This fall, PG&E was trying something new. As the National Weather Service forecast a Red Flag event in Northern California, the utility cut electricity to distribution lines in seven counties, hoping to prevent a wildfire. The CPUC approved the de-energization. San Diego Gas & Electric had pioneered this approach after sparking two huge blazes in 2007, which had merged with a third wildfire to kill two people and level more than thirteen hundred homes. Cutting electricity was controversial, and PG&E had resisted imposing such outages for years. But management felt it had few options. As the planet warmed, nighttime temperatures had risen twice as fast as daytime temperatures, lowering relative humidity during the early morning hours, when firefighters had heretofore been able to contain a wildfire more easily. In the previous four years alone, more than 1,550 wildfires had been linked to PG&E equipment failures. There was no room for error.
The electricity cutoff, which took place in October, left nearly sixty thousand customers without power. San Diego Gas & Electric, or SDG&E, followed PG&E’s lead and blocked electricity to an additional 360 customers in the foothills communities sixty miles northeast of San Diego, near the Cleveland National Forest. In the last half decade, SDG&E had used shutoffs as many as twelve times. They seemed to work. The smaller utility’s power lines had not sparked any significant wildfires since then.
In Northern California, gas stations closed. Convenience stores sold out of batteries and ice. Residents brushed their teeth by flashlights and cellphone screens. Tourists with out-of-state license plates wandered through the empty streets of Calistoga—a tony hot springs town in Sonoma County—in search of a cup of coffee. With traffic signals out, the police propped up temporary stop signs. Local school districts canceled classes, and children, enjoying the rare day off, pedaled their bikes in the hushed streets.
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ON THE EVENING OF Wednesday, November 7, PG&E was considering cutting electricity off again, this time to parts of eight counties. Paradise Town Manager Lauren Gill sent out an email update to the Town Council and staff. The chance of deactivation in Paradise was 35 percent, Gill wrote at 3:29 p.m. If PG&E chose to cut electricity to the town, she added, it would happen between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. the next morning.
“PG&E will have 6-8 helicopters and 135 personnel inspecting the lines to get the power back on as soon as possible,” she continued. “Although this is not our emergency and we are not in charge of it, this may be the new normal. All residents of California need to be prepared for these planned outages. We have windy days every year—it is actually more dangerous when power lines are charged. Let’s hope that these outages save lives and property.”
PG&E managers had been hesitant to order this outage. Each mile that was deactivated would have to be carefully inspected before electricity could start flowing again. With more than 3,100 miles of lines—equivalent to the distance between San Francisco and Boston—this would take time, and PG&E knew there would be pushback. More than seventy thousand customers stood to be impacted—though the actual number of people affected was far higher. A single “customer” could be a household of four people, an office building, or an entire mobile home park. No electricity meant freezers of spoiled food and run-down cellphone batteries. Vital medical equipment, like oxygen and dialysis machines, wouldn’t work.
Already, residents were emailing the Butte County Board of Supervisors to complain. At 7:18 p.m., one of these notes landed in Supervisor Doug Teeter’s inbox. Teeter lived with his wife and two young daughters on Rockford Lane in Paradise. His grandfather had built the house by hand and named the street after his hometown in North Dakota. Teeter, who had switched to the Republican Party in recent years, represented Paradise and the unincorporated village of Magalia. He was a man of principle—though the gas station up the street was closer, he preferred the one just outside town, driving the extra two miles so the sales tax would go to the county. He had no control over the shutoffs, but his constituents liked to grouse. “We have just been informed by PG&E that power to our community may be turned off potentially for several days,” the email read. “I believe it is counterproductive and punitive to residents of the affected areas. PG&E has been providing power for decades and has only now engaged in this ridiculous policy!!”
