Laura George started a petition to urge the county to fix Centerville Road, which is one lane in one portion and completely washed out in another.
portion of the road. That was met with opposition from the community, which expressed environmental concerns, Schmidt said. Then it was on to plan B—cut into the cliff on the other side, which looms above the road. Problem is, someone owns that property. They’ve been resistant, Schmidt said. “There are 15 people on the title,” he said, “and they have four different legal counsels.” He said he believes progress is being made. Last week the county submitted a new proposal and he’s hopeful the property owners will be cooperative. The Board of Supervisors likely will be presented with news at its Aug. 13 meeting—Schmidt will be asking either to move forward with hiring a contractor or to resort to seeking eminent domain. The latter could mean a long, arduous court process, he said. The second failure, Schmidt said,
occurred when debris flow coming off the Ridge washed out a portion of the road, which is gravel in that section. Photographs show a clearance of less than one lane; a truck that failed to maneuver it is still stuck in the ditch below. During the tour with George, not far beyond the Centerville School House and just past a residence, a sign warns that the road is closed ahead. Schmidt is hoping for a speedier process to fix that portion. The bid process already is underway. Estimated cost is $400,000. And with just one property owner to contend with, Schmidt said the county is “charging forward” with those repairs. It won’t even wait for FEMA to approve the price tag, he said, but will ask for repayment afterward. He said that project likely will take 70 to 80 days to complete. “We’re right up against that weather window. We really can’t wait much longer,” he said. “I’m cautiously optimistic we’ll get them both approved at the Aug. 13 meeting.” That, of course, would make George and her neighbors happy. But she says she’s seen it all before—construction on the lower breach was supposed to begin in the spring, then it was summer, now it’s fall. Instead, it appears priority has been given to debris removal and taking out trees. “Fire prevention doesn’t mean a wit if the road is closed,” she said. Ω
The Post perseveres Paradise’s town newspaper finds way to reach scattered readers post-Camp Fire On Nov. 7, 2018, Rick Silva was editor of the
Paradise Post, a twice-weekly newspaper that for 74 years had served the residents and businesses on the Ridge. By the end of the next day, Nov. 8, Silva was editor of a newspaper serving a town that, because of the Camp Fire, had no residents— and, thus, no readers. At 6:30 on the morning of the fire, Silva was awakened when his phone signaled receipt of a tweet. It advised him that a fire had broken out in the Feather River Canyon and was moving toward Paradise. He dressed and raced to the offices of the Chico Enterprise-Record, where for the last several years, since the closure of the Post’s Paradise offices, its small editorial staff had shared work space with their E-R colleagues. (The publications are among several Sacramento Valley newspapers, including the Oroville Mercury-Register and the Red Bluff Daily News, owned by MediaNews Group, which also owns the Bay Area News Group.) The newsroom was buzzing. Everybody sensed that this story was huge—bigger even than the 2017 Oroville Dam spillway story, which chronicled the evacuation of more than 180,000 people under threat of dam collapse. Of all the people gathered at the E-R that morning, none was as strongly connected to the Paradise community as Silva. Back in 1994, freshly graduated from Chico State, he had applied for a sports reporting job at the Post. Much to his sur-
prise, he got it. He’s since worked there for 25 years, 17 of them as editor. He’d covered Paradise-area fires before, most notably the Humboldt Fire of 2008. Determined to get as close as possible to the blaze, Silva had gotten lost in the smoky darkness and begun to think he was done for when two Paradise residents stepped out of the murk and directed him to Chico. “I was so unprepared for that fire,” he said, lamenting especially the lack of a gas mask. In 2008, the Post’s editorial staff numbered 11 and was housed in a large building on Clark Road in Paradise. By the time of the Camp Fire, however, budget cuts had made the paper a shadow of its former self. Its editorial staff was down to just two people— Silva and reporter Amanda Hovik—and the whole operation had been moved to Chico. Fortunately, they weren’t alone in covering the Camp Fire. E-R reporters and editors pitched in, and crews from the Bay Area News Group arrived to help out. Their work
SIFT ER Tracking pain pills The Washington Post recently won access to a Drug Enforcement Administration database that tracks the path of prescription pain pills sold in the U.S., and it published a tool showing how much hydrocodone and oxycodone went to individual states and counties from 2006 to 2012. The Post says the “records provide an unprecedented look at the surge of legal pain pills that fueled the prescription opioid epidemic, which resulted in nearly 100,000 deaths” during the seven-year time frame. The
database shows the North State as a hot spot in California for the rate of pills per person. Butte County received 126,438,275 pain pills, enough for each resident to have 82 pills per year. Shasta County received 117,341,864 pills, enough for 94 pills per person. Actavis Pharma, which has since been acquired by Teva Pharmaceuticals, was the top manufacturer in both counties. Sacramento County received many more pills total—443,063,171—but had a rate of just 45 pills per person per year.
Rick Silva, editor of a paper with no readers immediately following the Camp Fire, continues to tell his town’s stories. PHOTO BY ROBERT SPEER
was invaluable. “There’s no way we would have been able to do what we did without their help,” Silva said. For his part, Silva took advantage of his media access and spent nearly a week driving around Paradise with a video camera, documenting the disaster and posting the videos on YouTube and his Facebook page. He helped hundreds of people learn the fate of their homes—those he could find, that is. Landmarks and street signs, like everything else, were burned beyond recognition. He also accumulated more than 3,000 new Facebook friends. Since the fire, a kind of new normal has settled in at the Post. The staff—since Hovik left, it’s mostly Silva, though he does get some backup from the E-R and other sister papers—has had to learn how to put out a newspaper in a town that has almost no residents. To that end, they made one especially smart decision: to insert a four-page version of the Post into the E-R twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. It’s an unconventional distribution system, but it has attracted subscribers and even a few advertisers, giving the Post a new, if fragile, lease on life. As for Rick Silva, these days he’s not only the Post’s editor, he’s also its staff reporter, covering meetings of the Town Council, the Paradise Irrigation District and the school board as these entities struggle to bring their town back to life. He is determined to keep the Post alive to benefit the people of Paradise, whom he knows so well. “The last thing I want to be,” he said, “is the last editor of the Paradise Post.” —ROBERT SPEER r ob e r tspe e r @ newsr ev iew.c o m
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