Paradise

by Lizzie Johnson

  In the Sheriff’s Office, there were five people who were trained to send emergency messages using CodeRed. Of them, only one person—an information systems analyst—had shown up for work. The rest were out of town or tending to their families. The analyst now struggled to field all the incoming phone calls, with two people—a Cal Fire dispatcher at the ECC and the sergeant in Yankee Hill—calling in with identical requests, including this one for Pentz Road.

  The CodeRed system was owned by the California-based software company OnSolve, which maintained twelve data centers around the world and billed itself as the “Nation’s #1 Public Safety Alerting Solution.” In Massachusetts, the Newton Police Department had used CodeRed to alert residents of the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013; in Florida, Sarasota County had relied on the system during Hurricane Irma in 2017. The platform was capable of sending a single message to hundreds of thousands of phone numbers and email addresses every minute. It worked well—as long as people had the foresight to sign up. As of early 2018, only 11 percent of Butte County’s population had registered, but dispatchers knew that word spread quickly in small communities, and even reaching those people could save many lives.

  At 7:57 a.m., the analyst keyed Messina’s first evacuation order for Pentz Road into CodeRed. He thought about how to communicate the emergency in ninety characters or less, then typed: “Due to a fire in the area, an evacuation order has been issued for all of Pentz Road in Paradise East to Highway 70.” In the hubbub, he never received the order to evacuate Concow. It was buried under other requests. A CodeRed alert wouldn’t be sent to that community for another two hours. Aside from firefighters pounding on front doors, residents received no warning. After pressing Send on the Pentz Road order, he dispatched an Amber alert–style message through a system run by FEMA. Called the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, or IPAWS, it was capable of reaching every cellphone in a geographic area regardless of whether the user had signed up, making it even more effective than CodeRed. However, Butte County had never tested the system. Unbeknownst to the analyst, a system error prevented the alert from sending.

  Paradise Police dispatcher Carol Ladrini hadn’t received the order for Pentz Road when she answered a call from a woman in the evacuation zone. “Um, are we supposed to be evacuated, or what?” the woman asked.

  “No, you’ll be notified. There’s a fire north of Concow up off of Highway 70. No danger to Paradise, okay?”

  “Well, it said evacuation west side of Pentz Road.”

  “What says that?” Ladrini said, flustered.

  “Butte, um, Fire.”

  “Okay, we haven’t been advised of that.”

  * * *

  —

  AT CHICO MUNICIPAL AIRPORT, it was calm. Not a breath of air whooshed over the two-lane runway as David Kelly, forty-two, took off at 7:48 a.m. One thousand feet, then two thousand feet, then three thousand feet between his aircraft and the earth. The Cal Fire contract pilot hit a patch of turbulence so jarring it rattled his teeth, the 30,000-pound tanker jolting like it was in the spin cycle of a washing machine. The wings convulsed as if they were going to snap off. Kelly climbed until he hit a smooth patch of air at five thousand feet. He steered east toward the foothills.

  More than a thousand gallons of bubblegum-pink fire retardant were stowed in the hull of his Grumman S-2 Tracker. The propeller plane had been designed to hunt Soviet submarines during the Cold War but had been gutted and repurposed. Cal Fire operated twenty-three of these air tankers. They were used for dumping a chemical gel—made of a salt compound, water, coloring, and a thickening agent made of clay or gum—atop anything combustible, slowing a wildfire’s burn by lowering the temperature and reducing flammability. The retardant, also called “slurry,” was stored in the Grumman’s old bomb bay. Kelly had been flying aircraft like this for more than twenty years. His father had flown air tankers for the Forest Service for decades, but Kelly hadn’t followed in his footsteps until taking a break from college. He got a gig pumping gas at the local airport one winter and began chatting with the aviation folks. He was immediately hooked—and never returned for his music education degree.

