THE FIRE: DESCENDING INTO CONCOW
How easily this parched land burned, incinerating with a soft crackle that deepened to a howl. The wildfire lapped Flea Valley Creek and climbed upward. Embers hurtled one to two miles ahead of the flaming front, carried on the wind. Every second, flames raced a distance greater than a football field. Every eight minutes, a swath of land the size of Central Park—or downtown Chicago or the country of Monaco—burned. The fire overtook every living being. Flame darted from brush and vine into the canopy of old-growth timber, where it burned brighter and hotter. Its hunger was endless, but there was plenty of fuel. The flaming head of the wind-driven fire sprinted faster than its flanks, carving a trail like a shooting star.
Pine needles baked in place on their branches, seemingly frozen in time. At 212 degrees Fahrenheit, the water and sap stored in tree trunks began to boil. The trees sweated until—their cell walls bursting—they combusted. The pine forest had settled into dormancy for the winter and awoke just in time to die. Leaf and limb turned to carbon in seconds. Dead timber and rotten stumps smoldered. Their shriveled roots carried fire laterally along the oxygen-rich subsurface, threatening to ignite vegetation up to forty feet away.
As the wildfire crested the ridgeline above Concow, it slowed and trundled downhill. But not for long—the Jarbo Winds were spilling over the Sierra Nevada, juddering from high to low pressure. The descending air stoked the flames, forcing them faster down the incline. The smoke column, which had been building upward in place, sheared with the wind. It coated the ground in a white miasma that caramelized to yellow, then russet and gray. In places, temperatures exceeded more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. A single breath could blister lungs. The minerals in the volcanic soil—iron, lime, and silica—melted and hardened to slivers.
The smoke heaved, churning with ash as it punched through the lower levels of the atmosphere, now visible to two satellites that floated twenty-two thousand miles above the earth.
CHAPTER 4
CODE RED
At Station 36 in Jarbo Gap, the crock pot hissed, releasing a thin waft of steam. The smell of corned beef hung in the air. Captain McKenzie diced the last of the red potatoes and dumped them into a bowl of water so they wouldn’t turn brown. His higher rank meant that he didn’t have to cook breakfast for the other firefighters, but he enjoyed it. He took pride in his reputation as one of the best station chefs in Butte County.
The ceiling lights remained off, and a television brightened the kitchen. The local news channel was playing clips from Southern California, where a gunman in Thousand Oaks had shot up a Western-style bar popular among college students. At least a dozen people had died, the newscaster announced, in the deadliest shooting for California that year. The screen flashed to a reporter in a rumpled suit, interviewing a young man who had been inside the bar. “That’s what’s really blowing my mind,” the student said, shaking his head in disbelief. “It’s a really safe area.” The program flipped to a commercial. McKenzie ground coffee beans and spooned the granules of French roast into a paper filter. Less was needed these days: The seasonal employees at Station 36 had recently left their posts. Their departure marked another end to fire season.
The crew normally woke up by 6:15 a.m., lining up barefoot to shower, then tucking their navy T-shirts into their navy cargo pants and lacing up their leather work boots. Breakfast was at 7 a.m. sharp. But it was November, and the men of Station 36 moved more slowly now, savoring the calm after a ruthless fire season that had killed six wildland firefighters. Only an afternoon training hike was on the schedule. McKenzie could see the barracks from the kitchen window, his own movements distorted in the glass. The building was still dark. He chopped bell peppers and a yellow onion. The news program returned to the Thousand Oaks shooting. At 6:29 a.m., his phone blinked with a notification from Cal Fire’s Emergency Command Center, or ECC, in Oroville. A worker at Poe Dam had called dispatch to report a vegetation fire under the transmission lines off Highway 70, possibly in the Camp Creek Road area. Jarbo Gap was the closest fire station.
“Bullshit,” McKenzie said, setting down the knife.
He didn’t smell smoke—it had to be a false alarm. He walked across the kitchen and flung open the back door. The wind ripped the knob from his grip, slamming the door against the metal porch railing. The air was crisp, no trace of ash. The ponderosa pines moaned in the wind.
