As he pulled in to Oroville, Messina knew that no one had had a good read on the fire to begin with. They couldn’t fight it. The inferno was too big, too fast. His final command over the radio carried all the resignation of that knowledge. “I don’t want to see anybody laying hose or going after a spot fire,” he said. “There will be zero firefighting. Your only mission is to protect evacuation routes and the lives of civilians. Get people moving, now!”
CHAPTER 5
THE IRON MAIDEN
As Messina and his team were packing up to leave for Oroville, Paradise town manager Lauren Gill was rushing from her home to Town Hall. She grabbed her coffee, still steaming in its mug, and dashed out to the bright red Volvo in her garage. She was in a hurry to set up the local Emergency Operations Center. Similar to Cal Fire’s ECC, the EOC would serve as the town’s hub for emergency management. As its director, Gill was responsible for gathering intelligence and distributing information to Paradise residents. As she was backing out of the driveway, a neighbor waved her down.
“Did you see the smoke?” the woman asked.
“It’s in Pulga, far away,” Gill answered tersely. “I have to get to work.”
As Gill navigated toward the lower Skyway, slaloming through the labyrinth of residential streets, she realized she had forgotten her mascara on the countertop in her kitchen. She turned onto Elliott Road and sighed. She really could have used some mascara this morning, to make her tired eyes appear brighter.
Already the day hadn’t gone as she’d planned. Gill, sixty, had set her alarm for 6 a.m., leaving ample time to get ready for a Rotary Club board meeting at the Cozy Diner. But she had missed the alarm completely, oversleeping by more than an hour. The election earlier that week had worn her out. As she was powering up the coffee maker, she had glanced out the kitchen window. The sky above Butte Creek Canyon was golden, misted with smog, and didn’t look quite right. When Gill stepped onto her front porch to get a better view, a sharp, acrid note hit her nose. She ducked back inside to call Paradise fire chief David Hawks. He was off duty that morning and had just finished working out with a friend in Chico. As far as Hawks knew, the wildfire was still miles away, near Pulga. At 7:28 a.m., Gill sent a text message to the Town Council chat group: “Fire in Concow. Fire chief says it’s a long way from paradise. I’ll keep you posted. Only retweet or share info from cal fire.”
A few minutes later, she joined a brief conference call with several agencies in town, passing on those same details. By the time councilman Greg Bolin had texted the chat group back—“Are there evacuations in paradise yet?”—Gill was leaving for Town Hall. “Checking,” she replied. She didn’t know that Cal Fire had just requested the evacuation of Pentz Road. High above Paradise, contract pilot David Kelly was flying his air tanker over town for the first time. At 8 a.m., Gill’s phone pinged again, this time with a message from councilman Mike Zuccolillo, Rachelle’s ex-husband: “This was a text to me by friend on dean rd…. not verified. (Fwd:) Fire on dean rd. Apple view off of Pentz. Sawmill peak, 15 spot fires.” A second text followed from Bolin, whose family owned a local contracting business: “I just received a call from my business partners that there is brush burning at Mountain View off Stark. Could someone get that word out.”
Gill parked at Town Hall, then tapped out a reply: “Call fire or 911 with that.” She looked up, noting the assistant town manager’s Chevy truck and the clerk’s Honda CRV already in the lot. Ash was wafting from the sky, dusting their windshields in white. Gill hurried indoors. Normally, she dressed in elegant skirt-suit sets and spindly high heels that tick-tick-ticked down the hallway, announcing her arrival. But today, with no time to get ready, she had gone with black jeans and shiny leather loafers. Gill ducked her head into the clerk’s office and asked her to send an internal CodeRed alert to the town staff. The clerk nodded and turned to her computer. “The EOC is activated. Please report to Town Hall,” she typed into the system at 8:07 a.m.
