In such a lopsided situation, the firefighters’ ignorance may have been a kind of blessing. “I remember their faces,” Jamie Coutts told me, “and I mostly remember because that’s what my face must have looked like when it slammed into our town in 2011—because it was just disbelief, right? It was like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to lose ten houses here, but we’ll get it.’ And I’m thinking, ‘No, you’re going to lose five hundred houses here. You guys don’t get it.’ ”
