Home destroyed in Camp Fire but coin collection found and restored

Joseph Best safe Paradise California Camp Fire
Joseph Best’s photo of his safe that stored his coin collection.

One of the 14,000 homes and businesses that burned in the Camp Fire at Paradise California in November belonged to Joseph Best. During the month evacuated residents were kept out of the burn area he worried about his coin collection that was stored in a “fire proof” safe. When finally allowed back, he found it in the ashes of his home, tipped on its side.

The video below tells the story of how Numismatic Guaranty Corporation, a company that cleans, grades, and packages coins for collectors, extracted Mr. Best’s coins from the melted holders, graded them, and reinstalled the coins in new holders — all at no charge.

Note about “fire proof” safes. The term is misleading. Safes have different levels of fire resistance. Some have more insulating characteristics than others, but if exposed to high enough heat for an extended period of time even the best may allow the inside temperature to rise high enough to damage the contents. Various organizations rate fire resistant safes for time and temperature, for example half an hour at 1,550 degrees, 1 hour at 1,700 degrees, or 2 hours at 1,500 degrees.
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Jim. Typos or errors, report them HERE.

Video from the first night of the Camp Fire

@FirePhotoGirl is a professional photographer who documents and reports on emergency incidents, concentrating on fires, usually in Southern California. This video is from the first night of the Camp Fire, which virtually wiped out the town of Paradise in Northern California last fall. Her handle is the same on both Twitter and Instagram.

Lessons learned from Camp Fire could augment data utilization and community resilience

Camp Fire Northern California
Firefighters monitor the Camp Fire in Northern California. Inciweb photo.

A Mississippi State University civil engineering faculty member who researches resilience against extreme events and natural hazards is responding to lessons learned from California’s deadly Camp Fire by outlining how to utilize the power of data to improve disaster response and minimize economic loss and human harm in similar events.

In a letter published January 10, 2019 in Science Magazine, Farshid Vahedifard writes that in the aftermath of the Camp Fire in Northern California, it is critical to examine how decision makers and first-responders can “prevent an extreme hazard like the Camp Fire from turning into a massive human disaster.”

Vahedifard is an MSU Bagley College of Engineering associate professor who also holds the Civil and Environmental Advisory Board Endowed Professorship. He penned the Science letter with MSU colleague Alireza Ermagun, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering; Kimia Mortezaei, an MSU engineering postdoctoral associate with the university’s Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems; and Amir AghaKouchak, a University of California-Irvine associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.

With reports pointing to shortcomings in disseminating critical information to warn residents before and during the November fire that killed 85 people, scorched more than 153,336 acres and destroyed more than 18,800 structures, the authors point out that a “lack of an integrated framework for circulating information among decision-makers and passing it to residents exacerbated the devastating impact of the wildfire.”

They assert that investment in an integrated system for identifying, harnessing, synthesizing, and communicating pertinent data would “enable decision-makers and communities to better anticipate, prepare for, respond to and recover from extreme events such as the Camp Fire.”

They continue, “We must identify relevant stakeholders, examine the required data, collect public and relevant private data efficiently, and develop platforms for processing datasets such as weather data, cell phone GPS data as proxy for people, social media feeds, and traffic cameras and sensors. We then need strategies to convert data sets into usable information by using artificial intelligence technologies for decision-support systems. To communicate the resulting information effectively, we need a reliable data infrastructure for real-time analysis that could alert residents by email, phone messages, text warning, television, radio, and ‘reverse 911.’”

Vahedifard and colleagues previously have published research and commentary highlighting how a chain of events, such as wildfires, landslides and mudslides, cascades like a series of toppling dominoes and leads to catastrophic disasters.

A documentary about the Camp Fire at Paradise, California

There will probably be numerous documentaries released about the Camp Fire that erased much of Paradise, California as it killed at least 86 people and destroyed over 14,000 homes. Below is one of the first.

The fire will be an important part of California history, but it remains to be seen if it will be eclipsed in the next few years by even more unimaginable and disastrous fires as the climate becomes warmer and more prone to extreme events.

The film below, produced by Paradise-area film maker Golden Eagle Films, contains many interviews with residents that survived the inferno.

 

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Dave. Typos or errors, report them HERE.