Down the carpeted corridor, the EOC was coming together in the council chambers—just as staff had practiced in simulations. As Gill was speaking with the clerk, a few more employees had trickled in behind her. They were now taping maps to the walls, flipping through binders of evacuation plans, unloading plastic tubs of supplies. They scoured social media posts on their laptops, trying to distinguish between rumor and truth. The assistant manager had already posted an update to the town’s Facebook page: “Cal fire reports a fire in the concow area. Approx. 50 acres. We will update as we get more info.” Now the staff’s cellphones rang furiously as people called for more information.
Gill continued down the hallway and opened the door to her office, logging on to the computer and loading her email. She scrolled through the new messages. She was hearing that a blaze had sparked near Noble Orchards and Feather River hospital. Was it a separate fire?
Gill had come to know Paradise and its local landmarks well over the past few decades. She had moved to the town from Orange County in 1981 to be closer to her then husband’s family. His parents had retired to the Ridge because they loved the ponderosa pines and the hushed surroundings, and she—then twenty-three years old—had followed because she loved him. Paradise had incorporated two years earlier, and the town manager hired Gill as a secretary. It was a temporary role that involved answering phones and residents’ questions. As the new administrative clerk, Gill hadn’t even known what culverts and septic tanks were, because they didn’t have those in her hometown of Garden Grove, but she learned. She also began to understand the impact one could have in a small community, where local politicians actually made things happen.
After the demise of her marriage—which produced no children, though she had always longed for a family—Gill focused on her career. Her father had always told her, “If you work hard and you’re good at what you do, you will be rewarded for it.” It wasn’t her intention to stay in Paradise, and she might have enjoyed a different career path—teaching literature or working as a librarian, perhaps, because she loved books—but department heads continued to tap her for openings, and Gill jumped at the opportunities. By 2013, she had been appointed to the most powerful position in Town Hall. With a degree in public administration—which she had gone back to school for—and nearly three decades of experience working for the town, she was a natural choice to become Paradise’s first female chief executive officer. Gill knew the position wasn’t going to be a “fun” job. More than 20 percent of Town Hall’s workforce had been laid off during the economic recession, and the budget was shot. But she was glad to have a hardworking staff and backing from the council. She also had the support of her family: two sisters and a brother, who lived across town, and later her fiancé, Don, who had five grown children and twelve grandchildren, whom Gill adored and treated as her own.
Not everyone in Paradise felt as warmly about her. Slender and petite, with a reliably perfect pouf of blow-dried brown hair, Gill sang beautifully at the staff Christmas party every December and served as the president of the local Rotary Club. But some people found her cold and calculating, preoccupied with appearance and control. She cared a lot—maybe too much—about everything. A smattering of locals had taken to calling her the Iron Maiden. Whether or not constituents liked her, however, Gill couldn’t be recalled, because she was not an elected official. Unless the majority of the five-person Town Council voted to terminate her contract, the job was hers to keep. It was a lucrative gig, too. In 2017, Jody Jones, the sixty-two-year-old ceremonial mayor, earned less than $5,000. Gill, who guided the town with a firm hand, brought home nearly $180,000 in salary and benefits.
Gill wanted Paradise to be a good place to live. She was responsible for drafting the policy reports that councilmembers used for making decisions, making the case, for instance, for a half-cent sales tax or a new sewer system in the commercial district in order to attract new businesses.
In 2013, Gill had hired Marc Mattox as tow
n engineer. He was thirty-three but he looked even younger, with flyaway blond hair that he combed to the right. Laid-back but diligent, he had a civil engineering degree. He was always the first to volunteer to help out, whether by explaining a technical policy decision or refilling the paper towel dispenser in the men’s bathroom. Gill told him his job was to “green and black”—get money for road improvements and lay asphalt. Mattox cobbled together transportation grants meant to lessen car dependency and improve safety. The town would agree to install a bike lane or a sidewalk—even though few people used such things—just so the road could be repaved. Despite his efforts, Mattox never found funding to widen the town’s narrowest streets, like Roe Road. Gill promoted him to assistant town manager, then assistant EOC director. Gill hoped he might take her job when she retired. It was difficult to persuade educated candidates to move to a community as remote as Paradise, and the town’s staff had traditionally created succession hierarchies. Gill and Mattox were both hands-on people who didn’t like to be told what did or didn’t work. She liked this about him.