When a wildfire was reported, the ECC played emergency tones over its radio frequency, making sure to catch the attention of first responders who might be exercising, sleeping, or otherwise distracted. In the barracks, the firefighters awoke to a high-pitched shrieking that lasted ten to fifteen seconds. McKenzie saw the lights in the building flick on. He jogged to his bedroom, shedding his sandals and athletic shorts for a fire-resistant suit.
He headed quickly to the garage and climbed up into Engine 2161. Sweaty gear was piled in the backseat. McKenzie registered the stink with annoyance. A new recruit slid into the passenger seat, and a veteran with twelve seasons of firefighting experience crawled into the back. Their seatbelts clicked. McKenzie started the engine with a rumble, a bobble-head Yoda bowing atop its radio mount. “Everybody in?” he said. His passengers nodded. At 6:35 a.m., McKenzie steered down the driveway and hooked right onto Highway 70, his headlights sweeping across the empty parking lot at Scooters Café and reflecting off the fog lines. A second engine with another three firefighters followed, its dashboard sporting a rubber duck.
“I didn’t smell anything. Did you?” asked the older firefighter.
“No,” McKenzie said. “Nothing.”
The next six minutes were silent.
Highway 70 paralleled the Feather River Canyon as it wound through the foothills. The new firefighter flipped through a book of maps, trying to match the latitude and longitude on the dispatch with local landmarks. He held a flashlight to illuminate the pages, swaying with each curve of the road.
Wildfires were reliant on heat, oxygen, and fuel—a combination known as the “ignition triangle”—for sustained combustion. When the three factors aligned, flames grew in size. When a variable was removed, as with damp grass, a sealed room, or mineral soil, flames starved and sputtered out. Fire was a science; it obeyed the laws of physics and could therefore be studied. But like the weather, it couldn’t always be predicted. A good firefighter relied on experience and deep knowledge of fire behavior—and also gut instinct.
McKenzie careened around another bend in the highway, passing the sign for Plumas National Forest, its letters inscribed in looping yellow cursive. Near the town of Pulga, the hummocks dropped to reveal PG&E’s Caribou-Palermo Line crisscrossing the valley. The system was a feat of engineering, some of its towers drilled into granite rock outcroppings, others situated atop steep drainages. Had McKenzie been closer, he might have seen the line break near Tower 27/222, the snapped cable flapping in the wind. The hook had fallen forty-seven feet to the ground. But from a distance, he couldn’t at first make out the reason for the emergency dispatch.
“Oh, shit,” McKenzie heard from the backseat. “I see the fire.”
Flames rippled atop the canyon wall. They were short and squat, indicating a low-intensity burn, and they were billowing white smoke. McKenzie knew the blaze wouldn’t stay small for long. It seemed to be creeping toward Flea Valley Creek, where the air would eddy before funneling up the sheer draw and blasting over the mountains, coaxed along by the Jarbo Winds. He still couldn’t tell where, exactly, the fire had sparked.
Fourteen minutes had passed since he received the alert. He continued northeast.
At 6:43 a.m., he parked on Pulga Bridge, upriver from Poe Dam. Suspended by a web of steel girders, the bridge sat high above the Union Pacific Railroad tracks, which snaked below, following the gentle curve of the Feather River until they crossed the canyon on their own three-span bridge. The two bridges appeared to be stacked one atop the
other, extending over the same water at different angles, the pine-speckled gorge slanting upward on either side. The view was striking, an iconic landscape that graced postcards, calendars, and coffee mugs—but it did not register with McKenzie. He rolled down his window and peered west. The tops of the mountains, 3,000 to 5,000 feet high, were soft with orange light. Through the smoke he made out a single transmission tower rising out of a singed hole in the canopy. The tower’s proximity to the flames made McKenzie wonder if it had caused the wildfire.
The second engine shuddered to a stop behind him. The flames appeared much closer now, lighting up Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, and incense cedar like birthday candles and clawing through the manzanita. Embers winged westward on the wind. It looked like the wildfire was 10 acres in size, maybe more, as it blasted along the boulder-strewn slope toward Pulga. The town, which a geologist had built in 1904 as a base for railroad workers, had emptied out after the heyday of gold mining and steam passenger trains diminished. When Betsy Ann Cowley bought Pulga, in March 2015, she and her friends became the only residents, though she hoped to turn her “Ladytown” into an events space.