PG&E had plans to avoid such outages in the future by increasing surveillance of its grid, with a goal of adding another thirteen hundred weather stations and six hundred high-definition cameras by 2022, but those measures weren’t in place yet. On Tuesday, November 6, the utility had activated its new Wildfire Safety Operations Center in San Francisco, which had only just opened eight months before. Its meteorology team was working twenty-four hours a day, monitoring wind speeds, measuring humidity levels, and calculating fuel moisture to determine how quickly a wildfire might move. Workers on the ground in Butte County were assigned to keep an eye on the lines. Some of them were positioned near Camp Creek Road, one mile from the neighboring town of Pulga. A woman from the Bay Area had bought the ghost town—named after the Spanish word for “flea”—for $499,000 in 2015 and dubbed it Ladytown. Her 64 acres were a few miles down the highway from Station 36 in Jarbo Gap.
The fifty-six-mile Caribou-Palermo Line delivered power from Poe Dam, a popular kayaking spot. The dam was part of a chain of seven hydroelectric powerhouses that plugged the Feather River. Known as the Stairway of Power, they were a technological wonder, churning out enough clean electricity to power San Francisco. The transmission towers that connected them, snaking past Pulga along the Feather River Canyon, were so old they had been considered for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. The average tower near Jarbo Gap was sixty-eight years old. The oldest was 108. Workers struggled to maintain them without injuring themselves. In October 2016, a contractor painting a tower had grasped a piece of cross bracing to shift positions. The metal snapped.
PG&E management knew the towers were at risk of collapse, but they assumed any damage would occur during a wet winter storm—they hadn’t factored in what would happen if those storms arrived late. In December 2012, a rainstorm had pummeled the Caribou-Palermo Line and knocked down five steel towers, an event the utility termed a “catastrophic failure.” The next year, PG&E replaced them—along with one additional tower that had been damaged—with fifteen temporary wooden poles. Workers didn’t swap them out for permanent steel poles until 2016—four years after they’d fallen.
One of the oldest pieces of infrastructure was Tower 27/222. Captain McKenzie drove past the tower, visible from Highway 70, every week on his way to Station 36. It had been designed in 1917 and put into service on May 6, 1921, shortly after World War I ended. At the time, Warren G. Harding was the country’s twenty-ninth president, and the first Miss America Pageant was being held in Atlantic City. As crews finished its construction, Prohibition had just taken effect and women had recently gained the right to vote.
Between November 6 and November 7, PG&E posted fifteen tweets warning of an impending shutoff. These outages didn’t include powerful transmission lines like the Caribou-Palermo—only local distribution lines. The company also sent email and text message notifications to customers. At 6:13 p.m. on November 7, Gill dispatched a final email to her colleagues: “We will all know tomorrow morning. The Town is ready.”
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FOR DAYS, TRAVIS WRIGHT had been bombarded with text notifications from PG&E. Now his phone was quiet. No new updates. His wife, Carole, had left for work, pausing to snap a photo of the morning sky for its eerie beauty. Travis headed outdoors to clean up the yard. He paid attention to every Red Flag Warning. Danger had struck in the foothills before—it was the price of living in the forest. At fifty-three, he tried to be responsible. And by this point, he knew how to prepare for the possibility of fire.
Travis cleared out the pine needles spilling from the gutters and dragged sprinklers in a semicircle around his backyard.
He returned to the front, where ornamental grass whispered by the front door. He headed inside to round up their possessions. The 14-by-17 wedding portrait in the living room went into the back of his Subaru Crosstrek first. He added rifles, computers, hard drives, photo albums, and emergency cash, then a bright yellow folder of important documents—Social Security cards, passports, birth certificates—and, finally, a stack of jeans from his wife’s dresser drawer.
His work boots crunched on the gravel. He squirted a garden hose at the roof. Across the street, he saw his close friends and neighbors Paul and Suzie Ernest swing open the front door of their house. Paul often wandered over to chat in the afternoons, barefoot and bare-chested, swigging from a bottle of pale ale from the local brewery. Travis watched them climb into Paul’s old blue truck. He waved hello, then continued working.
