Wildfire in Paradise | Evacuating Paradise with Beth Bowersox and Daniel Swain | 6
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A listener note. This episode contains discussion of suicide. From Wondery, I'm Cassie DePeckel, and this is Against the Odds.

Imagine you're coming off a long shift as a CAL FIRE dispatcher early on the morning of November 8th, 2018. But then the 911 calls start coming in. There's a fire closing in around the towns of Paradise, Megalia, and Concow. Emergency responders call it the Camp Fire. And the blaze is spreading faster than any wildfire you can remember.

Callers are terrified and looking to you for help as their homes disappear in the flames. By the time the campfire is extinguished, it will be known as the deadliest fire in California history. My guest today is Beth Bowersox. She works as a communications operator with CAL FIRE and was a dispatcher on duty the day the campfire ignited. Beth also lived in Paradise at the time of the fire.

Later, we'll hear from climate scientist Daniel Swain about his own experience with the Camp Fire and how wildfires are linked to climate change. All that's coming up next. In our fast-paced, screen-filled world, it can be all too easy to lose that sense of imagination and wonder. If you're looking for new ways to ignite your creativity and open your mind to fresh perspectives, then let Audible be your guide. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, or any genre you love, Audible is the place for you.

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Beth Bowersox, welcome to Against the Odds. Hi, thank you for having me. You've been working with CAL FIRE for over a decade, and you come from a long line of firefighters. Give us a sense of who does what in your family. My name is Beth Bowersox.

My dad initially started out, he started with CAL FIRE back when it was the Department of Forestry in the 70s. My mom actually worked at the same time she was one of the first female firefighters hired by CAL FIRE back then. And then my brother is currently a battalion chief. And my sister's the black sheep. She's a therapist who treats first responders. That's necessary, though, definitely. Yeah.

What was it like growing up in a family of firefighters? It had its moments. I think that sometimes, especially because I grew up on a ranch, so sometimes we were more firefighters and ranch hands than we were kids. I mean, my brother had started doing it when he was 18. I started when I was 14 as an explorer before I became a firefighter and then a dispatcher. I remember my sister...

My sister-in-law at one point had to put a limit on how much we could talk about work at family gatherings because, one, we're leaving everybody else out. And, two, it would be all we would talk about. And for so many people, like, working for the department, that is your whole life, especially in the summer. Like, that is all –

you have time to do really. And so it's like, that's all you have to talk about. It's like, can we talk about something else? It's like, well, I got a full set of days off last week. What? That's still work related. Yeah, exactly.

You decided to settle down in Paradise and bought a home there. Because of your firefighting roots, did you think much about the fire danger in the area? Oh, absolutely. I drove my real estate agent and my parents crazy when I was looking for a house because I had, like, such stringent requirements. I told myself, like—

I have to be near a fire hydrant. I have to be near a fire station. I wanted to be on a flat level piece of property, which is impossible to find practically in paradise. I didn't want too many trees surrounding me. I couldn't be on a canyon. I think that growing up in the family that I grew up in, we always knew there was all, I mean, even people who lived in paradise who weren't firefighters, they always knew one day, one day. And I think it kind of became a little,

complacent, but it was always a one day this could happen. And so that was like very present in my head when I was looking at houses. What was life in paradise like for you before the fire? What did you love about it? Oh, gosh. I remember telling my dad one time they had come up for dinner and we were outside and it was nighttime and it was like it had been a hot day, but it always cooled off really nicely up there at night. And we're standing out on the porch and I remember telling my dad, I'm like, you know what I love up here is that it always smells like camping.

Like, it smells like that just nostalgic, like, pine needle, like, kind of the dry pine needles on the ground. And you get that cool breeze and, you know, that dry kind of grass smell mixed with it. And then if someone, you know, as it started getting a little colder, if someone had, like, a fireplace going, then it was, like, more of a…

I hate to say this in conjunction, campfire. And I always loved that. I just loved that it reminded me of just being up in the woods camping because you were up in the woods, but you lived there. Yeah, I love that. You were just getting off an overnight shift the morning the campfire broke out. Paint a picture for me of how it unfolded. What were the first calls like? We only got one call initially because it was in such a remote area that there weren't a lot of people who would have seen it.

And the call was actually from, it was like a third hand from someone who saw it, who worked for PG&E, who called it into a PG&E power substation. And they then called us.

