Christoph Lohr: Welcome to The Authority Podcast: Plumbing & Mechanical. When talking about the built environment, we would do well to remember: We shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us. Therefore, on each episode, we’ll discuss the latest trends from IAPMO in plumbing and mechanical safety, sustainability and resiliency. Join me, your host, Christoph Lohr, and together we’ll explore the ways we can make our buildings shape us for the better.
Christoph Lohr: And welcome back to The Authority Podcast: Plumbing & Mechanical. I’m your host, Christoph Lohr. And on this insightful episode, we’re going to delve into the reconstruction journey of Paradise, California, following the devastating Camp Fire in 2019 that destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 85 people. Our guest, Tony Lindsey, Paradise building official and fire marshal who lost his own home in the disaster, shares exclusive insights into the challenges, innovations and resilience efforts and shares specifics that shaped the town’s water infrastructure revival.
Tony, it is great to have you on the episode. Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule.
Tony Lindsey: Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it and am looking forward to speaking with you.
Christoph Lohr: Likewise. I'm looking forward to learning from you. Well, let’s dive right in. So take us back to the morning of the campfire. Can you describe to our listeners the initial challenges you faced, especially with the responsibility of both saving and evacuating the town?
Tony Lindsey: Well, it definitely was a challenge. That morning, I worked for a community that was just down the ridge, for the city of Chico. I was serving as Chico fire marshal at the time, kind of serving both jurisdictions. And my wife had talked to me. I looked in the rearview mirror, headed down in the morning, and it was just a plume of smoke coming back.
And like we are accustomed to the to the fires right out here. And then a couple of hours later, we found out it was blowing up. I responded up the hill and tied in to the town of Paradise’s Emergency Operations Center as well, and gave them field intel of what was happening as we were starting to evacuate and then fully evacuate the town.
It was pitch black. We had so much smoke and ash falling through that town and through the rest of the day. I ended up coming up here about 9:00, and I left the town around 5 p.m. that afternoon. You could only imagine; you don’t really plan for these worst-, worst-, worst-case scenarios when you're evacuating certain zones, but then when you have to dump a town of 28,000 people as well as, we serve a community above us of about another 20,000. Then when they're trying to evacuate, and we live on a cul de sac, essentially; so there’s a couple of ways in and and only a couple ways out. And a lot of people have already heard the story and then the horrors of the power lines catching on fire, dropping line, hurting and crippling our evacuation routes. And there was very little structure protection happening, so that promulgated the conflagration of fires; houses catching other houses on fire and then essentially burning down 80% of the town.
Christoph Lohr: And from your own home being lost in disaster, did that personal loss of your home impact your approach to the recovery and rebuilding efforts then later on in Paradise?
Tony Lindsey: Well, I think it made me feel more committed to rebuilding the town, wanting to rebuild my life as the life of my family. We all we all made it out safely, so that was a blessing out of it. But then we were fragmented. So luckily, the college took in, Chico State college opened up their student housing for the students that had lost their homes. And then we ended up couch surfing for a little bit. And so we eventually found a place that we could get our whole family to and then shortly thereafter I was lucky, my wife was a staunch supporter and I was working, because nonetheless after the fire you’re looking at structural assessment procedures and running teams for the town in that regard so I worked three months straight after the fire trying to assemble the town and repopulate it as much as we could at that particular time.
So obviously, it led me to wanting to come back and work completely for the town. And luckily, three years after the town offered me a position and brought me back.
Christoph Lohr: Excellent. It’s amazing to hear the steps and everything you went through and coming back when you came back to Paradise. Can you describe some of the challenges maybe faced by the town of Paradise and its water infrastructure after the campfire and the steps taken to ensure clean and safe water for the community?
Tony Lindsey: Well, you can imagine if you have 80% of your town burned down, you just have open faucets. Open spigots going out there, and that really depleted the water source.
And we melted many lines underground and lit the open faucets. And it really allowed the water pressure to decrease and allowed contaminants to get in the main systems, the main arteries of of the water system. And we are on, the Paradise Irrigation District that serves the town is a gravity system, so they don’t have, I think they have all but two pumps on the entire town serving the community as well as it’s a complicated system with seven different zones, pressure zones.
They rely on tanks to maintain the pressure; it’s a little different than living in a flat area like we had down in Chico that was a consistent water pressure flow. We would count on 65 PSI all throughout the town. Here we go from 100 PSA at the bottom and then very little at the top of a particular zone.
You may have a little pressure. Little pressure, a lot of volume, then you get down to the bottom and you have a high pressure and lower volumes. The infrastructure for the irrigation district was crippled due all the melted pipes, all the laterals for the homes were melted and gone — or melted, decayed; they’re still on the ground.