  With fifty fixed-wing and rotary-wing planes, Cal Fire had the largest fleet of firefighting aircraft in the world. They were housed at thirteen air bases and nine helicopter bases across the state. Tankers, like the Grummans, were the most effective at containing a wildfire early. Pilots in them could navigate steep and rocky areas before ground forces gained access, helping douse flames within the first two hours of ignition. The Grumman was svelte and fast, able to operate with precision in terrain that larger aircraft couldn’t navigate. Kelly’s air tanker had two red stripes and the identification number 93 painted on the tail, as well as red stripes on each wing.

  Kelly loved the uncertainty of his job; he enjoyed weighing the probabilities and unknowns and working out a solution. A wildfire was a giant puzzle. His favorite days were when he knocked down a blaze within a half hour of ignition, allowing firefighters on the ground to extinguish it before anyone ever learned its name. But as he careened toward the mouth of the Feather River Canyon, it didn’t seem as if it was going to be that kind of day. The fire was already at 1,000 acres and roaring. He circled over Flea Mountain, where he could see a radio repeater topped by a towering antenna. The Sheriff’s Office and ambulance crews relied on the repeater to communicate. Kelly knew it was about to burn—but the way the winds were blowing, he couldn’t hit his target with retardant without endangering himself.

  Better to protect lives and homes, he thought.

  Kelly abandoned the repeater and flew down the mountain’s northernmost flank, tracking toward the flaming front, where he might be more effective. As he began to descend, debating where to drop his retardant, the turbulence suddenly caused his Grumman to bottom out. For a moment, he lost control of the aircraft. He pulled on the throttle. Nothing happened. The downdraft sucked the plane toward the forest floor—only to reverse seconds later, when an updraft popped him back up. This happened twice in a few minutes. He climbed back to the safety of 5,000 feet to regroup.

  His airspeed hovered around 140 knots, standard for circling. His ground speed, on the other hand, registered at 210 knots. Kelly did a quick mental calculation. The wind was thrusting his tanker 70 knots faster than he wanted. To drop the retardant, he would need to flick his control levers to “flight idle” until he slowed to 125 knots, providing just enough fuel to keep the propellers spinning; then he could descend, dropping like a rock and releasing his cargo. The goal was to spray the pink slurry like rain, evenly coating a house or a clump of trees from above. But with an added tailwind, he couldn’t be effective. When the retardant fell toward the ground, it would shadow his target, coagulating on one side and leaving the other side bare. Even worse, it might just evaporate.

  In any case, the wind was pummeling him too hard from every side for this maneuver to work. His tanker’s small size and the variability of its weight made it dangerously vulnerable in these unpredictable gales. He couldn’t crawl any slower, to feel out safe pockets of air. If Kelly was stalled when he hit a downdraft, he would smash into the mountain.

  Still, he was determined. He would at least try to douse a neighborhood or an evacuation route near the wildfire’s edge. He banked to the right, toward Paradise, struggling against the wind. Houses spread downhill below him, barely visible through the curling black smoke. Square and humble, arranged in orderly rows, the town’s homes looked like Monopoly game pieces. With a sinking feeling, Kelly realized that the flames were already licking at them. The wildfire was now 2,000 to 3,000 acres in size. He pictured the people below—retired folks in their robes and slippers, still asleep or getting ready for the day. People were good at evacuating when a fire arrived in the afternoon, he knew, but it was barely 8 a.m.

  He lowered the flaps on his tanker’s wings and quieted the engine as he approached
the town, planning to descend so he could unleash the retardant. But instead of gliding downward, his tanker shot up 1,000 feet, cresting a massive updraft like an invisible ocean wave. Kelly could fight fire—but he couldn’t fight weather. It was over. He turned around, landing in Chico at 8:29 a.m. without having released a single drop of retardant. His air attack supervisor immediately grounded all fixed-wing aircraft until the winds subsided. Even so, desperate firefighters would continue to call for retardant drops for the next six hours.

