7 On Your Side: Six years after the Camp Fire, Paradise residents continue their rebuilding efforts

PARADISE, Calif. (KABC) -- More than six years after the devastating Camp Fire nearly wiped Paradise off the map, residents continue their rebuilding efforts as they reflect on their lessons learned along the process.

7 On Your Side's Phillip Palmer traveled to Paradise to show how far along they are in rebuilding and how they are making the town fire resistant to prevent a future catastrophe.

That includes removing trees, reconfiguring roads to create more escape routes and putting power lines underground.

In November of 2018, the Camp Fire killed 85 people and destroyed 90% of the homes in Paradise.

Paradise had a population of 26,000 people before the fire. In 2020, only 5,000 people lived there, but by last year that number had more than doubled to 11,000.

For three straight years Paradise has been the fastest growing city in California.

"You see trucks everywhere, you see red cones everywhere. We're a work in progress and people get frustrated about it. We call it construction fatigue here," said the former Mayor of Paradise, Ron Lassonde.

"The folks down in your area are gonna experience that same thing because construction's gonna take a long time and it's gonna interfere with day to day life. That's just normal for the first three to five years after the disaster," Lassonde added.

Gary Ledbetter lost everything he owned in that fire, and six years later, still remembers his state of mind during those moments.

"There's a flood of emotions when you get burned out. One of them is 'I want what I lost' and you want to build back right away," said Ledbetter.

He had moved into his home 10 days before the Camp Fire destroyed it. It was a year before he was able to begin rebuilding, in part because he wanted to wait for new building codes now required in Paradise.

But it took much longer for many to come to grips with the reality of what they faced on their road to recovery.

"You lose everything. Now you're a victim, but my recommendation is don't stay there," Ledbetter said. "Climb out of that hole and become a survivor. Then once you have a survivor mindset, you can gain some clarity and set a vision for yourself."

In terms now easy to understand for fire victims in Southern California, phase one and phase two of the debris clean-up took almost nine months.

One thousand trucks every day hauled away 3.7 million tons of debris, or the equivalent weight of four golden gate bridges.

"Seeing hundreds of trucks drive the same routes every day, all I taught myself to think of was progress, each truck was progress," said Paradise Public Works Director Marc Mattox. "But what I can say in my experience having kind of overseen all of it, is that the more people that sign up for this program, the more efficient they can be and the faster the overall cleanup is done."

Paradise is a remote community just east of Chico, so the timeline for recovery was affected by its location, but so too was the decision to rebuild in a manner that would reduce the chances of this kind of devastation ever happening again.

It took two years for the first homes to be completed.

"It was extremely hard at times during storms or other threats of fire, feeling like maybe we couldn't rebuild," said Jen Goodlin. It took two and a half years before her family was able to move into their new home.

"There were some really defeating days, but you just have to do one thing at a time and if you get through that, then you do the next hurdle," Goodlin added.

Paradise realized over the years how important it is to celebrate small achievements every day.

The community has a wall as a celebration of the smallest. Each individual tile is the actual handprint of a child living in Paradise five years after the fire, over 2,500 small achievements all in one place.