A Community's Lifeline: Protecting Schools and Hospitals from Wildfire
The Challenge: In November 2018, the Camp Fire became the most destructive wildfire in California's history, devastating the town of Paradise. The fire destroyed over 11,000 homes, but its impact on the community's critical lifelines—its schools and only hospital—was just as profound, crippling the town's ability to care for its residents and begin recovery. Understanding exactly how these essential buildings failed was crucial for learning how to protect other at-risk communities in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI).
RAPID staff and researchers examine a fire-damaged structure before a LiDAR scan.
A New Approach: An interdisciplinary team of researchers conducted a post-disaster reconnaissance mission to investigate the damage to Paradise's schools and the Adventist Health Feather River Hospital campus. With support from NSF, the team utilized the RAPID Facility to deploy advanced data collection tools, including high-resolution Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) scanners and drones, to capture precise engineering data from the damaged structures. They combined this technical data with in-depth interviews with school and hospital staff to create a comprehensive picture of the fire's impact.
Data & Discovery: The investigation revealed a critical vulnerability that went beyond structural collapse. In many cases, it was nonstructural damage—particularly to utility systems—that rendered these essential facilities inoperable. At Ponderosa Elementary School, the main buildings survived, but the destruction of the campus's electrical panel prevented the school from being used. Similarly, the Adventist Health hospital campus was forced to shut down after the roof of its utility building collapsed, destroying the generators, HVAC systems, and other equipment necessary for the entire campus to function.
The team also documented cases of successful mitigation. At Pine Ridge Elementary School, the purposeful clearing of defensible space and a campus layout that placed buildings inside a ring of asphalt and sports fields helped save the main structures from destruction. In a remarkable case at Ponderosa Elementary, a metal shipping container, likely placed by accident, acted as a massive heat shield, protecting a school building from the intense fire of an adjacent lumber yard.
Impact: This RAPID-supported research, published in the journal Natural Hazards, provides a powerful new understanding of how wildfires impact critical community infrastructure. The findings demonstrate that for essential facilities like schools and hospitals, surviving a fire is not enough; they must also remain functional. By highlighting the critical vulnerability of nonstructural systems, this work provides a clear roadmap for engineers, architects, and policymakers to develop more resilient building codes and mitigation strategies. The study proves that protecting a community's lifelines requires a focus not just on the building's frame, but on the power, water, and HVAC systems that allow it to serve its purpose in a time of crisis.
Citation: Schulze, S. S., Fischer, E. C., Hamideh, S., & Mahmoud, H. (2020). Wildfire impacts on schools and hospitals following the 2018 California Camp Fire. Natural Hazards, 104, 901–925. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-020-04197-0