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More and more it was becoming a refuge for people priced out of the rest of the state, where the cost of living had risen to untenable levels.
They were consuming almost four hundred American football fields’ worth of vegetation a minute.
The flames, when they arrived, were unstoppable, far beyond the capacity of any firefighter to control. In places they burned as hot as a crematorium. Cars turned into rivulets of molten metal. Homes became matches that set fire to the next.
apparitions only seen in the most extreme of blazes: fire tornadoes.
California is an ecological island, cut off in the west by the Pacific Ocean and in the east by the forbidding deserts of the southwestern US, and its plant life has evolved in isolation in spectacular fashion. There are more than 2,000 endemic plants in California, outnumbering any place of similar size in North America.
Because fire is generally regarded as a hostile force, a marauder that must be defeated, it can be difficult to grasp that in California, fire is as natural and necessary as the rain or wind. Giant sequoias, like some other conifers, require fire to propagate themselves.
Thick bark on mature trees enables them to survive a flame front, yet the ascending heat opens cones hanging on branches. Falling to earth, the seeds are able to germinate in sunlight because the fire has cleared away the leaf litter.
In desert oases, California fan palms rely on fire to kill other plants competing for precious moisture.
Paradise residents were mostly middle- and lower-income, and it was a sanctuary for people priced out of the Bay Area or Southern California.
California, they said, had entered a new epoch of huge and fast-moving blazes—the “era of megafires.”
When the wind grew too strong and the humidity was too low—ideal conditions for the spread of a wildfire—PG&E would de-energize its lines until the danger had passed.
When winds roared across the Ridge, as they often did, they rocked trees like piñatas and sent branches plummeting to the ground.
Evacuations would proceed based on which areas were affected, and during a disaster, cars would be permitted to use both lanes on certain roads to flee. Paradise sent out “know your zone” mailers to residents. It also established a reverse-911 alert system, which would call residents with an automated message in the event of a disaster.
Broshears spearheaded a number of projects intended to reduce the risk of fire. As fire chief, for instance, he pushed through a large brush-clearance project along the eastern boundary of Paradise, next to the hospital. He organized a drill in 2016 in which police and city officials staged a practice evacuation, shutting down stoplights at an intersection on Skyway and using volunteers to move traffic.
“We knew we’d have a fire,” Broshears said. “We knew we couldn’t escape it forever.”
The Humboldt Fire, which began in June 2008 when an arsonist set a fire under power lines just east of Chico, burned more than 23,000 acres in and around Paradise. Heavy smoke and flames closed three of the four main evacuation routes out of town, and the fourth, a two-lane road, was so congested that what should have been a fifteen-minute journey south lasted nearly three hours.
it birthed a remarkable fire tornado, a product of the high temperatures and hot air from the fire creating a column of superheated air that began to rotate as it rose. The twister was 1,000 feet wide and tore through the area, uprooting trees, tearing roofs off houses, and throwing power lines and cars into the air. Whirling at 143 mph, it reached temperatures of 2,700 degrees and heights of 17,000 feet. A firefighter died when the tornado snatched his 5,000-pound truck and flipped it down a road. Redding’s
PG&E equipment was found to have caused at least 1,500 fires between 2014, when the state first began requiring the utility to report such blazes, and 2017.
Another audit for the California Public Utilities Commission found that PG&E deferred maintenance projects to increase its profits.
they wondered how the elderly, disabled, and those with medical devices such as ventilators would manage without power.
“It put the onus on all of us, the public at large, saddling us with the loss of hundreds of dollars from the loss of food in our refrigerators and freezers,” one wrote to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.
Such warm downslope winds, known in different parts of California as Santa Ana or Diablo winds, are feared by firefighters because they disperse wildfire embers as easily as a child flinging dandelion seeds into a breeze.
His grass was always green, because a well-watered lawn is a firebreak.
The pillar of smoke that pours into the sky above a fire is known as a convection column. Composed of carbon dioxide, water, particles of burnt matter, and thousands of other components, a convection column can reach as high as 45,000 feet under certain weather conditions and create its own clouds, known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds, and thunderstorms.
million flying matches. These incendiary chunks of flaming debris are called firebrands, and the new fires they spark are known as spot fires, which can create a vast lattice of firelets that threaten to merge and lay waste to a firefighter’s best-laid plans.
she saw a bulging whirlwind of flame and smoke that was sucking debris from the ground, setting it alight, and rocketing it into the sky. It was a fire tornado as wide as a pickup truck, and it was moving slowly but inexorably toward her.