And it was our only call. And my captain, my supervisor actually took the 911 call and I dispatched it out. And we're just thinking like, it can't be too serious because it's the only call we've gotten. And we had actually been kind of making some jokes that we were looking at a wind map that we have like, oh, the winds have lightened up today compared to yesterday. So we're in the clear kind of jokingly because like, oh, they went from 80 to 60, you know, and

It was just – it was actually surprisingly mellow at first because we got so few calls. But the initial communities that were threatened were Polga and then it moved towards ConCow. And we had people that we had sent to the ConCow area to start helping them do evacuations. And we're getting reports, hey, we're having to shelter in place already so quickly. And that's just –

That's unheard of in a fire. In my experience, I've been dispatching for 16 years for it to be that quickly. But looking at a map, it could make sense. Like with the winds, what they are, with what's – okay, that can make sense. And then one of my partners took a 911 call and they mentioned a house on fire in Paradise.

And my immediate thought was, oh, my God, we don't have anything to send to a structure fire in paradise. What our luck that we have this huge vegetation fire and now we have a structure fire, a house on fire in paradise. And, oh, my God, where are we going to get the engines to send to that? And they were like, no, this is related to the camp. And I just remember being like indignant. Like that is not true. Right.

I live in paradise and the fire, the house that was on fire was on Sawmill Road, which is between, was between the main body of the fire. My house was right between those two points. And I'm just like, holy crap. That was the first time my brain was just like, I can't fathom what this is, what is happening right now.

As the situation progressed, give us a sense of how the calls changed, what people said to you as events were spiraling. So I was initially the radio dispatcher, and then I was able to leave briefly to evacuate my house. And when I came back, that's when I was on call taking. So by the time I was into taking 911 calls, we were like four hours into the fire, and

So they were pretty consistently the same for me where it was constantly I need to be evacuated or I have a family member who needs to be evacuated or I'm in the evacuation traffic. So it did kind of progress that way where it was I need to be evacuated or I need help getting someone evacuated or I don't have a car or I have someone who's elderly or infirm. And then that turned into, okay, now we are in the evacuation traffic and there's flames all around us and we're stuck in this traffic and we can't now get out.

to people on foot saying, hey, we got out of our cars and now we're running and we don't know where to go. And you had people calling from out of town. I had a woman call, I think, from the Bay Area saying that she had family up in Paradise and she was asking, is there a way that I can pay for a helicopter to go do water drops on her house? So it was...

It was a lot. And what did you tell people? Like, what could you tell people? I have a policy. I don't lie to 911 callers. I don't like to give false hope. I don't like to say someone's coming if they're not. And there were times I had to tell people. I mean, my neighbor from across the street where I lived called 911. And she was a senior citizen. She had dementia. A couple of my neighbors had already tried to get her evacuated. She had no idea there was a fire. She wouldn't leave her house.

And when she finally called, I had to tell her, you have to leave. I have no one that I can send. I mean, just straight up, we told people, I have no one I can send to help you.

You have to get out, run, get on foot, flag down a car. If you see a fire engine, flag them down. They'll put you in the engine. I mean, that's just what we told people was get out and run. Take refuge. I mean, I had a woman and I think it was her daughter called me. They were in a car in the middle of kind of a gravel parking lot.

And she said, what do we do? And I said, shelter in your car. Roll up all the windows. Turn the car off so you're not running the air conditioner, air bringing in smoke. Get down as low as you can. If you have any clothes, put them on top of you. Just get down. And then she's freaking out because her husband had gotten out of the car and was trying to put what he could out with a hose. And it's like,

I don't know where he is. I don't know. And it's like honk the horn to see if he can come back to you. But if you get out of your car, you're going to die. You made a decision to evacuate all of Paradise, which was outside your area of responsibility and would mean going above your superiors. But you did it anyway. What factors went into making that decision? I would like to preface it by saying the people that were out working that day and who worked in the follow-up are amazing people and firefighters. And I just...

I don't want it to sound like what I did was because they can't do their job and I doubt what they do and I have to step in and make this decision because they can't. It was a split-second decision where it just felt like...

