June 30: The Paradise Calif Camp Fire: A Survivor Speaks (and Films) the Lessons

FREE online event! Wed, Jun 30, 2021, @ 9:00 AM
Register here to attend

Join us for a conversation with Christopher Allen Smith, an Emmy-Award Winning documentarian, who lived in Paradise, California with his family until the Camp Fire consumed his home in November 2018.

Since then, he has been conducting interviews and research into the history of the fire as well as the lessons taken by first responders, civilians, government officials, and private disaster planners, to produce film and writing projects based on those lessons. Smith also acted as a Field Producer for Ron Howard’s REBUILDING PARADISE as well as the writer/director of the PBS broadcast documentary A HIGH AND AWFUL PRICE: LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE CAMP FIRE.

In this webinar we will talk to Chris about his experience, the lessons he learned from the disaster, and his lessons learned for others that he is documenting in an exclusive column with Homeland Security Today.

We present this series to bring a voice to the victims of disaster and add some personal texture and experience to the impact of disasters, terrorism, and other tragic acts of violence.

For teaser about his film, please click here

See episode 1 of A High and Awful Price: Lessons Learned from the Camp Fire here

"This is the story of people who lived through fire."
Register to attend this online webinar tomorrow at 9am!
www.eventbrite.com/e/the-paradise-calif-...tickets-155732111939

From the creator of the High and Awful Price video series, and presenter at the webinar in the first post, here is the first of his series of articles at Homeland Security Today.

HSToday is proud to announce a multi-part series from Emmy award winning director Christopher Allan Smith, a survivor of the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, and documentary filmmaker. Following the fire, Smith took his talents and devoted them to helping others learn from the tragedy on the Paradise Ridge, and the impact of disaster on families, communities and the first responders and disaster planners whose responsibility it is to take these lessons into the future. This series, Lessons Learned from the Camp Fire, describes how preparedness plays out in reality: from running for your life away from the danger to emergency finances to the aftermath, told only like a survivor could share. HSToday presents this series to bring a voice to the victims of disaster and add some personal texture and experience to the impact of disasters, terrorism, and other tragic acts of violence.

In our lives, how obvious is the line between where the influence of our personal decisions ebbs and eddies and undertows of larger trends holds sway?

If you’re like me, you want to believe everything important falls under your influence. And if you’re like me, somewhere in your heart you know that notion is more an article more of faith than reason or experience.

I am here because 6:25 a.m. on November 8, 2018, my fate was sealed.

That morning, 10 miles from my front door in Paradise, California, a poorly maintained power line owned by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. arced, dropping molten metal into the brush below.

I was rousing my younger son and getting ready to drive him to high school in Chico, ignorant of the turn my life was taking. We saw smoke, like we had many times before. We assumed it was another of the brush fires familiar to those of us living on a forested ridge.

Read on at COLUMN: Disaster Is Coming, and Camp Fire Lessons Can Help You Manage and Survive