The DrsC lived in or near Chico, CA during most of the years included in the span 1972-2020. During that entire period we never spent a whole summer there. We were mostly traveling in our RV or, after 1994, living at our summer place in WY.
We built a new home a few miles outside Chico in 1987 on nearly 12 acres of hilly grassland that had previously been winter pasture for livestock. Understanding it would be at risk of grassfires and likely untenanted by us in summer, we built in fire protections.
The house style was Spanish colonial with tile roof and stucco walls, it was surrounded by a wide concrete walkway, no plants growing adjacent to the house. We annually plowed the firebreak that surrounded our property just inside the fence. We also maintained a 40' plant-free firebreak just beyond our landscaping, and our driveway was another quasi firebreak.
I remember one autumn night sleeping in the living room because out those windows we could see a fire creeping down the hillside across the valley a mile or two away. We'd hooked up the RV ready to evacuate if need be. I'd wake up every hour or so and check the fire's progress. We got lucky that year and the fire crews stopped the fire before it got close.
When we later built a barn away from the house in which to store our RV it was of metal construction and again surrounded by firebreak. All of these precautions worked.
More recently the Camp fire that destroyed the town of Paradise also came within a few feet of our house but damaged only our landscaping. When that happened we were three days west of Hawaii, sailing home from the Orient. For a few days we thought our house had burned until our phones went live in HI and our neighbor texted us it was okay.
Our fire insurance went from $1000/year when we built to roughly $7000/year after the Camp fire. In 2020 we sold out and no longer own property in CA.
Now the area again is suffering wildfire, this time it is the Park fire, so-called because it started in the upper reaches of the city's Bidwell Park, the result of arson. The Guardian has a good article on the human costs of these disasters in the hills outside Chico. We lived through a lot of them.
