By Joseph Serna

Los Angeles Times

PARADISE, Calif. — The cleanup facing Butte County’s mountain towns is monumental in size but probably won’t start for weeks.

“It is a historic, almost biblical disaster,” said California state Sen. Jim Nielsen, a Republican who represents Paradise and has toured the destruction left in the fire’s wake. “Old Testament stuff.”

But California’s most catastrophic wildfire may finally be reaching its dying embers.

Aided by two days of drenching rains, fire officials in Butte County report that the Camp fire is 95 percent contained, and that crews on Friday were putting out hot spots in the mountains east of Paradise as well as laying fire lines to cover the last edge of the once-raging fire.

The Camp fire has scorched 153,000 acres, destroyed more than 18,000 buildings, most of them residences, and left a death toll of 84. Hundreds remain unaccounted for.

“We have so many souls unaccounted for; I believe that this search for remains is going to go on for a long time. Could be weeks,” Nielsen said.

But once that search is over, the next phase of the recovery can begin. And for a rugged mountain town that essentially improvised its way into existence, that’s going to carry some unique challenges, experts say.

For starters, Paradise has the dubious honor of being the largest municipality west of the Mississippi River to have no sewer system. Instead, its residents and business district off its main road — Skyway — rely on between 11,000 and 12,000 septic systems that are prone to failure, according to a city website dedicated to the issue.

Unfortunately for crews tasked with scraping the topsoil then removing debris, those systems sit in shallow basalt soil resting on hardened bedrock, said Clint Snyder, assistant executive officer for the Central Valley Water Board.

If they scrape too deep into the volcanic earth, equipment could compromise the septic system — which would spoil the location for future use in many cases, he said. Finding a new septic leach field that is far from a domestic drinking well to avoid contamination would be difficult, he said.

“Our biggest concern would be anything that impedes those folks getting into (their) homes as soon as possible,” he said.

City and state officials said any rebuilding effort should seriously consider modernizing Paradise’s infrastructure — specifically its sewer system. The town mayor said last week that an old study to add sewers to its business district should be updated and considered, and Snyder said state grants could help continue that work in the residential areas.

Even if all goes well and the debris is removed and the town’s septic systems come out unscathed, there’s the looming question of where to put all the rubble.

Fire after devastating fire over the past 13 months — from the deadly wine country fires in Sonoma and Napa counties to the historic conflagrations that scorched Redding, Mendocino and Lake counties this summer — are testing the capacity of Northern California’s landfills. More than 2 million tons of debris were removed during last year’s emergencies alone, officials said.

There are also the Montecito mudslide in Santa Barbara County and the Woolsey fire, which just burned through Los Angeles and Ventura counties and destroyed more than 1,000 homes, to consider.

Just as in each of those emergencies, crews that come in for cleanup will have to separate the toxic from the nontoxic debris and then find a place for all of it, said Mark Ghilarducci, director of the state Office of Emergency Services.

Some of it may end up out of state or in far-flung sections of California, he said.

But even that isn’t so simple.

The same issue that stymied evacuations the day of the Camp fire — limited roads in and out of town —could also slow the cleanup effort as a caravan of heavy-duty haulers, excavators and bulldozers are motored into and out of the area.

To try to speed up the process, state officials are plotting out landfills along rail lines that run through Butte County in hopes that much of the debris can be shipped off by train.

“It’s a heavy lift,” Ghilarducci added.

Nielsen said officials haven’t estimated how much debris is out there. One property can hold as much as 100 tons of material that needs to be removed.

No single disaster in state history has ever amounted to the level of cleanup crews will face in Butte County’s Sierra foothills, Ghilarducci said.

“We’re going to dwarf Santa Rosa” after the wine country fires, he said.

The first task will be removing hazardous materials. In a rural, working-class setting such as Paradise and the towns above it, where residents lived in tree-lined mobile home parks and affordable single-family homes built in the 1960s and ’70s, the debris is loaded with asbestos, Ghilarducci said.

There will be propane, pesticides, paint and other toxic substances that have to be specially wrapped, “like a big burrito,” then carried away, he said.

Once that process is complete, residents will be allowed to return to the property to gather any personal belongings and keepsakes, officials said. They can opt to find their own way to remove the nontoxic debris left behind or sign a right-to-entry and have state workers remove it for them.

It could be at least eight or nine months from the time that the hazardous-material removal work begins before residents can start to break ground on new homes, Ghilarducci said.

“This isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon,” he said. “Paradise is going to have to come together with Butte County and figure out what it wants to look like in the future.”