Camp Creek Road, a rugged dirt track named after a nearby stream, heaved across the southwestern corner of her property. PG&E workers known as linemen used the route to access and check on the utility’s grid, including the Caribou-Palermo Line. The day before, a right-of-way consultant working for PG&E had sent Cowley an email alerting her that the company would be completing maintenance on one of its electrical circuits that week. The work involved a swarm of ground vehicles and the maddening clap of helicopters. On a cruise in the Dominican Republic, Cowley didn’t respond.
McKenzie knew that the only way to reach the fire burning near Pulga was to wend up Camp Creek Road. His crew could try to chase the wildfire on foot, lugging hoses connected to their engines and spraying water at the flames—but it would be a death wish. The dirt track was so treacherous that the blaze would no doubt barbecue them first. The previous autumn, McKenzie had driven the road to try to reach a smoldering pine that had been struck by lightning. But the track hugged the cliffside so tightly that he had nearly scraped the engine’s side mirrors off. Firefighters had walked ahead of him, craning their necks to check for erosion under each tire lest he topple into the adjacent canyon. It took an hour to drive one mile before McKenzie was able to turn around, spooked by the risk.
There was nothing to do but radio for extra help. He studied the blaze as it scuttled along the escarpment and thought about how many fire engines he should request. Normally, for a new wildfire, he might ask for five. But watching the flames, he decided to request fifteen, along with four bulldozers, two water tenders, and some hand crews. He knew that the size of his request—nearly half of the unit’s thirty-nine engines—would strike fear in anyone listening to the scanner at that moment. He steadied his voice.
“Engine 2161 responding,” McKenzie said over the radio at 6:44 a.m. “Possible power lines down. We have eyes on the vegetation fire. It’s going to be very difficult to access because Camp Creek Road is nearly inaccessible. It’s on the west side of the river, underneath the transmission lines, with a sustained wind on it. This has the potential [to be a] major incident.”
The radio crackled and cut out.
* * *
—
SEVERAL MILES SOUTH of Pulga Bridge, Curtis Lawrie parked his Town of Paradise–issued Ford Expedition outside Scooters Café. A battalion chief for Cal Fire, Lawrie was on call that day, responsible for handling any major crises that popped up along Highway 70. He was one of many leaders in Cal Fire’s strict hierarchy. The agency oversaw units in thirty-five of California’s counties; Butte County’s was organized into several tiers, the better to oversee the twenty-three municipal fire stations and sixteen volunteer stations scattered across its seven regions. The unit was led by Chief Darren Read. Beneath him were division and battalion chiefs, then captains, engineers, full-time firefighters, and seasonal workers. As a captain, McKenzie supervised a single fire station; as a battalion chief, Lawrie oversaw several. Lawrie’s boss, John Messina, who served as a division chief, managed three or more battalions at once.
When a battalion chief went off duty, a peer filled in for him, which is what Lawrie was doing that morning. Jarbo Gap wasn’t his usual assignment—his home station was in Paradise. When Lawrie’s pager had beeped at 6:29 a.m. with an automated dispatch—the same ECC alert McKenzie had received—he was already awake. He kissed his wife, Tessa, goodbye, asking her to keep an eye on the local news as she got their children ready for school. Then he made the twenty-five-minute drive east to Jarbo Gap, the rolling foothills turning to arid mountains.
Wind thudded against his windshield. Lawrie looked up, taking in the DON’T TREAD ON ME sign nailed to the front of the restaurant, next to a painting of a skeleton lounging on a white sand beach smoking a joint. In one of the windows, the neon Budweiser sign had gone dark. Lawrie scanned the sky—still impossibly clear. He rubbed his temples, where his brown hair was graying, and slid out of the SUV. He was fifty but usually looked a decade younger, with a round, youthful face. But on this morning, his eyes looked tired, his face aged by shadows. He hadn’t slept much the past few nights, worried that PG&E was going to shut off power.