They can't see because of where they are on the ground and what they're looking at how big this is. And I've never felt that way before. And it chokes me up now thinking about it because it's never something I've done before and never something I've done since. You know, they started evacuating the eastern portion of Paradise, which is where the fire was pushing to from Con Cal. And with the calls that we were getting of the spot fires in Paradise and with what had happened in such a short time, I just thought –

this isn't right. There's, it just felt like, you know, your gut reaction of this isn't the right reaction. And I don't know. And I remember my partner sitting next to me while I was still on the radio. She had come in, she was still kind of trying to wrap her head around what was going on because it was just so much to walk into and be like, Oh, you know, I have to jump in on these calls and what's happening. And, and she said, you know, Paradise PD or Butte County SO, I can't remember which, wants to know what we need to evacuate. And I just went everything.

All of Paradise, everything. And I still to this day, I don't entirely know why I did it. And it's one of those things that when I started to think about it, it was like you don't realize how big of a thing it was until after the fact. Right. If they hadn't done those evacuations then, they wouldn't have had a chance because of how long it takes to do the code red, like reverse 911 stuff. Right.

If it hadn't been issued then, by the time it would have been issued later, at that point, all the cell towers had burned through up in the Paradise area. And it's just one of those things where it just hits you like a sack of bricks and you're like, I don't know. It was literally a split second decision for me where I just said, this is what seems right. Oh, my God. It's worth the risk, right? Well, yeah. And it was like, I'm going to get fired. And then something else happened and it was like, I'd rather evacuate everybody with what's happening than nobody. Yeah.

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I had to leave to evacuate my house. My brother was on a fire engine. I dispatched his strike team from the neighboring unit to the fire. So I'm like, I don't know of anybody else. So I'm calling my dad, calling my dad. I finally called so many times. He answered in the shower because he's like, what is happening? He was supposed to go fishing that day. Wow.

And I just said, there's a huge fire. I need you to go get my cats. Because at the end of the day, that is all I cared about. They're the most important thing. Well, you know, papers can be replaced. A lot of stuff can be replaced. But I just was like, you know, it's not their fault they're stuck in a house when a fire is coming through. It's like the animals are the most, like, innocent in that. And so I'm just like, you need to go get my cats. I would be the same. The first thing I'd think of is my cat. I got there and I'm calling my neighbors. Yeah.

get out. Don't wait for the evacuation order. You need to leave now. This, I don't know what's going to happen, but just get out. And I got there not long after my dad did. And I'm just running through the house, like chicken with their head cut off. Like, I remember looking at the stuff I threw in suitcases later and I'm like, why did I grab this? Like, why did I bring this? But I didn't bring a coat. Yeah.

Right. I had done laundry, so I just grabbed what was on the couch and I threw it in a suitcase. And my dad had to lift up the couch at one point because one of my cats is like, something is wrong with what is going on here and I'm scared. And so I'm like reaching under grabbing the cat and I didn't have enough cat carriers. I'm like, dad, can I just throw them in your car? He's like, sure. Just hucking cats in my dad's truck and

It felt like it was forever, but I think all in all, I was there for like 10 minutes. We walked outside as I gave my dad a hug and I kind of looked at my house and I was like, you're a really good little house. Did your house survive the fire? Yes and no. Back, a detached garage shop burned, which had a lot of, I totally forgot when I was evacuating, it had a lot of what I called memory boxes, just over the years, stuff that I had saved. Sorry. Yeah.

That I forgot. Completely forgot. I just, it was further at the back of the property and I forgot to go out and grab stuff there and that burned down. And then my house caught fire. The guy, he was a captain at the time. He's now my battalion chief. He actually put it out. And then my brother's strike team actually was in and they were doing structure protection in my neighborhood just because that's where they coincidentally, insanely enough, got assigned. And so my brother...

His engine did structure protection on my house, too. And so he actually he left me a note. I still carry it because when he was still on an engine, he would leave notes like this at every house that he did structure protection on. He says, thanks for the Cheez-Its. Secured the house. Glad it's OK. Love you, sis. After you grabbed your cats, what was the scene like as you drove out of Paradise?

like it was surreal almost. My house was near a canyon. It was a couple rows of houses away and it was weirdly like the fire just being like, F you because my dad goes, I just don't see paradise burning down. I just don't see it getting to that point and

And right as it happened, the wind kicked up and it was like almost this like little column from a separate like spot fire kind of like swirled and bent over sideways and just blew ash right in our face. And I'm just like, mm-hmm, yeah, okay. I don't believe that. But I appreciate you trying to give me some hope. And it was just, it was surreal. Like out of my periphery, I could see neighbors loading up their trucks and

It kind of reminds me of this day of like the Independence Day movie where people are trying to evacuate from the aliens and people just throwing stuff in their truck. And it's like, what's it was? It was like that. And it's not something that unless you have lived in an area that has gone through rapid evacuation orders for a fire that you are used to seeing this idea of people mass fleeing a situation or a place. And then.

