Paradise

by Lizzie Johnson

  “We know there’s a fire in Pulga,” Gill said. “We aren’t sure what’s going on, but we don’t feel it’s a threat to our town.”

  As Ashlock finally left the office and walked down the hallway, he noticed hospital staff congregating near the windows facing the Feather River Canyon. The clouds were a violent churn of red and orange. Singed pine needles and blackened twigs pinged against the double-pane windows. The sight startled him into activating the hospital’s Emergency Command Center, just in case. Ashlock, thirty-three, was the only executive on campus that day; the rest were at regional meetings. He called a Code Triage External, the signal for an emergency occurring outside the hospital’s walls that could potentially threaten patients. A medical administrator’s first instinct was never to evacuate: A full evacuation was not in the best interest of the hospital’s most vulnerable patients, and besides, the facility had fire-rated walls and doors that could withstand flames for two to four hours. Ashlock simply wanted the staff to be aware of the situation unfolding in Pulga.

  The morning had begun with the typical lineup of general surgeries. Orthopedic cases were reserved for earlier in the week, so patients could be discharged before the weekend. All other operations were slated for Thursday or Friday, though PG&E’s plans to de-energize the town meant that fewer elective operations had been scheduled. The first patient was readied for rotator cuff surgery, expected to last three hours. Another patient prepared to have his gallbladder removed. A child was slated for a tonsillectomy. In the Birth Day Place, a nurse greeted a woman from Redding who had an appointment to be induced.

  Nurse supervisor Bev Roberson walked through the hospital’s main doors from the parking lot, a fall-themed coffee mug in her hand. Unlike most medical facilities, the hospital was spread out across several acres on a slope near its namesake, the Feather River Canyon, and to move between departments, patients and medical professionals often had to duck outdoors. Roberson, fifty, had just finished an hourlong meeting in a conference room in the lower wing. She had watched a PowerPoint about the hospital’s annual accreditation process as other staff members nibbled from a continental breakfast buffet.

  Why do I even take the time to get myself ready for work? she thought now, the wind disheveling her neatly brushed hair. She ducked into the climate-controlled interior, the hospital doors swish-swishing behind her. After twenty-two years as an emergency room nurse, Roberson had only recently been tapped as the new in-patient nurse manager, overseeing sixty-seven hospital employees. They were a tight-knit group. (“Don’t talk crap about anyone, because someone on staff is always related or married to that person,” the ICU director liked to say.) Her promotion meant more meetings, and Roberson was headed to another one, this time led by Ashlock.

  She glanced down as she walked and recoiled. A handful of embers, almond-sized and steaming, bobbed on the surface of her coffee.

  Down the hallway, Ed Beltran, the charge nurse, examined his hard plastic name badge. It had partially melted as he’d stood in the parking lot to make a phone call. A flaming stick had smacked him in the chest, scorching a small hole in his scrubs. He couldn’t believe it. Management had already instructed Beltran, forty-four, and the rest of the staff to pull down the window shades so patients wouldn’t see the blood-orange horizon and charcoal showers. “Close the doors, too,” Ashlock had added.

  Ashlock was now weighing whether or not the hospital needed to evacuate. Boyish, with bright blue eyes and ginger hair, Ashlock had worked in Paradise for only a year. He and his wife, who had grown up on the Ridge, had relocated from Pasadena in 2017 for his job. He wasn’t familiar with wildfires, and he wanted to be cautious. He hadn’t heard anything more from Gill about the fire’s spread. It was Gill’s responsibility, as the director of Paradise’s EOC, to communicate relevant information to cooperating agencies, like the school district, the hospital, and the parks department. She received training for this role four times a year. A retired fire chief schooled her on the Incident Command System; the town paid him $1 annually for his help. He trained Gill on how to handle a wildfire and a wet winter storm. She also learned to manage an active shooter and a pandemic.

  Ashlock asked the nurses and physicians to discharge as many able-bodied patients as possible so there would be fewer people to move in case of an emergency. There were eight patients in the intensive care unit; one was intubated. The ICU director began printing their medical charts and tracking down gurneys and wheelchairs. Ashlock thanked him and walked into the wood-paneled boardroom for the 8 a.m. meeting. When everyone had arrived, they linked hands to pray. “Keep us safe as we go throughout this day and give us the wisdom to make the right decisions,” Ashlock said. “Amen.”

