Decimated by the deadly Camp Fire in 2018, Paradise, Calif., is now moving to acquire some high-risk properties and turn them into managed park land to buffer against future wildfires.

Transcript

LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: The U.S. government is now spending upwards of $2 billion fighting wildfires every year, much of it aimed at keeping the flames away from homes and communities. Now one California town is looking to buy out some of its most high-risk residential properties and turn them into fire-resistant green spaces. NPR's Kirk Siegler reports.

KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: By the heat of the afternoon, smoke from the largest wildfire burning in the U.S, the Dixie Fire drifts into Paradise, Calif. The Dixie ignited in nearly the same place as the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed almost 19,000 buildings here. Seeing and smelling the smoke is a constant, if ominous, reminder.

DAN EFSEAFF: Quite literally, it's hanging over your head. We had some days that the sun was blacked out and as dark as night.

SIEGLER: Dan Efseaff, Paradise's parks and rec director, turns right off a highway lined on both sides by stumps from logged, charred pine trees. A narrow, steep, winding dirt road leads us to the rim of the canyon where the flames entered Paradise nearly three years ago.

EFSEAFF: This is not something that a fire engine would even entertain going down.

SIEGLER: Fire trucks can't get in to protect homes in places like this because it's too dangerous.

EFSEAFF: We have 21 acres down here. And we'll step out. them.

SIEGLER: This neighborhood was leveled. It's unrecognizable.

Are we standing on somebody's old home, I think?

EFSEAFF: We are. We are.

SIEGLER: The homes that burned probably wouldn't have gotten building permits today, but this neighborhood is no anomaly in the libertarian rural West. There's a legacy of loose zoning. And some people have to live in places like this because it's cheaper.

EFSEAFF: And you can see this area got decimated.

SIEGLER: Yet Efseaff sees opportunity here.

EFSEAFF: There have been so many instances of these fires, people know that we have to do something different.

SIEGLER: The town has bought up land from Camp Fire survivors who either couldn't or didn't want to rebuild. The idea is to connect it to their existing parkland. That's good for recreation but also as a fuel break. They can strictly manage this forest with the hopes that the next wildfire slows down here and gives firefighters a chance.

EFSEAFF: Every single one of these properties we're looking at from the standpoint of, what can we do to limit the spread of fire? Is this a staging area and all of that? And I think it's going to make the community safer.

SIEGLER: This is not eminent domain. It's voluntary, but they've acquired about 300 acres of new land with about 500 more in the pipeline. It's mostly paid for with nonprofit grant money and donations. But Efseaff estimates they may need 20 million or more to really make this a success. That sounds like a lot, but consider that the campfire did about $16 billion in damages. Efseaff says in Paradise, there's a new mindset that the town has to be as climate- and wildfire-resilient as possible.

EFSEAFF: So we're going to have to learn how to live with it in a better way and not just kind of build and hope for the best, which has been kind of the approach, I think, in the past.

SIEGLER: The federal government has been buying out people who live in high-risk flood zones for almost three decades. And as the West cooks in extreme drought, there's interest in replicating this to certain high-risk fire zones. A change in federal law recently devoted funding to study the feasibility of this in places like the Sierra Nevada. Michael Wara is a climate resiliency expert at Stanford. He says what's going on in Paradise could be a model for many other forested, flammable communities. But he's not sure it will work as well in places that haven't already burned.

MICHAEL WARA: What's more challenging is getting people in existing homes to be willing to leave their homes and their communities so that those homes can be torn down to create this kind of space.

SIEGLER: Wara says that will be an even tougher sell in California, where a lot of people move to towns like Paradise because they can't afford to live anywhere else.

WARA: The housing crisis in California really complicates any response to the wildfire crisis.

SIEGLER: So on a grand scale, experts interviewed for this story say public money may be better spent toward hardening existing homes, bringing them up to fire-safe building codes and keeping brush and shrubbery around them cleared out. While every option is expensive, according to the western think tank Headwaters Economics, some 40 million Westerners are now living in the potential path of wildfires. But then again, last year alone, the U.S. government spent 2.2 billion on suppression and Cal Fire hundreds of millions more. In Paradise, there's a sense of urgency behind the reforms. The pace of rebuilding has even surprised town leaders.

JIM BROSHEARS: What you're seeing is Skyway, which is the main feed. And that traffic is evidence that there's people living here. There's people working here. It's - things are happening here.

SIEGLER: Jim Broshears is in charge of paradises emergency management. He's also been a wildland fire chief for 50 years in the Sierra Nevada.

BROSHEARS: We have to rethink what's possible.

SIEGLER: Another huge catastrophic wildfire like the once-unthinkable Camp Fire could happen again, he says. So doing things like clearing brush out of vacant lots, like the one we're standing on, and putting more green parkland in strategic places should make Paradise safer. Before the Camp Fire, town was built out into a dense, overgrown forest.

BROSHEARS: You go from a natural stocking level of 30 trees an acre to 150 trees an acre. The burning condition, the health of the forest is compromised. So the new forest in Paradise - you won't see that again.

SIEGLER: They've removed almost 40,000 trees here. Depending on who you ask, town is an eerie skeleton of its former self, or it's a blank slate, a fresh start. When Helene and Paul Baker go back to property the family owned in a gulch along a creek, they hardly even recognize it.

PAUL BAKER: You wouldn't know, but there's a nice creek right there at the bottom.

HELENE BAKER: It was a beautiful creek. All this was cleared out.

SIEGLER: The couple lost a family home in the Camp Fire that Helene's parents had built long ago on these three acres. When they heard the parks department was interested, it was an easy decision to sell. This land will open up public access to an 18-acre parks property up on the hill behind us.

H BAKER: We were happy with the idea that my folks' old property could be turned into something beautiful rather than just somebody building another house.

SIEGLER: The Bakers were among the first sellers. Town officials are hoping more might follow them once more PG&E settlement money starts coming in for fire survivors and if or when the federal government gets serious about funding prevention work like this.

Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Paradise.

(SOUNDBITE OF BEWARE OF SAFETY'S "MULBERRY AND HEATHER") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.