I also had neighbors who were still in their pajamas, like, looking out at the fire and taking pictures. And I'm driving down the street and yelling, get in your house and evacuate. Get your stuff and get the hell out of here. This is not picture-taking time. This is getting the F out of here time. And so, like, it was, okay, I see them. I see them. Nope, you're not doing anything. I'm going to yell at you. I see you're doing okay. Okay. And then just kind of moving on and...

Where I lived on kind of the southeastern portion of town, people hadn't started really evacuating yet. It was still so fresh in the process. And so I was – there was no one on the road when I pulled out. It was eerie. And so did you go back and live in Paradise? I did for a little bit. I was actually in –

my parents' fifth wheel on their property for about 10 months. And me and three cats in a fifth wheel after a while starts to get a little cooped up. And I just, I wanted to go home. It took me a while to get kind of through the fog.

the depression, like trying to get the paperwork and the insurance figured out and get someone up there to clean, do, you know, smoke removal and stuff on the house and get the portion that had been burned boarded up. I was back up there for maybe a year and a half, year or so, and I just couldn't do it anymore. Yeah.

My emotional brain was just so dysregulated. It's like, it's going to happen again. It's going to happen again. We're all going to, like, I'm going to die. It's going to happen in the middle of the night. Anytime the wind blew, it scared me. Anytime there was a fire, I would be texting whoever I knew on duty saying, hey, is it near? Is it a threat to paradise? Is it okay? And I'm just like, I can't keep living like this. It was too hard. It was too exhausting. I finally, about a year and a half ago, moved down to Chico. You went through such a traumatic event. How are you doing now?

It's an ongoing process. I have had a couple medical leaves from work, been diagnosed with CPTSD and major depressive disorder and anxiety. And, you know, on medications, therapy is a lifesaver. Actually, in 2020, I had a suicide attempt. Um,

Luckily failed at. Yeah. You know, it's something that I keep telling myself I need to talk about more because it de-stigmatizes this idea when people, you know, there was so much I went through where I felt I am entirely by myself. I am suffering alone. No one else understands. Like, no one gets it. And the more you talk about it and the more people are brave enough and willing to speak up as well, the more you realize we're not alone in this. There are quite a few of us. And so it was kind of an eye-opening revelation for me.

Well, now that you've relocated to Chico, do you feel safe again? I do. It took me a while to get used to when the wind would blow because I'm kind of near a creek. And so we get this afternoon breeze and I'm just immediately like, is that fire breeze or is that like creek just kind of comforting breeze? And it's like I was kind of very hyper vigilant and hyper aware for a while. Yeah.

And it took a little bit to calm down from that. And then it got to the point where, you know, it's like, okay, the wind doesn't scare me no more, but oh, okay.

I smell smoke. Is there a fire? Because I'm kind of near Upper Park in Chico and we do get fires in the Upper Park area. It took a while for my brain, the emotional side to calm down and kind of regulated back where the logical side could go. It's going to be okay. You are in a newer house versus your 1950s bungalow. It has sprinklers in it. You know, you're right down the street from a fire station. Same requirements. I'm near a fire station and I'm near a fire hydrant.

because those were all still very important things. And it's just, it's been nice going back to that. And so I'm happy not being scared all the time. And I'm happy in my new home, but I miss my old home too. Beth Bauer-Sox, thank you so much for joining us on Against the Odds. Absolutely. Thank you for having me and thanks for telling this story.

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, call or text 988 for help. After the break, we'll hear from climate scientist Daniel Swain about the link between wildfires and the changing climate. We'll also hear how Daniel helped people interpret what was happening when the campfire broke out by sharing updates on his website.

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My guest, Daniel Swain, is a climate scientist at UCLA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Nature Conservancy. He also writes the blog Weather West, which provides real-time perspective on weather and climate in California and beyond. Daniel Swain, welcome to Against the Odds. Thanks for having me.

Daniel, put us in your shoes the morning the campfire broke out. Where were you and when did the fire come onto your radar? So on that morning in November 2018, I was actually not in California. I was here in Boulder, Colorado. We're an hour ahead of California time zone wise. And so, you know, I had been awake for a little while and

some of the weather conditions in California, there was a strong wind event and there was recognition that there was elevated fire risk in these wind corridors in the Sierra foothills.

