FILE - In this Nov. 8, 2018, file photo, a home burns as a wildfire called the Camp Fire rages through Paradise, Calif. In an order dated July 12, 2021, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Mary Strobel ruled that California Insurance Commissioner Richard Lara has the power to order the state's "Insurer of last resort" to offer more options for homeowners who can't buy traditional coverage because they live in areas threatened by wildfires.
Noah Berger / AP
The 2018 Camp Fire caused significant damage to the education, health care and water infrastructure systems in the town of Paradise, California. Oregon State University professor Erica Fischer was part of a team of researchers who set out to study how the town recovered, what mitigation efforts were successful in protecting school buildings and what lessons Paradise has for other communities affected by wildfire. Fischer joins us to talk about the findings.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In 2018, the camp fire ravaged the town of Paradise. It was the most destructive wildfire in California’s history. In the aftermath of the fire, a team of researchers led by a professor at Oregon State University first went to Paradise in February of 2019. They interviewed dozens of people and they are still going back to learn lessons about recovery and resilience, both what worked and what didn’t. They focused on key parts of civil infrastructure. Their most recent research paper, which was published in the journal Natural Hazards recently, focuses on schools and hospitals. Erica Fischer is the leader of this project. She joins us now to talk about what her team has been finding. Erica Fischer. Welcome to Think Out Loud. Erica Fisher, are you there?
Erica Fischer: Yes, I’m here.
Miller: Beautiful. Why did you focus on schools and hospitals in particular for your latest paper?
Fischer: I’m a Civil Engineer and a Structural Engineer. When we design civil infrastructure, we’re heavily involved as structural engineers in the design of schools and hospitals. In the state of California in particular, there are incredibly strict guidelines for the structural design of schools and hospitals as it pertains to earthquake engineering. So evaluating those buildings for the loads imposed due to some sort of seismic motion, and so, looking at the reports coming out of Paradise, I was really shocked that schools and hospitals were damaged due to the wildfire just because of how involved engineers are and how strict those guidelines are in the state of California.
Miller: In other words, the state had mandated really strict guidelines for surviving an earthquake, but that was less true in terms of surviving a wildfire.
Fischer: Exactly.
Miller: There are a lot of things that stand out in your recent paper. Since you’re an engineer, I think I was expecting that the headline would be about, I don’t know, fire resistant roofing materials or something. But instead, the first thing you focus on in the new paper are the complex mental health challenges within the school system. Maybe this just shows that I have an incomplete understanding of what civil engineers are focused on. But why did you start there?
Fischer: Your confusion is correct. So I am a Civil Engineer and this is why we collaborated with Dr. Sara Hamideh out of Stony Brook University. She is a Social Scientist who is an expert at performing interviews and then performing qualitative analysis from those interviews. This was the last paper of one of the grants that I have to work in the town of Paradise. This was the fourth paper. We started the paper in the ways that you would maybe more expected. We started the series of papers where we were documenting the damage that was in the community and evaluating how well mitigation worked and exploring engineering tools to sleuth out what happened in these buildings and why they performed in certain ways. So, we did all of that already. But the last part of the puzzle is really, well, we have all this damage to our civil infrastructure. So why do we care? Why is it so important that we mitigate and we harden our infrastructure so that it isn’t damaged and the community can recover quickly.
Miller: What is the connection that you found between the mental health of students at the school district or say, elderly or disabled people in the community, the connection between their mental health and the ‘built environment’ of a community?
Fischer: It’s a very complex interaction, but in a town such as Paradise, and Paradise is just an example, we have towns here in Oregon that are very similar to the town of Paradise, where there’s one school district, there’s one hospital and those two really serve the surrounding communities. When the schools are damaged and the students can’t go back to their school building, they feel disconnected from their friends from their teachers. When the healthcare system is shut down, and especially one like that’s in the town of Paradise that provides affordable health care to the community, then people have to travel further to get their healthcare services. Even further, when a town is recovering and they’re trying to reopen their schools, they have to think about, will parents want to send their kids to a school in a town that doesn’t have an emergency room?So what happens then? There’s so many complexities to how the damage to just one building can ripple through the community and have all these additional effects in the recovery phase.