  He started the meeting four minutes early, at 7:56 a.m., and was interrupted soon after by a technician seated in the back of the room. The technician had been listening to the first responders’ radio traffic on his cellphone. “Ryan, Cal Fire just issued a mandatory evacuation for everything east of Pentz Road,” he said. The order included the hospital—information that normally should have funneled to Ashlock through Gill. But she wasn’t yet aware of the evacuation order.

  A hospital director held out a chunk of burned bark he had found in the parking lot for everyone to see. It was black and narrow, as long as a carrot. Ashlock knew he needed to act.

  Four minutes later, his phone rang. His brother, who worked in the Human Resources Department on the northern end of campus, had spotted flames in the Feather River Canyon. As soon as Ashlock hung up, the hospital’s information technology director called. From the southern end of the campus, he could see fire, too. The flames stretched taller than the one-story hospital, reaching toward the sky as if they might torch the clouds. Administrators had called 911, but there were only two fire engines left in Paradise, and no one was available to respond to the campus. Most of the force was in Concow or Jarbo Gap or on their way there. The remaining firefighters were snuffing out a grass fire near Ponderosa Elementary.

  The technician announced that he had more news. On the radio, the police had called for a townwide evacuation. Bowersox’s order was making its way through the proper channels. Ashlock called a Code Black—everyone needed to leave immediately. “Bring all patients to the ambulance bay,” he instructed the employees. He dialed Enloe Medical Center in Chico, making sure it had room for their patients, and requested eight ambulances and two helicopters. At 8:10 a.m., as Kelly was realizing he’d be unable to drop his load of fire retardant above Paradise, the hospital administration posted on its Facebook page: “We are evacuating. Don’t come here.”

  In the Birth Day Place—on the opposite end of the same hospital building, away from the growing pandemonium—a nurse’s aide knocked on Rachelle’s door and stuck her head inside to greet Rachelle and Chris. She checked Rachelle’s heartbeat and blood pressure, inputting the numbers into a computer. For a few minutes they chatted and laughed, the three adults focused utterly on the baby as if he were the entire world. Then the nurse’s aide left to finish her morning rounds. Chris smiled at Rachelle, then stepped outside to take a phone call in the parking lot.

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  —

  JUST AFTER 8 a.m., Paradise Police dispatcher Carol Ladrini received a call from Cal Fire’s Emergency Command Center. “Hey, we’ve just issued mandatory evacuations for the entire town of Paradise,” the dispatcher said.

  “Are you serious?” Ladrini asked.

  The last large-scale evacuation had taken place a decade ago during the Butte Lightning Complex. Ladrini passed word of the townwide evacuation order to Police Chief Eric Reinbold. In most municipalities, a police chief was usually the one who issued emergency CodeRed alerts, but in Paradise, this was the town manager’s prerogative. It was Reinbold’s responsibility to call Gill, who had the final say.

  Reinbold thought about how to tell her. A soft-spoken and well-respected Paradise native, he had w
orked drilling water wells for farmers across Northern California before joining the local police force in 2007. At thirty-five, he was young for the job: The schools superintendent had once been his kindergarten teacher—a fact she mercilessly teased him about. Reinbold had been named chief only fifty-two days earlier, sworn in with a quick ceremony led by Gill on a sunny September afternoon. For the past hour, he had focused on his officers, who were knocking on doors along Pentz Road, instructing residents to evacuate. A sergeant who would have been assigned to represent Paradise at the command post in Jarbo Gap had been diverted to help.

  Reinbold hadn’t been monitoring Cal Fire’s radio traffic. Firefighting and law enforcement communicated over separate frequencies. Trying to listen to both simultaneously was akin to playing a country music station over a rock station. But he did know that some of his officers had asked for fire shelters—beach-blanket-sized coverings made of aluminum. Folded into a shoebox-sized waist pack, the shelters deflected heat while preserving a pocket of breathable air. Reinbold had stashed nine of them in his squad car and prepared to speed over to Pentz Road. Now Ladrini’s update had left him reeling.