Their homes were clustered along a narrow ridge near the southern edge of Paradise, where pavement turned to gravel before dead-ending into wilderness. One of his neighbors had bought a tractor to grade and maintain the road. Everyone chipped in some cash to help. Most people in town didn’t even know that Edgewood Lane existed, but it reminded Carole of her longtime family home. Her relatives had bought a 40-acre property in Paradise with a few gold bars in the early 1900s. The land had since been parceled off and sold to developers, but she treasured her memories of her childhood visits. It was her tales of soaring ponderosa pines and the sweet taste of wild blackberries that had convinced Travis to relocate to Butte County.
Born in Southern California, he had spent much of his childhood with his grandparents in Bakersfield before moving to Napa to attend high school. He met Carole there, in the school gymnasium. Their first date was after church. They shared homemade manicotti that his mother had prepared. After their graduation, Travis proposed with a rectangular Seiko wristwatch. He couldn’t afford a diamond ring. The proposal was nothing special—they were sitting in the front seat of his Toyota Celica—but he felt it was the right thing to do. He was twenty; she was nineteen. Carole always said “almost twenty” when she recounted the story, because it sounded better. Looking back, Travis realized how young they had been. Maybe they were wise beyond their years or maybe they were just stupid, they liked to joke.
They moved to Pasadena, where Carole trained as a dental hygienist and Travis studied radiology. He liked seeing the proof of a patient’s pain materialize on the X-ray screen, the small crack in a bone crystallizing to black. It was a small way he could help others. They had a son, Jefferson, who slept in the home office of their historic bungalow. They considered having a second child, but there wasn’t enough space or time. Travis read his son books, played Legos and Pokémon with him, and taught him to ride his tricycle on city sidewalks. He didn’t mind staying up past midnight with the boy when he was sick. He included him in everything. Jefferson grew, and so did Pasadena. The Town Council voted to knock down the historic homes on Colorado Boulevard for condominiums, and parking meters sprang up along the streets. Traffic snarled. Their family’s story of coming to Paradise was like so many others in that way. It was safer and more affordable to raise a child in the foothills.
Travis had agreed to check out the mountain town on the condition that they not live on a gravel road pitted with potholes. But he fell in love with Edgewood Lane, ruts and all. That was the charm of Paradise. After a failed bid to purchase a historic home that everyone called the Dr. Mac house, for the prominent local doctor who had built it, he and Carole designed a Craftsman-style home for themselves. Rabbits and deer nibbled at their garden, and invasive brush crept up to their patio. Travis struggled to keep it at bay, plowing two hundred feet of defensible space. In 2008, when the Humboldt Fire nearly engulfed the town, fire officials had parked an engine on the lawn, preparing to save his home if the flames crept closer. The structure was built with fire-resistant materials and ringed with cleared land, while the neighboring lots were too overgrown to safely accommodate an engine. The officials assured Travis that had a fire encroached, his house would have survived.
Travis was proud to hear it. He had spent a lot of time doing yardwork since retiring from his job at Feather River hospital. He had taken CAT scans and X-rays until recently, when rheumatoid arthritis made his hands swell and ache, causing him to drop expensive film and struggle to lift patients from their gurneys and wheelchairs. Retirement was a tough transition, but Travis soon realized that he enjoyed the solitude. He spent many afternoons at the antiques shops on the Skyway. The closets in his home overflowed with purchases, which sometimes frustrated Carole, though she was mostly just happy that he had found something to do with his free time. On weekends, Travis rode his four-wheeler along the Ridge’s lava-capped trails with Paul, his neighbor. They had recently discovered some caves and dilapidated gold mines. They snacked on tomatoes from Paul’s garden, warm from the afternoon sun.
On this Thursday morning, Travis shuffled through pine needles a foot deep, as dense as snowdrifts. They sucked at his leather boots and crowded the crannies of his home. The wind was relentless. His cellphone pinged with an alert. He ignored it and continued working.
THE FIRE: THE CARIBOU-PALERMO LINE
The wind slammed against the Harding-era transmission tower, ripping a heavy electrical line from its brittle iron hook. It was 6:15 a.m. The 143-pound, 115-kilovolt braided aluminum wire—known as a jumper cable—fell through the air. A piece of the rusted hook fell with it. The energized line produced a huge bolt of electricity, reaching temperatures up to 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit and zapping the steel tower like lightning as it charred the pillar black. Droplets of molten metal sprayed into the dry grass.
