The cover on this issue of the Sun caused some discomfort, among our own staff. Too sensational, too scary, too much out of context. All of that is to some extent true. But in my view necessary.
In October, 2017, the Nuns fire burst out of Nuns Canyon, roared across Highway 12 and consumed a northwestern swath of Glen Ellen and random parts of Kenwood. It came perilously close to my house. Photographing the flames in the pre-dawn hours that Saturday morning, staring at a 180-degree wall of fire, I literally couldn’t process what I saw. That fire destroyed 407 homes, some of them belonging to people reading these words right now.
That was almost nine years ago, and we tend to forget. Up in Butte County, eleven months later almost to the day, the Camp Fire destroyed the entire town of Paradise, killing 85 people, destroying 18,804 structures and ringing an alarm bell about the dangers of the rapidly-expanding Wildland Urban Interface (or WUI), and the general lack of appropriate concern and urban planning paying attention to the challenges that acronym represents…