PARADISE, Butte County — Residents of this foothill town have long known that their community was a tinderbox waiting to blow.

A decade-old grand jury report warned of “vast amounts of fire fuel on steep terrain.” State fire maps assigned the highest level of hazard to the area. And countless stands of dry, dense and sometimes dying trees were a constant reminder of all that could burn.

Those living here weren’t just sitting around waiting for the inevitable. Before the Camp Fire rained terror across this region 90 miles north of Sacramento, many were working to reduce the threat, including one group that had just thinned 11 acres of thick, fire-prone forest at a school outside of Paradise.

The campus, the Pine Ridge School in nearby Magalia, survived this month’s firestorm largely due to the group’s precautionary effort. But the loss of more than 11,000 homes and at least 70 lives highlights the challenge that Butte County — like much of California — is up against: a trend of catastrophic wildfire that is impossible to tame.

Fire experts say hotter, drier conditions fueled by climate change are undermining efforts to prevent and put out unruly flames and limit destruction. From Redding this summer to the Wine Country before that and now Paradise, it’s become a grim reality that has left no clear path for gaining the upper hand.

As debate rages over how to tackle California’s wildfire problem, with even President Trump weighing in last weekend with a call to “rake” forest floors of debris, the best solution, experts say, lies in a combination of strategies that merely chip away at the risk and soften the blow.

The tool box includes hiring more firefighters, undergrounding spark-producing power lines, equipping homes with fire-resistant building materials, clearing overgrown vegetation and more. All of the tactics are pricey, and even pursued in tandem, there are no guarantees.

“We’re not defeated,” insisted Calli-Jane DeAnda, executive director of the Butte County Fire Safe Council, which did the forest clearing that helped save Pine Ridge School. “We knew we couldn’t stop a raging wildfire in its tracks. But we can still see successes.”

DeAnda’s Fire Safe Council , in its 20 years, has won about $7 million in grants for roughly a dozen vegetation projects across 600 acres. A chipping program has also helped with tree removal. Like other fire-prevention work, limited funding and delays in getting approval, particularly on private lands, have made it difficult for the group to address thousands of additional acres that need attention, DeAnda explained.

“It takes a lot of investment to create a safe and healthy forest,” she said.

On a larger scale, both the state and federal governments have committed to reducing heavy brush and timber in California’s wildlands.

This year, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation that provides $1 billion for fire prevention, including vegetation clearing and proactively burning overgrown forest. The new law also streamlines the permitting process for fuel-reduction work.

Trump on Saturday pledged an additional $500 million for forest management in the Farm Bill during his visit to Butte County.

Still, the amount of land being cleared or burned for fire prevention in California remains relatively small: about a quarter-million acres this year cumulatively by the U.S. Forest Service and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The two agencies manage a combined 50 million acres statewide.

“You’ll never get ahead of the problem without using fire more extensively,” said Malcolm North, a research ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service, who advocates for prescribed burns in wooded areas because of their low-cost and wide reach.

Removing vegetation with machinery and hand crews, by contrast, is very expensive. While some clearing can be done by logging companies at a profit, the smaller trees and understory that pose the biggest fire risk do not have commercial value.

“You often have to send people in there with chain saws, and they’re having to pile the wood” and remove it, North said. “That just doesn’t pay its way out of the woods.”

Prescribed fire, meanwhile, has been a tough sell as critics worry about burns getting out of control or putting up unnecessary smoke.

In Butte County, where the current 151,272-acre blaze continues to threaten communities, several hundred acres were burned intentionally this year, said Don Hankins, a professor at Cal State Chico who studies forest restoration. Much of the controlled burning was in the Plumas and Lassen national forests.

“This last year, we’ve actually seen some prescribed fire put on the ground, but nothing on the scale that would have helped with the Camp Fire,” Hankins said.

Making matters worse, a decades-old policy of aggressive fire suppression by the state and federal governments has added to the buildup of dangerous vegetation.

California’s building codes are another way to protect communities from wildfires, but they, too, only do so much, experts say.

