One of the startling moments in our reporting about how Californians can be safer from wildfire was when Scott Stephens, professor of fire science at UC Berkeley, said, "There's at least a hundred Paradises out there." Meaning there are that many towns nestled against forests, with limited evacuation routes and people living in old homes, built to old standards, that will burn easily. KQED's Danielle Venton asked Stephens whether there's any hope, whether wildfires in California -- given the state's development patterns and given climate change -- have to be so brutally destructive.

Stephens thought about it.

"No," he told her. "In a lot of ways, it could be better."

One of our stories this week tells you about one group's effort to help. A San Francisco-based traffic analytics company called StreetLight Data identified 100 communities across the country with the most limited means of escaping disasters like wildfires and hurricanes. It found that 14 of those communities are in California, second only to Florida's 20. The information is free for these small towns, meaning they didn't have to pay for a study to analyze their risks and options. Local politicians can now decide whether that information is useful in the effort to make people's experience of wildfire less horrific, maybe even "better."

Kat Snow Senior Editor, Science