Gill, Mattox, and the rest of the Town Council were preoccupied with development and beautification, keeping residents happy. But they were also tasked with keeping them safe—and there was danger on every side. On hazard maps, the community was an island in a splotchy sea of colors marking past wildfires. Since 1999, thirteen monster blazes had barely missed the town limits. Until now, luck had always been on their side.
But fire was unpredictable, and in recent decades, Paradise leaders had watched as wildfires swept across California with an unprecedented ferocity. In 1991, the Oakland-Berkeley Hills Fire killed twenty-five people across the bay from San Francisco, hopping both a four-lane and an eight-lane freeway and leveling nearly thirty-five hundred homes. The tragedy showed just how vulnerable a community could be if it lacked clear evacuation routes.
The truth was, California had always burned—as much as 5.5 to 19 million acres annually in prehistoric times, or up to 19 percent of the state’s land. Flames were as typical of the changing seasons as rainstorms and blizzards. The same swath of hillside blackened by the Oakland-Berkeley Hills Fire of 1991 had also burned in 1923, 1970, and 1980. But residents were quick to forget the past, and amnesia was part of California’s identity. The state legislature left it up to local governments to protect their constituents, and thus development continued unfettered, and more and more homes became kindling.
In Paradise, the threat of an ember-driven wildfire, akin to the blaze in the East Bay of San Francisco, was very real. State documents cautioned that a fire could cause “catastrophic life and property loss.” The town was a tinderbox nestled between two geological chimneys. As in so many other Sierra Nevada towns, miners and developers had carelessly pitched homes on fire-prone terrain, never grasping the consequences of taming their Eden. The risk compounded as dry brush accumulated and trees died. Though the Town Council tried to enact stronger evacuation policies, it didn’t succeed until after wildfires torched Paradise’s outskirts in 2001 and 2008.
The Poe Fire erupted just before the terrorist attacks of 2001, after a windstorm knocked a ponderosa pine onto a PG&E power line. It blackened 8,333 acres, destroyed twenty-six homes, and caused $6 million in damage. It nearly killed Captain McKenzie and his crew as they tried to save an elderly couple and their dogs, the fire burning so hot that it melted the hose off the back of their engine.
Then, seven years after the Poe Fire, at the start of a dangerously dry summer, an arsonist lit the Humboldt Fire beneath some power lines. The blaze slunk out of Butte Creek Canyon and thundered toward the Skyway, taking out eighty-seven homes at the edge of town. The heavy smoke and flame forced three of the town’s four main roads to close, and more than ten thousand people were left stuck on the one remaining route: Pentz Road. Traffic crawled at 4 mph. The radio station that broadcast emergency alerts transmitted outdated information. As a strange orange light overtook the sky, residents began to panic. Then, at the last moment, the wind shifted, saving Paradise.
One week after the Humboldt Fire, dry lightning strikes sparked a dozen more wildfires near the opposite edge of town. When the slow-moving Butte Lightning Complex hit the Feather River Canyon more than a month later, residents were forced to evacuate again. The hospital was emptied of patients. Altogether, that fire scorched 60,000 acres and leveled two hundred homes—the worst season in local history.
“The greatest fear is fire on the Ridge,” a thirty-seven-year-old woman told a reporter of the ordeal. “There’s no way out. You’re trapped.”
The Town Council was determined to heed these hard-learned lessons. In 2009, it carved Paradise and Magalia into fourteen zones and created a staggered evacuation plan to prevent gridlock. It contracted with CodeRed to issue warnings to cellphones and landlines. Crews paved the nine-mile upper stretch of the Skyway—at the time a gravel road. That same year, a local Civil Grand Jury issued a report cautioning against further population growth until Paradise did more to address its challenges. “The unpredictability, intensity, and locations of the 2008 wildfires…emphasized the critical shortcomings of the area’s readiness for extreme fire situations,” the report read.