  Just after 8:10 a.m., as Feather River hospital began discharging patients, Reinbold called Gill at Town Hall. “Hey, Cal Fire just told me we need to issue a townwide evacuation,” he told her.

  “No, we aren’t going to do that,” Gill replied, stunned. “We are just evacuating the eastern side of town.” Reinbold repeated what he’d heard from Cal Fire.

  “I’m going to call David Hawks,” she said and then hung up, her mind racing.

  What is happening right now? Gill wondered, pacing the council chambers. Only a few minutes earlier, Mattox—her steady and unflappable counterpart—had told her about the evacuation along Pentz Road. This alone was shocking, never mind the idea of evacuating the entire town. They had long relied on a system of orderly and well-timed CodeRed alerts as a wildfire progressed. And for good reason. No place is designed to evacuate all at once, Gill thought. Not San Francisco with its two bridges during an earthquake. Not Los Angeles with its tangled freeways during a tsunami.

  Neither of the retired fire chiefs, who volunteered at Town Hall during emergencies, had arrived. Until they showed up, Gill was on her own. Petrified, she fell back on the town’s evacuation plan. Mattox ducked his head into the council chambers.

  “I need a second with you,” he said, looking at Gill.

  For the past hour, his cellphone had chirped with messages from friends in the valley. “Do you need a place to stay?” they all asked, as they saw a black haze solidify above the Ridge. “No, we’re fine,” Mattox had replied. Earlier that morning, he had dropped his daughters off at nearby Paradise Elementary, certain that the town wasn’t in danger. He had concentrated on coordinating with his five-member Public Works crew. They were deploying an evacuation trailer stuffed with the construction cones and reflective signs needed to start contra-flow on Pentz Road. But now he had new information to share.

  “We need to evacuate the entire town,” he confided in Gill around 8:35 a.m., relaying the latest from the police radio frequency.

  Gill blinked at him. Pushing thousands more residents out onto the streets in their vehicles could mean sending them to their deaths. She had seen this happen in 2008, when half of the town had gotten jammed on narrow corridors as the Humboldt Fire inched closer. Outside Town Hall, on the Skyway, cars were beginning to back up. As residents drove downhill, they were all trying to take the first exit into Chico, clogging traffic for more than twelve miles. Meanwhile, the four-lane contra-flow hadn’t yet been implemented, and vehicles were arriving in Paradise on the two uphill lanes. Gill had already called the Chico city manager several times, begging him to block exits into Chico, which would force traffic onward to places like Oroville. “I’m trying,” he replied.

  More than a half hour had passed since Cal Fire had called for the full evacuation. Still Gill hesitated. She told Mattox that she wanted to hold off. She would verify the information with Fire Chief Hawks first. He would know what to do. Gill spun on her heel and strode back into the chambers, Mattox following closely behind. Hawks picked up after a few rings. “I’m hearing we are evacuating the whole town,” Gill said softly. “And, well, you told me to never evacuate the entire town.” “It’s only the few zones along Pentz Road, as far as I know,” said Hawks, who had recently arrived on the Ridge from his gym in Chico. “You’re right, we never want to evacuate the entire town. It’s not ideal. But I’m on Pentz Road, and it’s bad.”

  Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, Gill saw Zuccolillo. He and councilman Steve Crowder, who had just been elected, arrived. They asked her how they could help. “There’s nothing to do right now,” Gill said, flustered. She ventured that they might check on people gathered at the Paradise Ridge Senior Center and CMA Church. Preoccupied, she paced away. She needed to get the flow of traffic switched on the Skyway.

  Soon after, IT manager Josh Marquis showed up. Though four staff members were trained to use CodeRed, Marquis had been designated as the sole dispatcher of evacuation notices. The clerk had called him at home in Chico to tell him to come to the EOC and start issuing CodeRed warnings. By the time his 1989 Jeep Cherokee pulled in to the parking lot, another staffer was waiting for him. “We are not doing warnings. We have to start evacuations right now,” she told him.

