Residents of Paradise, Calif. continue to contend with Camp Fire damage, with hundreds of people still missing. Thousands of buildings have been destroyed. with the majority of the destroyed buildings consisted of private residences.

The now infamous Camp Fire spread through Butte County, taking as many as 77 lives as of this writing. The number of deaths is now the largest number of recorded deaths on record from a single fire in the state of California.

Emergency responders and search and rescue teams have been searching the area of Paradise, Calif. with the residents still evacuated from their homes. Before the fire, Paradise had a population of around 27,000 with many of them being elderly. In Paradise, Camp Fire damage included the destruction of 6,453 homes, according to The New York Times.

When the Camp Fire first started, the intensity of the inferno was so hot that the aluminum in tire rims melted away, which caused seven people to die in their cars.

“Paradise is an old, wooded town with narrow surface streets — and it’s a retirement community. [T]he winds were phenomenal, pushing everything down across the roadways. Roads were simply blocked. People ran out of gas. It was an accumulation of everything all at once,” said Deputy Chief of California Fire Department Scott McLean, speaking to The New York Times.

The Deputy Chief and other commenters stated that the Camp Fire damage was made even worse by the fact there was only one main road leading out of Paradise, which quickly became clogged with traffic. Paradise mayor Jody Jones told The New York Times there had been evacuation procedures in place for wildfires and that the town had gone through evacuation drills.

Jones stated that no amount of planning could have prevented the panicked reaction of the citizens, which caused the fatal gridlock.

Overview of California Fire Damages

Wildfires have become a consistent problem in California, with each inferno becoming larger and more intense than the last one. This has caused many towns like Paradise to set up evacuation drills and other procedures to help prepare for the event, but the damages left behind by the blaze are unavoidable.

This means that numerous California homeowners will have or have already had to file claims for property damage, from the Camp Fire, Hill Fire, Woolsey Fire, or last year’s Thomas Fire.

The Thomas Fire was the largest wildfire in California history, which burned nearly 300,000 acres and lasted for over a month. It destroyed over 1,000 buildings, along with landscapes, trees, fencing, and vegetation, with California homeowners currently contending with the intense fire damage. SoCalEdison later admitted that defects in some of its equipment could have contributed to the start of the Thomas Fire.

Property insurance claims may cover some Camp Fire damage, but landscape and trees are often not covered. Only about five percent of insurance policies account for tree damage, with compensation for old growth trees typically falling below its value. Many of the properties destroyed by fires had included very old trees, which provided various benefits to the properties.