Frankie Rutledge, the mayor at the time, responded with a scathing public letter. She thought Town Hall had done enough. “None of the findings concerning the lack of emergency evacuation plans, emergency communications, or notifications are applicable to the town of Paradise,” she wrote.
Instead, in 2014, with Gill firmly in charge, the Town Council decided to explore the idea of narrowing a portion of the Skyway, the town’s major artery, which over the years had been widened to a four-lane highway. That year, thirteen people had been injured in crashes on that corridor. The goal, then, was to lessen the “expressway” feel of that stretch and reduce pedestrian accidents by means of a “road diet.” Gill was in support. Like the rest of the Town Council, she liked that it would create additional street parking, hopefully drawing business to the shopping district, and only downtown would be affected. During public comment, though, an eighty-eight-year-old named Mildred Eselin called the project “insane.”
“I can’t believe it’s being seriously considered,” said Eselin, one of the few dissenting voices. “Imagine if there were a fire, the traffic coming down the Skyway. If the council is searching for a way to diminish the population of Paradise, this would do it.”
The proposal passed unanimously.
The Bay Area engineering firm that consulted on the downtown project urged the council to remember that the roadway was the town’s main evacuation route. It discouraged raised medians and other “improvements.” But the council went ahead with its plan, and in late 2014, road crews slashed the Skyway from four lanes of traffic to two. Several other roads were also narrowed that year, reducing the number of vehicles that could pass through Paradise. On Pearson Road, bike lanes were added. On Clark Road, travel lanes became turn lanes. And where six concrete curbs—called bulb-outs—jutted into traffic on the Skyway, volunteers took a simple beautification approach. Instead of raised medians, they planted flowers and firmly bolted donated benches to the concrete.
In 2015, the Town Council devised a plan to reverse flow on the lower section of the Skyway in an emergency, sending four lanes of traffic downhill to Chico. Deciding on the logistics had been a particular challenge, because the plan called for the police to first block the arterial roads that fed onto the Skyway and Pentz Road to prevent collisions. Anticipating human reactions, too, complicated things. Gill never knew how residents would react: panicking, abandoning their vehicles to walk, refusing to leave their pets behind.
The following year, a few days before the seventh anniversary of the Humboldt Fire, Town Hall led an evacuation drill during morning rush hour. Though up to twenty-four thousand vehicles traveled the road every day, only about seventy people participated in the drill, inching past volunteers in reflective
orange vests before heading out of town through the tapered portion of the Skyway. Most everyone else, informed of the drill beforehand, simply avoided downtown. Meanwhile, firefighters staged their own drill, a wildland-urban interface training exercise in which captains roped off dozens of trees and twenty-one homes with toilet paper—which disintegrated when hit with water—to represent flames. Firefighters evacuated bedridden patients, dealt with low-pressure hydrants, hopped “downed” electrical lines, rounded up horses. The drill was so intense that one firefighter was taken to the hospital with symptoms of cardiac arrest. The fictitious scenario burned three hundred homes—a hundred more than the Butte Lightning Complex.
In the end, for all its efforts, the Town Council never designed a system for emptying the entire ridge at once. Evacuating every resident would take eight hours under perfect conditions—or five hours with the one-way traffic plan in effect—but the estimates didn’t factor in congestion or the extra time required to help vulnerable residents leave their homes. There wasn’t even an accurate local accounting of such people, since the town’s roster hadn’t been updated in years.
* * *
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FROM AN OFFICE at Feather River hospital, Chief Financial Officer Ryan Ashlock jumped off a conference call with a handful of agencies in Paradise. He tipped back in his chair, thinking. Gill had originally scheduled the call to discuss PG&E’s planned outage, but since the blackout hadn’t occurred, there wasn’t much to discuss. Gill explained that PG&E had not gone forward with its plan because it “didn’t seem appropriate”: Weather reports had not registered sufficiently strong winds. “Are there any questions?” Gill had asked.
“We’re concerned about fire in the area of Paradise,” Ashlock replied.
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