Miller: You also point out that before the fire, there were already some really big differences in terms of the social vulnerability or resources among residents in Paradise. How did those differences affect how kids or families did after the fire?
Fischer: Exactly. So the town of Paradise, and just Butte County in general, has a lot of socially vulnerable people in the community. If we started thinking about one anecdote from a teacher was that during the power shut offs by PGE in the Fall of 2019, there were a lot of people living in trailers on their land. So when the power was shut off due to high winds and heat and basically weather that could create a wildfire, then children can’t go to school. When children can’t go to school, who’s gonna take care of them? So then parents can’t go to work. You have all these people staying at home, in their trailer on their land without any electricity.They might not have air conditioning, they may not have heat, they might not have access to the food that is available through the school system that provides them with that opportunity and resource. They might not have electricity. So you start seeing these additional factors when people are already socially vulnerable, the recovery, it takes that much longer.
Miller: What did the town of Paradise do well before the fire?
Fischer: They did a lot of things well and I’m so glad you asked that question, Dave, because I think we should highlight some of the things that they did well. There was a lot of mitigation performed. So one of the elementary schools in the Paradise Unified School District in Magalia had mitigation performed and it worked. The school survived the fire and was able to open up in January 2019. Kids were at the school and that was just wonderful for the School District. The town was able to actually, they did an amazing job with their communication. So they really prioritized schools and teachers and keeping students with the teachers after the fire. They were able to have monthly meetings on the recovery. They used social media in order to broadcast that to the community. They built a resilience center. They got counselors into schools to help with mental health issues like you had mentioned before, and they petitioned for a standalone emergency room so they could reopen the hospital. So there was a lot of things that the town did really, really well as they kind of even before the fire, and then through that recovery phase to really help its residents.
Miller: You’re a part of the team that’s been tasked with implementing parts of Oregon’s new Wildfire Resilience Law that lawmakers passed a few months ago. What are some tangible lessons that you think we should apply here, based on what you’ve learned in Paradise?
Fischer: I know you talked to Doug Graff and Marc Bennett about SB 762 earlier this week, and I think what I learned most from the town of Paradise is that residents in the town of Paradise were not surprised by the fire itself, they knew their risk, just as so many Oregonians know their risk. But towns like Paradise, and people in towns like Paradise, need help in mitigating. Whether that comes in the form of financial resources or just resources in terms of manpower to clear land and to get access to materials. People are aware of the risks in terms of where they live and their risks and vulnerability to natural hazards, but they’re not always able to implement the mitigation themselves, they need some help from their local, state and federal governments. And so I really do think that’s where SB 762 is going right, they are prioritizing socially vulnerable communities, prioritizing emergency facilities and healthcare and the mitigation around that. And the priority authorization is for resources.
Miller: Erica Fischer. Thanks very much for joining us today.
Fischer: Thank you so much, Dave.
Miller: Erica Fischer is an Assistant Professor in the Oregon State University College of Engineering. Our Production Staff includes Julie Sabatier, Elizabeth Castillo, [Rolando] Rolie Hernandez and Senior Producer Alison Frost. Nalin Silva Engineers the show. Our Technical Director is Steven Kray and our Executive Producer is Sage Van Wing. Tomorrow on the show, we’re going to revisit an hour we spent with the novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist Priest Ruth Ozeki. We talked to her in 2014 about her novel, A Tale for the Time Being. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. We’re going to replay that conversation tomorrow, because tomorrow evening at eight pm, you can listen to a new live interview I’m doing with her for her new novel. We’re gonna be talking as part of the Portland Book Festival and we’ll put a link to tomorrow’s new eight pm conversation on our Facebook page. If you don’t want to miss any of our shows, you can listen on the NPR One App on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Our nightly rebroadcast is at eight p.m. Thanks very much for tuning in to Think Out Loud on OPB and KLCC. I’m Dave Miller. We’ll join you tomorrow. Think Out Loud is supported by Steve and Jan Oliver, the Rose E. Tucker Charitable Trust and Ray and Marilyn Johnson.
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