  Marquis cursed. “What are you talking about? I thought we were just doing warnings.”

  “The fire is coming right for the town.”

  He parked and followed her indoors, racing past the office where the clerk was recording an updated message for the town’s emergency radio station, 1500 AM, about the Pentz Road evacuation. Marquis, thirty-eight, was an hourly contractor who handled everything from PowerPoint issues to keyboard replacements, preferring to keep his distance from the drama that accompanied local politics.

  Paradise was responsible for dispatching its own alerts. The town had an independent CodeRed log-in, though it shared the bank of residents’ phone numbers and emails with the Butte County Sheriff’s Office—a necessary redundancy, in case something went wrong and the town couldn’t complete the task. Gill and Marquis didn’t realize that the Sheriff’s Office had already begun sending its own evacuation alerts. The uncoordinated alerts were scattershot, a problem that had plagued other communities during wildfires.

  A year before, the state had been confronted with the grave consequences of not alerting residents in a timely manner. When the Wine Country wildfires blazed through Sonoma County in 2017, only 2 percent of residents had been signed up for its primary warning system, SoCoAlert. A small group of leaders had decided against sending a Wireless Emergency Alert—the Amber Alert–style message that could reach virtually every cellphone in an area—because it was a geographically imprecise tool. They feared it would ping cellphones in unthreatened areas, causing traffic snarls and overwhelming 911 dispatchers. The county’s decision meant thousands of residents were left unaware as fire bore down on their neighborhoods.

  The state criticized Sonoma County’s decision in a scathing thirty-four-page review, calling out emergency managers for a procedure that was “uncoordinated and included gaps, overlaps and redundancies.” State senators Mike McGuire and Bill Dodd, whose districts were most impacted, brought a bill to the capitol in Sacramento. They wanted to pass a uniform protocol for how all fifty-eight counties in California issued emergency notifications. The bill passed in September 2018 and stipulated that the new guidelines had to be written by July 1, 2019. As of November 2018, the protocol was still being drafted.

  On his computer, Marquis clicked on the zones along the Feather River Canyon and wrote the message: “There is an immediate evacuation order for zones 2, 3, 7, 8, 13 and 14 due to a fire. You should evacuate immediately. You are receiving this message because you are in the affected area.” Gill gave her approval, and at 8:44 a.m., Marquis
clicked Send. The alert went out to fewer than half of the town’s fourteen zones.

  Usually Marquis tried to contact only a handful of zones at a time to minimize congestion on the roads. But Mattox was getting impatient. Each minute that passed was another minute that people wouldn’t have to make their escape. As Marquis dispatched the first alert, Mattox pulled Gill aside once more. As Public Works director, he carried a master key for the traffic signal boxes downtown. Each contained a computer controller that flipped between green and red. He wanted to switch the stoplights to hold green, he told Gill, to move vehicles downhill faster. Soon he wouldn’t be able to cut through gridlock to reach the lights. He felt obligated to leave Town Hall now, before traffic got worse. Gill nodded and briskly turned away.

  As Mattox left, he instructed Zuccolillo and Crowder—the lost-looking councilmembers—to drive up the Skyway until they found an intersection without law enforcement. “Stay there and direct traffic,” he said. Then, feeling panicked but determined, Mattox drove his Chevy truck to the intersection of the Skyway and Neal Road, just north of where the Skyway cleaved into a four-lane divided highway. He manually switched the stoplights so the oncoming vehicles wouldn’t have to stop. The evacuation would hinge on the town’s two southernmost cross streets, he knew, where traffic merged. He then headed north to the intersection of the Skyway and Pearson Road, where a probation officer and a sheriff’s deputy were directing traffic.

  Thousands of vehicles were inching by at 5 mph. Some formed bottlenecks at the bulb-outs. Mattox’s wife, a social worker at Adventist Health, was in one of the cars at the intersection, with their two daughters, Sara and Mae, ages six and nine, buckled in the backseat. When she spotted Mattox, she rolled down the window, and Mattox shouted to the girls that he loved them. Their taillights rolled downhill and disappeared in the red glow.

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