“It sounded like a freight train going around. It sounded. . . . It had this other sound too, more evil,” she said. “Oh God, I can’t even imagine what I could describe it as close to,” she added. “There was nothing earthly about it.”
When wildland firefighters give percentage figures for how much a fire is “contained,” this is what they are referring to: the proportion of the fire that has been boxed in with fire lines by bulldozers and hand crews.
Paradise officials had never contemplated a fire as terrible as this. “We always thought a fire, even if it was a fast-moving fire, would burn into a zone or zones,”
In one abandoned car he caught sight of a baby seat. Others were not abandoned at all. He saw what appeared to be the burned bodies of people who had not been able to get out in time. Worse, he had to shove them and their cars off the road.
Instead of a wildfire out in the countryside, it had become an urban fire spreading from building to building. The heat of burning structures ignited vegetation rather than the other way around. Showers of embers found their way into yet more buildings by means of ventilation ducts, cracks, and gutters full of leaves.
It would take them roughly three hours to make it three miles.
He heard the fire before he saw it, the whoosh whoosh of it moving toward the neighborhood. Angry winds cleared some of the thick smoke, and overhead the sky was a martian red.
Arriving on the street of two dozen homes, the mass of fire was as loud as a “fleet of trains.” It ensnared house after house, the one across the street, his brother’s van. There was a pop pop pop from the home of a gun enthusiast: bullets igniting in the heat of the fire.
They shouted for people to run toward the wide intersection. There, Lowe’s five fire trucks formed a physical barrier around a hundred or so civilians and their dozens of dogs and cats, protecting them as the flames went past. “It was panic,” Lowe said: pitch-black, trees lighting up like fireworks all around, power lines arcing, embers skidding through the sky like cherry blossoms on a gusty day.
they would race across the foothills toward the West Branch Feather River. They never jumped the water, yet today they had.
According to firefighters, the fire emitted radiant heat reaching 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, as hot as a crematorium. Trees across the street were burning so hot that they were left looking like charred matchsticks.
A firefighter visited their home, saw that it was destroyed, and on the porch found Andrew’s burned wheelchair and his remains. He had waited there for the firefighters, just as Iris has told him. There was no sign of the dogs. “Andrew was like the captain of his ship,” Iris said. “And he went down with it.”
One outdoors magazine even suggested that hikers planning a trip out West travel by July at the latest, to avoid the months with the highest risk of smoke and flame.
He took comfort in the dogs. Some “would rush at me like I’m their owner, and I’d hug on them, kiss on them, and talk about a stress reliever,” he said. Taking in the dogs “probably had to be one of the most medicinal things we’d ever done.”
One set of remains was found commingled with those of two small animals, suggesting a person huddled with their pets in their final moments.
the Paradise Irrigation District discovered that benzene, a cancer-causing chemical in crude oil and gasoline used to make plastics and synthetic fibers, contaminated almost one-third of the five hundred water samples it collected around town. Officials believed this occurred when the Camp Fire sent toxic gases from burning homes into the water pipes, and melted plastic pipes and meters. By the summer, the water district was still warning people not to drink the water or use it for cooking, brushing teeth, making ice, or preparing food.
In the spring, Paradise bloomed. Daffodils and irises flowered in neat groups in front of bare home foundations. Grasses emerged unchecked and, swaying in the wind, lent the town a prairie feel.
streaked with wildflowers like the yellow foothill poppy, a fire-follower species that is common in the wake of blazes.
Everywhere there were black oaks whose bark was burned smooth but showed signs of regenerating, putting out new stems from the base or from buds high in the sky that had previously been dormant. Frass on the bark showed that insects were busy burrowing away inside.
“It doesn’t even look like I live here,” she said. “It’s like everything has been erased—like all the memories are gone, everything gone. Even in the devastation, at least you saw parts of your home.” In a text message that accompanied a photo of the lot, she wrote: “No reason to go back.”
the question of rebuilding was tinged with bitterness.
“What happened in the Camp Fire is the fire that professionals knew was going to happen, but I don’t think anyone foresaw a whole town wiped off the map,” he said. “This was the perfect fire.”