That’s all it took. Where the hot metal droplets landed, fire ignited. The wind stoked the flames, which glittered in the darkness. For ten minutes, or maybe fifteen, the fire feasted. Tiny flames licked along tiny stalks and burrowed into vegetation beaten back by herbicides. Wisps of white smoke filled the air, eddying in swirls and curlicues, as delicate as milk dissipating in coffee, before disappearing. The fire glowered. Near the fringes of the cleared land, dead timber was stacked several feet high. Manzanita, pine saplings, and grass bunched around the dead logs. The fire blasted toward the tangled and overgrown brush.
The flames stretched higher, grasping for oxygen, then hunched and bent horizontally with the wind, pushing southwest. The heat broiled the flat volcanic benches ahead, where national forestland touched private logging fields. The fire didn’t care about man-made divisions. It was ravenous. The smoke thickened, impossible to ignore. As the hot air rose, cooler air rushed in to take its place, pushing the flames up the slope. The canyon lay in the distance—a ready racetrack. There was nothing, and nobody, ahead to halt the fire’s advance.
KONKOW LEGEND
As the days and nights interchanged in the countless moons of the past, the Konkows and all the other people on the face of the earth became very wicked and bad, until one day the spirit of Wahnonopem, borne upon the beams of the rising sun, came through the pines and appeared unto some very wise old men, and said to them: “My children, whom I have made out of my breath, shall not bow down and worship the mountains, the waters, the rocks, or the trees, or anything which I have made upon the earth, or in the waters, or in all the skies; but go to all my people and say that they shall bow down to me, and me alone; and all who do not believe in and worship me shall be devoured by the wild beasts and the demon birds of the forests, or destroyed by the great fire, Sahm.”
This the Great Spirit said to the teachers of our tribe, and then he passed away into Hepeningkoy, the blue land of the stars. But his words were not heard, and wickedness increased and went wild and rampant about the whole land, and Wahnonopem caused Yanekanumkala, the White Spirit, to appear in the flesh unto the people, that he might enlighten and turn them from their evil ways. This good man began his teachings and for many years he lived among our people, teaching the young men and the maidens many lessons of love
and wisdom, many songs and games and gentle pastimes; and all these years they loved him more and more. But he died, and the lessons were forgotten. The songs died away in the forests, and in their stead came the war whoop, the shrieks of struggling women, and the groans of the wounded and the dying; and the name of Yanekanumkala became a jibe and a mockery all over the land.
As time went on, the Great Spirit sent two more good men, white spirits from the Yudicna, the unreachable frozen regions at the end of the earth, to explain once more the teachings of wisdom and of love, and the worship of Wahnonopem; and to show them that they came from the Great Spirit. He made the streams issue forth from solid rock, the mountains dissolve into lakes and the waters of the sea. They healed the sick and gave back the spirit of life to the dead, who, as they quickened into life again, bowed down for a time before the Great Spirit and worshiped him. But these good men accomplished no lasting good. Wickedness went about roaring as fiercely as before; and they passed away, carried by the wind to their homes in the frozen seas, amid the floating ice mountains, and the golden auroras of the far-off Yudicna.
Wahnonopem, after the good men had departed, became wrathful against his children and sent a great drought upon the land. The gentle rain fell no more upon the earth, and it baked and cracked and yielded no more food. The sweet summer grasses and the white clover shrank away and became as wisps; the pine tree bore no more of its nutty cone; the brown balls of the buckeye and the red grape of the manzanita were nowhere to be found; and the flesh of the roebuck, the black bear, and the wild game in the woods was a frothy poison. The people worked hard digging for the socomme, the sweet roots of the swamps, which had become as rocks, and when found they were molded away or wasted into strings. Suffering and hunger were all over the land, and the old men, the young men, the women and the maidens cried in their anguish for the Black Spirit of Death to come to their relief.
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