  “You’re going to have significant structure-threat issues,” Kelly’s supervisor said over the radio at 8:01 a.m. “The fire is now in Paradise.”

  * * *

  —

  THE REPORT FROM air attack seemed inconceivable to the command post. Wildfires rarely traveled eight miles in just over an hour, or threatened such a large community. But it was true: The blaze had breached the town limits. Just after 8 a.m., Messina asked both Bowersox and the sergeant at Pines Yankee Hill Hardware to request a second round of CodeRed evacuations in another four zones in Paradise. The sergeant processed Messina’s request, calling the message in to the Sheriff’s Office. In Oroville, however, Bowersox hesitated. They think they’re going to stop this fire, but they can’t, she thought. On the radio, she could hear firefighters debating how to put out the flames.

  What neither she nor the firefighters knew yet was that nine people in Concow had already been charred to death. Dozens more had been trapped in a plowed field—or submerged themselves in the cold reservoir—as flames rose around them. On Pentz Road, in Paradise, Lawrie’s home was about to ignite. Bowersox couldn’t see the carnage from her post at the ECC, but she did have a dawning sense of just how sweeping the devastation was becoming. They aren’t seeing this for what it is, she thought. She agonized over Messina’s request to evacuate only four more zones. Bowersox’s own bungalow was in Zone 8, on a cul-de-sac near Pentz Road. She lived across the street from a seventy-five-year-old widow named Sara Magnuson. When Bowersox had moved in a few years earlier, Sara had left a bag of apples on her doorstep. For Christmas, she brought Hershey’s Kisses. The elderly woman suffered from dementia and lived alone.

  Bowersox had overheard enough 911 calls to realize that all fourteen zones in Paradise were being threatened by fire—not just the additional four that Messina wanted to evacuate. The air report from Kelly had been the final confirmation. Her head felt woolen. She needed to do something. The answer came in a flash. Get them out, she thought. Just get them all out.

  As someone who had grown up in a household of firefighters, Bowersox was acutely aware that it wasn’t her place to adjust evacuation orders. She was lower-ranking—and she hadn’t run the idea past the captain on duty in the ECC or received approval from the command post. She knew she stood to suffer the consequences if something went awry: a pay cut, a suspension, or worse. But time was of the essence. The evacuation might save the lives of people like Sara. For the first time in her almost-fourteen-year career, Bowersox flouted orders.

  She turned to a colleague in a nearby pod.

  “Tell the Sheriff’s Office to evacuate all of Paradise,” Bowersox said.

  “That’s not what Messina said,” the dispatcher replied, confused.

  “I don’t care. Who’s it going to hurt? Do it.”

  Bowersox listened as her colleague called the law enforcement office and requested that Paradise be emptied. Then Bowersox ran to her car and drove the eighteen miles to Drendel Circle, in Paradise, so she could evacuate her own bungalow. She caged her three rescue cats, Gus, Bailey, and Peter, and collected some paperwork. She saw no sign of Sara.

  * * *

  —

  AT PINES YANKEE HILL Hardware, incident commander Messina called a fellow division chief in the ECC to inquire about extra help. They needed more fire engines. Lawrie stood by Messina’s side, still trying to reach his family. He hadn’t heard from Tessa in more than an hour. Before Messina could ask his question, his colleague on the line spoke first: “We have fire in Paradise, and we have fire in Concow. I want to order one hundred strike teams of fire engines.”

  Messina paused.

  A single strike team was made of five engines led by an SUV. Their unit would be requesting a total of five hundred engines—a state record for the number of resources ordered within the first hour of a wildfire.

  Does Messina think I’m nuts? the division chief thought.

  “That’s completely accurate,” Messina replied. “Let’s go with it.”