And pretty early that morning after I got up, there were some initial reports of a small fire just near Polga in the canyon. And that immediately set off some alarm bells. Given the set of conditions we knew were occurring, which were record warmth in the summer preceding and then a record dry autumn leading up to the fire day, we

and these really strong downslope, we often call them Jarboe Gap winds. Sometimes they were gusting above 50 or 60 miles an hour, so they were quite strong in the region where this fire had ignited. And so I started looking at the data at the winds, at some of the satellite imagery, looked at some of the informal sources of fire intelligence on Twitter, and even in the comments section of my own WeatherWest blog.

And those initial reports were immediately alarming. It was the wrong place at the wrong time under the worst possible conditions. I understand your blog, Weather West, became a conduit for information. What did you end up telling people that they should do? We were sort of following this on social media, on Twitter, and in the comments section of my own Weather West blog, which is,

Has quite a community, has a very active comment section. There are thousands of people who comment there on a regular basis talking about the weather conditions they're experiencing or the climate conditions they've experienced or even episodic events like storms or fires as well. The somewhat sardonic joke in recent years in the comment section is it's more like fire west than weather west. There have been so many fires to talk about.

But that morning, there were people in the comment section, some of whom were in the town of Paradise, you know, at that moment or near it, who were really concerned. And they communicated that there had been no official information, no evacuations ordered, no reverse 911 calls. In fact, there was almost radio silence. They were only able to access certain websites and social media for whatever reason due to

phone outages and cell tower outages. And essentially at that point, people were reporting that the sun had set at about 8 a.m. You know, the smoke got so bad and so dense that it had blocked out all sunlight. And people were understandably freaking out, saying that, you know, there are embers falling from the sky. It's as dark as night and there is a bright glow in the distance and it's really windy.

It feels like this is really dangerous, but we haven't been told to evacuate. And so at that point, you know, it puts people in a non-official capacity and an uncomfortable position of giving potentially life or death advice, not knowing all the information. But at that point, I think I felt that I knew enough that,

The only recommendation that I could make was that people needed to get out of there as fast as they possibly could by any means necessary, even though that might violate the orderly tiered evacuation that Paradise had planned for. It was pretty clear at that point that this wasn't going to happen. And so I told multiple people that if they didn't get out right then, as soon as they read this message, like, get off your computer, get in the car and leave immediately.

that they might not get out. And so I do think some people took that advice and in the process of doing so, they sent updates as they were stuck in gridlock as the firestorm enveloped them essentially on the skyway. Images of it being black as night except for these 40, 50 foot tufts of flames as these ponderosa pine trees went up like matchsticks. And was a major fire like the Camp Fire a surprise to you?

Well, from a wildfire and climate perspective, unfortunately, no. This was a catastrophic fire in exactly where you would have predicted one to occur. Paradise previous to Paradise Burning in 2018 was essentially widely known in the fire and climate communities to be one of these places that made folks nervous about

because of a bunch of different overlapping factors that made it highly exposed and vulnerable to this particular kind of natural hazard. You know, it's in this natural wind corridor.

where these down canyon winds which occur in the autumn can blow quite strongly. It's an area that has been surrounded not by untouched forests, but actually by a lot of forestry plantations. So prior to the fire, there were lots of new growth forests with pretty dense, newer trees. And that actually is even higher risk in a lower density natural forest. And so the vegetation

upwind of paradise in this high wind corridor was particularly flammable because of these historical forestry plantations.

And then the city itself had very little buffer from fire and was built in a way that made rapid evacuation difficult. At that point, really the only way out of the city was the two-lane-in-each-direction skyway. So it was a town at high risk because of its geographic and climatologic context, the vegetation that surrounded it, and that it was particularly vulnerable

risky spot because leaving was always going to be difficult under the best of circumstances and almost impossible under the circumstances that actually unfolded that day. Do you think what happened in Paradise could happen to another town? Unfortunately, yes. You know, I don't think that many folks really would have foreseen that 10,000 structures could burn and almost 100 people would die in a single fire in a single day in California in the modern era. But

Paradise was at especially high risk. I think that's quite clear, but it's not at singularly high risk. There are other places, especially places in the Sierra Nevada foothills that

that have similar risk factors. They're in downslope wind corridors nestled within pretty dense forests or adjacent to forestry plantations, which are even more flammable. They have relatively dispersed residential neighborhoods with few routes of egress and a lot of winding one- or two-lane roads to get out. Those are characteristics shared by a lot of towns in the Sierra foothills area.

