Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Paradise, CA

Paradise is an incorporated town spread across a wide pine-forested ridge in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Butte County, at 1,778 feet elevation about 10 miles east of Chico, and it is nicknamed simply "the Ridge."

Paradise got its first post office in 1877 and did not incorporate until November 27, 1979; for many years the Butte County Railroad ran along the ridge serving mines and sawmills.

Nobody knows for certain how Paradise got its name - one legend credits a saloon called the Pair o' Dice (the town once appeared on a railroad map as "Paradice"), while another says sawmill owner William Pierce Leonard exclaimed "boys, this is paradise" on arriving in the cool mountain air in 1864.

On November 8, 2018, the Camp Fire - the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history - swept through Paradise, killing 85 people and destroying 18,804 buildings, leaving only about 5% of the town's buildings without serious damage.

Paradise's population collapsed from 26,218 in the 2010 census to just 4,764 in the 2020 census, and a door-to-door count in April 2019 found only 2,034 people left in town.

Paradise is staging one of the fastest wildfire recoveries in American history - more than 2,500 new structures had been built by November 2023, the population climbed back above 9,000, and the Census Bureau estimated 10,023 residents in 2025.

Paradise has about 3,351 households that are unusually small at 2.09 people on average, and roughly 75% of its homes are owner-occupied.

Since the 1950s Paradise had been marketed as an affordable retirement destination - "a place in the pines" - which is why so many of its pre-fire residents were retirees on fixed incomes.

One year after the fire, the Paradise High School football team completed an undefeated season and became a symbol of the town's survival, inspiring the 2021 book Paradise Found by Bill Plaschke.

Paradise is rebuilding behind a planned greenbelt buffer - a ring of managed parks and cleared vegetation developed with the Nature Conservancy that models suggest could cut the town's future wildfire risk by as much as 64%.