Houses constructed after 2008 in fire-prone areas aren’t allowed to have flammable wood roofs or untreated woods decks. Double-paned windows and ember-proof screens on attic vents are a must. Defensible space around homes is also required, though not always enforced.

A fundamental problem with these rules is that many homes were built before the standards took effect, as was the case in Butte County.

“The newer homes seem to have done a lot better,” said Todd Derum, a Cal Fire division chief and the incident commander on the Camp Fire, which in some areas destroyed nine in 10 houses. “Building construction is a big deal.”

State and local governments often provide grants to help owners of older homes fire-proof their property. But the money has never been adequate.

Experts say that in some areas of high fire risk, houses just shouldn’t be built. The hills below Butte County’s Jarbo Gap, where the Camp Fire started and winds notoriously top 50 mph, may be one such area.

The outskirts of Santa Rosa, where last fall’s Tubbs Fire followed the path of the 1964 Hanley Fire, may be another bad spot. City and county officials appear to be pushing forward with new homes anyway.

Bill Stewart, a forestry specialist at UC Berkeley, said that technology has helped fire scientists pinpoint areas where wind, heat, vegetation and other factors conspire to pose the greatest threats. It’s just that the risk maps aren’t being used to guide development.

“We need more than an academic paper here and there on wind,” Stewart said. “The number of windy days per year should help determine new zoning policy for planners. Instead, we’re still just sprawling out.”

Stewart said that if local governments don’t limit growth, insurance companies eventually will — by refusing to cover high-risk homes. As it stands, the industry probably hasn’t had enough losses to justify reductions in coverage, he said. But, he added, that could change with the Camp Fire, which has become the most destructive blaze in California history.

Doing more to prevent unplanned ignitions and responding faster to new starts are other ways to reduce wildfire devastation.

With California’s firefighting force among the largest and best equipped in the world, however, only so much improvement is possible. Among the soon-to-come additions at Cal Fire is a new fleet of civilian Black Hawk helicopters.

Some places, like Sonoma County, are trying to give firefighters an additional boost by installing fire-detection cameras in high-risk areas and using better weather forecasting systems to anticipate problems.

A push to underground power lines is also resurfacing as investigators in Butte County look at electrical equipment as a possible cause of the Camp Fire. Many of last year’s blazes in the North Bay were sparked by downed lines, according to Cal Fire.

Like other strategies, though, burying the power grid comes at a high price. Pacific Gas and Electric Co. says it costs about $3 million per mile to move electric distribution underground. The utility oversees tens of thousands of miles of overhead line.

Other ways to address the wildfire problem include improving emergency warning systems. Like Sonoma County officials last year, authorities in Butte County are coming under attack for not issuing a widespread emergency message to cell phones, known as a Wireless Emergency Alert, or WEA, when the fire broke out.

The high death toll of the Camp Fire is in large part due to people failing to learn of the danger and quickly evacuate. Several burned in their cars.

No matter how much is done to prepare for and prevent fires, experts say that many of the recent blazes, including the Camp Fire, have been so hot and fast-moving that devastation is inevitable, especially as the climate continues to change.

Temperatures in California have increased about 3 degrees over the past century while droughts have become longer and more severe, only ripening the conditions for uncontrollable burns.

“If the weather gets too extreme, all bets are off,” said North, with the U.S. Forest Service.

The Butte County Fire Safe Council, which has its office in Paradise but will likely relocate to Chico, isn’t letting the bleak outlook deter its work.

A box of notices that the group had planned to send to local property owners, informing them of an upcoming forest-clearing project, is believed to have survived in the back of an SUV. Executive Director DeAnda said that once she can get into the burned-out community to retrieve the mailers, the effort will move forward.

The project involves reinforcing a 10-mile fuel break around Paradise, which may or may not have slowed the spread of the current fire. DeAnda believed it was only a matter of time before the area would burn.

“It’s been my worst nightmare,” she said. “But I’m not surprised.”

Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kurtisalexander