  The division chief hung up, then turned to his phone once again, scrolling through his contacts. He clicked on the name of Cal Fire unit chief Darren Read. Read, forty-nine, oversaw every firefighter, every fire engine, every fire station in Butte County. He was formidable—in both experience and physique. He had worked as a firefighter for thirty-one years, across five different units, and had also trained as a peace officer. In a photo taken with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Read made even the Terminator look tiny. He towered a whole head above Paradise Fire chief David Hawks, who many anticipated would take his job someday. Read was away for the day, attending a meeting of the Cal Fire Northern Region Leadership Team in Marin County, three hours south of Butte County and just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Every Cal Fire unit chief—the “boss” of each North State county—had gathered at Skywalker Ranch to bid farewell to Cal Fire director Ken Pimlott, who was soon to retire. A group photo of all the leaders—navy uniforms, gold bugles pinned on collars, smiles—was planned for the end of the day.

  Now, a few minutes before the meeting was set to begin, Read picked up the phone. “If you stick around for that picture,” the division chief told him, “you won’t have a goddamn unit left by the time you get back here.” Read raced to his car and headed for Oroville. Within a few minutes, the meeting would be canceled. Director Pimlott would leave to help open the state’s Emergency Operations Center in Sacramento. The Cal Fire chiefs would delay for only a few minutes, snapping a quick photo together in front of a historic covered bridge before scattering to their posts. Only the tallest among their ranks was missing from the picture.

  * * *

  —

  MESSINA GAZED ACROSS the parking lot at his colleagues. Their slack faces betrayed a sense of anxiety and discouragement that he was starting to feel too. For the past hour, he had tried to remain poised as every plan fell apart. At 8:49 a.m., with no options left, he had asked the sergeant to call for a final townwide evacuation in Paradise. This confused the county analyst, who had already dispatched an alert based on Bowersox’s request. (Messina wouldn’t realize she had defied his authority until four days later.)

  The Camp Fire roared through the foothills and gullies, unstoppable, turning the sky a livid purple. As soon as Messina drew a new containment border on his whiteboard, he had to erase it and redefine the boundaries. What he could really use, to be honest, was a piece of goddamn Scotch tape so the wind would stop snatching the papers from his tailgate. He grabbed a rock the size of a soup can and anchored his map. It held down the chaos for a bit, but he knew even it wouldn’t hold. Messina rubbed the stone with his hand, turning to speak to Lawrie. “If you need to take care of your family, then go.”

  Lawrie’s home had been in the first evacuation zone. Neither man realized that it had likely already burned down. “Where am I going to go?” Lawrie said, shrugging, trying to hold it together. “I don’t know where my family is. The best thing I can do is stay here. This is my job. I have to stay.”

  “Are you sure?” Messina asked.

  “Yes.”

  The Paradise Police sergeant had not made it to the command post at Yankee Hill. The Highway 70 corridor had become too treacherous. With a sinking feeling, Messina realized that he and his colleagues could soon be stranded themselves, their communication cut off. After nearly three decades in the fire service, he had seen plen
ty of wildfires—and the toll from this one, he knew, was going to be record-breaking. The horizon roiled darker with every passing minute.

  At 9:30 a.m., he directed his colleagues into a line of white trucks, SUVs, and sheriff’s squad cars. They would take Highway 70 toward Oroville, where the 928-acre campus of Butte Community College would provide plenty of space to set up a new command post. The Incident Command Team could meet them there and take over. But as the cars headed down the highway, they were immediately caught in the crush of residents evacuating from communities near Plumas National Forest, part of Messina’s first evacuation order. The two-lane highway was swollen with gridlock traffic.

  The brains of the firefighting operation were trapped. Messina considered snipping a nearby farm’s barbed-wire fence and driving through the harvested hayfields. Instead, he jerked onto the highway shoulder and into the ditch, his wheels ripping through the palomino grass. The sheriff’s deputies flicked on their sirens and followed. Over the radio, Messina heard the air attack supervisor announce that the Camp Fire had progressed halfway through Paradise. The town was now threatened by fire on three sides. Embers rained down on Butte Creek Canyon and Magalia.