Christoph Lohr: Gotcha. You had mentioned contamination from the water side. What initiatives were implemented to address that water contamination issue and ensuring the protection of local resources?
Tony Lindsey: Obviously you heard about benzene, gets in the water lines. That’s just really a constant flushing. They were dumping millions of gallons of water out, and then through grants the water district received, which is a little unique to our community now, every home has a backflow device kit at the street.
So it goes from a meter to a backflow device that either the water purveyor maintains or the resident, the ratepayer, has to absorb that cost to maintain that backflow annually. That’s a little unique and through going and talking to IAPMO professionals, you would know that once you put a backflow on a residential house, it creates a closed-loop system. And so then that requires the expansion tanks on the water heaters and the additional cost when you're talking about rebuilding.
Christoph Lohr: Gotcha. That obviously sounds like some significant changes made to, especially residential water systems, post-disaster. Were there any other adaptations to water system design or materials to meet higher safety standards to mitigate potential risks of future contamination or system failures that you're aware of?
Tony Lindsey: Well, sure. Some of the water tanks were just bladders, very large bladders out there, and they have now fortified their water system with your typical traditional water tank. We don’t have any that are sitting in sitting up tall because we’re on a hilly terrain, so the topography of our town lends itself to having a water tank basically at grade level to feed the downstream need, and then replacing the water mains, looking at getting them deeper I think helped, and just replacing some really antiquated pipe out there. If you have a 4-inch main serving in the ground for 50 years, you know the inner diameter of that pipe kind of gets smaller over time, and so they have certainly been upgrading the system to serve our community.
Christoph Lohr: That’s great to hear. On the back end in working with FEMA on some of these recovery efforts, did you encounter any impediments based on the codes the town uses during your construction practices?
Tony Lindsey: FEMA has been good to work with, but like any governmental agency, it’s just slow. The town has benefited greatly from USDA, from FEMA, HCD; there’s a bunch of acronyms for grants that we’ve received to help rebuild, really, the infrastructure as far as streets and getting all of our utilities undergrounded is fortunate, as well as helping those that have lost homes rebuild like with rebuild assistance, first-time homebuyer programs, down payment assistance, and actually building homes for people. There’s another one, ReCoverCA, that also many of the people that lost their homes have benefited from using those resources.
Christoph Lohr: Gotcha. It sounds like there's obviously the normal, anytime you’re dealing with a large organization, it’s a big ship, it takes a lot of time to respond to things. And so that would be, I think, maybe to be expected. But as far as what codes you were using, there was nothing really that I’m hearing from you that would cause any impediments in terms of working with FEMA, nothing that had happened there.
Tony Lindsey: Not with FEMA. We use all current building standards and that’s one of the things they were looking for — how are we rebuilding to be more resilient. Before the fire we were in a very high fire hazard severity zone and we were building, to people familiar with Chapter 7A or the Wildland-Urban Interface materials and methods of construction.
Christoph Lohr: Makes sense. Lastly, having experienced such intense personal and professional challenges, what advice would you give to officials in other regions who might face similar catastrophic events?
Tony Lindsey: When planning for types of emergencies, we all go through these plannings and EOC drills. You have to basically plan for the worst times 10 and kind of gear yourself to the worst-case scenarios while compensating and planning for like a snow emergency. Sometimes you’ll be like ‘Oh, you’ve got snow, you’ve got plowing, you’re cut down. Roofs are loading, but focus on how can you maintain the citizens and once we get them out of the town and start the recovery, how do we get them back. You have to loop all around and I think with these catastrophes that we’ve had, just lately the Hawaii fire, maybe Paradise provided a boilerplate for how these operations work. We made mistakes, we came back, but how you kind of formulate in, you got this one, you got Santa Rosa, and this is just the fires. And it’s the same with down south with the floods and tornadoes as well. Fires are just one of many catastrophes that can happen and fall on the community.
Christoph Lohr: Definitely. Well, Tony, on behalf of The Authority Podcast: Plumbing & Mechanical and IAPMO, I just want to say thanks for taking more time out of your schedule for us. We had a great article in Official magazine that our readers should be able to link to if they want to learn more, and just want to say thank you, Tony, for sharing your expertise and insights and experience with myself and our listeners here today. And thanks for all you do.
Tony Lindsey: Well, thanks for having me. And I’m always available for anybody if they want to look me up and ask me any questions.
Christoph Lohr: Excellent. Is there a good way for them to contact you?
Tony Lindsey: Yeah, you can go through email and it’s just tlindsey@townofparadise.com.
Christoph Lohr: Excellent. Well, Tony, thanks again so much.
Tony Lindsey: Thank you.