On Tuesday, Paradise Fire chief David Hawks, who was also a Cal Fire division chief, had forwarded Lawrie an email from a PG&E public safety specialist. The specialist warned that Butte County, of all the areas at risk of blackouts, stood to receive the strongest of the forecast winds. The email had nagged at Lawrie—and now it bothered him even more. He hadn’t gotten around to purchasing a backup generator for his home on Pentz Road. His daughter would be upset if the tropical fish in their heated 30-gallon tank died.
Lawrie was now the incident commander for this new wildfire, tasked with coordinating the efforts to contain it. Wildfires are named after the road or landmark nearest to their origin, and his colleagues at the ECC had already dubbed this one the Camp Fire. Dispatchers had considered designating the blaze the Seventy Fire, after Highway 70, or the Poe Fire, after Poe Dam, but those names had already been taken—and much like the National Hurricane Center, which retired the monikers of destructive storms, Cal Fire tried not to recycle names. Even so, the name Camp Fire had also been used once before, in 2008, for one of the twenty-seven fires that merged to form the Butte Lightning Complex. That Camp Fire had burned fifty homes to the ground.
Just over the ridge from Pulga was the unincorporated town of Concow. Lawrie knew he needed to get a handle on this new inferno, and fast. The Butte Lightning Complex had been devastating to Concow, and he didn’t want it to suffer another hit. The community’s population numbered 710—mostly retirees and those who preferred seclusion. The median household income was about $25,000. Mobile homes and travel trailers sat along the edges of Concow Reservoir, in the shadow of Flea Mountain. There was one elementary school with six teachers. No grocery stores, no medical facilities, no public transportation.
Lawrie’s radio crackled. It was an update from McKenzie. The captain reported that the Camp Fire was already thirty times bigger than when he and his crew had arrived on scene just half an hour earlier. “My best guess would be about two hundred to three hundred acres, possibly, with a rapid rate of spread,” said McKenzie. “It’s just above Pulga now. Heading in a direction toward Concow.”
* * *
—
MORE THAN TWENTY MILES to the southwest, the smoke column was already visible on the Lake Oroville Wildfire Camera, part of a statewide network of cameras used for fire surveillance. In Cal Fire’s Emergency Command Center, dispatchers monitored the footage on a row of televisions, which broadcast feeds from every fire camera in the county. The column had begun to lean west with the wind—this is why McKenzie hadn’t smelled it from his fire station in Jarbo Gap.
The ECC sat within the headquarters of Cal Fire’s Butte
County unit—known colloquially as BTU—which took up four and a half acres in Oroville, across the street from a Home Depot and a Dollar General. Dispatchers answered more than twenty thousand 911 calls annually and directed firefighters and equipment across the seven battalions. When an incident commander requested an evacuation, ECC dispatchers called his orders in to the Sheriff’s Office—unless, of course, a sergeant was already on scene to do it. Law enforcement officers then spread the message to evacuate using CodeRed, an emergency platform to which they, and some local city managers, had exclusive access. The Butte County Sheriff had already issued the first alert: “Due to a fire in the area, an evacuation order has been issued for the town of Pulga. If assistance is needed in evacuating, call 911.”
Beth Bowersox, thirty-three, was one of more than a half dozen ECC dispatchers on shift that morning. With straight, shoulder-length brown hair and a dimpled chin, Bowersox was tough and assertive, traits that came in handy as a woman in a male-dominated workplace. She wasn’t always as fast or as strong as the men she worked with, but she knew she made up for it by being smarter. She had gotten her start as a seasonal firefighter in Tehama County, northwest of Butte, defending homes and scraping firebreaks in the dirt during the state’s blistering summer months, before becoming a dispatcher. She had worked the overnight shift in the ECC and was the one to suggest “Camp Fire” as the name for the blaze—a name that would stick throughout all the chaos and disaster to follow. In the dispatch pods adjacent to hers, Bowersox could hear her colleagues fielding a growing volume of phone calls. As they spoke with residents who were reporting fire sightings, she communicated over the radio with firefighters in the field. That day, Bowersox would be Lawrie’s primary contact for receiving and passing on information.
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