And in some of the coastal mountain areas where we've also seen catastrophic fires in recent years. And so while I would like to think that we've learned a lot of lessons, and I think that we have since 2018 and some of the other catastrophic fires you've seen in California in the past decade, I think the other lesson, and this is a harder lesson to

to sort of deal with is that under sufficiently extreme climate and weather conditions, there are going to be some fires that we can't really fight in that moment, despite the increased resources we've now put towards firefighting, despite the fact that CAL FIRE is even more aggressive in its initial attacks. And we're doing some things to mitigate

the risks at the edges, the fundamental risks that led to this catastrophe, I think, are still there in other places. What are you observing about the link between the changing climate and the severity of wildfire in the American West and other parts of the world?

Well, we know that climate change is increasing the area burned and in many cases the severity of wildfires, not just in California, but really throughout the American West and in other many fire-burned regions on Earth. And it's doing this really in two ways, the most important of which is the long-term aridification of vegetation. So essentially the atmospheric warming itself

is acting as an increasingly large sponge, if you will, and extracting more and more water out of the landscape. So unless we get more precipitation to compensate for that, which we're not in most of the West, then you're going to see drier vegetation than we did historically. So drier vegetation, it burns more readily and with greater intensity, and it allows fires to

behave more extremely, particularly when erstwhile weather conditions align. So our own work has shown that the number of extreme fire weather days in California has already more than doubled due to the climate change that's already occurred. We were surprised that the numbers were that large already, but it is unfortunately consistent.

with both predictions made a couple of decades ago and more recent ones. We're just starting to live that reality now. So this all sounds pretty bleak, but what can we do to protect ourselves and hopefully start to turn this trend around? I mean, I think this is a critically important question. There were two big lessons, I think, from Paradise and from other catastrophic fires we've seen in the past decade in California. One is that

The cold hard reality is that climate change is amplifying the risks and that there are certain extreme weather conditions under which we can't effectively fight fires. But the other lesson is that there are a lot of things that we can do well before a fire starts to mitigate some of the vulnerabilities and the risks that contribute to the potential for catastrophe.

And although climate change is certainly upping the odds, it's not the only factor at play here. In fact, in certain contexts, it may not be the dominant factor. There are other things like

The fact that we have a lot of people, frankly, living in these high-risk zones, and this isn't necessarily to pass judgment on the fact that people live there, but we also know that we can design communities to be less at risk. We can build individual structures, first of all, to be more fire resilient, but we can also design communities in ways where

where their layout doesn't predispose them to these kinds of evacuation bottlenecks, or even potentially doesn't predispose them to the same degree of actual flammability, given that a fire comes along. This is more difficult for communities, of course, that are already in place and already exist, but there are lots of adaptations and retrofits.

that we can do there. And there's also the question of what we can do in terms of the actual risk of fire. And there are different kinds of vegetation treatments and prescribed fire treatments that can help bring some of these ecosystems and these areas back towards lower fire risk conditions. So the more targeted vegetation treatments that we can do, the more prescribed fire that we can do in some of these environments that

that can reduce what's known as the fuel loading, the density of the vegetation in some of these places, which due to historical policies of total fire suppression in the 20th century are today denser and more flammable than they would have been had we not suppressed all of those beneficial lower intensity fires over the past century or so. Learning to live with fire, in some cases embracing fire as a risk management tool,

is something that has been historically a bit of a hard sell, but I think there's pretty wide consensus among fire scientists and ecologists that this is one of the most effective things that we can do at scale to reduce the risks, in addition to those individual structure and community level resilience interventions I mentioned. Well, Daniel Swain, thank you so much for joining us on Against the Odds. Thanks again for having me.

This is the final episode of our series Wildfire in Paradise. You can follow Daniel Swain's blog, Weather West, and his Twitter updates at weather underscore west. CAL FIRE Dispatcher Beth Bower-Sox is featured in the Netflix documentary Fire in Paradise.

I'm your host, Cassie DePeckel. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker and Peter Arkumi. Our audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Our series producers are Matt Almos and Emily Frost. Our managing producers are Tonja Thigpen and Matt Gant. Our senior producer is Andy Herman. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman, Stephanie Jens, and Marshall Lewing. For Wondery. Wondery.

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