anything that can give firefighters a chance to save property, if it’s one house or a whole town, that’s an idea worth entertaining,” she says.

As climate change advances and makes wildfires more frequent and severe, what happens next in this small, rural community might ripple far beyond its borders. If the buffer ultimately succeeds in protecting Paradise and Magalia, it might serve as a blueprint for other areas – from Malibu, California, to the Greek island of Evia, to New South Wales in Australia – increasingly threatened by extreme wildfires.