Skip to main content
Browse by:
GROUP

Fire in Paradise: Aging Infrastructure, Climate Change, and Inequality

Event Image
Tuesday, February 04, 2020
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Deb Niemeier, Clark Distinguished Chair, University of Maryland
CEE Spring 2020 Seminar Series

This talk will focus on wildfires as a harbinger of the changing climate and our ability to introduce greater resilience into the built environment. We will explore what happened in Paradise, CA during the Camp Fire of November 2018, the largest fire California has ever experienced. We will walk through the history of the town, some of the land use decisions that made the fire much worse and finally, what happened during the actual evacuation. With the fire in Paradise to guide the narrative, the issues that arise in this talk have salience almost anywhere we face disasters that are exacerbated by conditions of climate change and aging infrastructure.