—
GILL’S ASSISTANT, Colette Curtis, thirty-six, plopped her handbag on her desk and sat down. Originally from the Bay Area, Curtis had moved to Paradise with her husband a decade earlier, hoping to start their family somewhere more affordable. Their two young daughters had been born at Feather River hospital. Regardless of how people felt about the town manager, everyone adored Curtis. With her bright lipstick and sunshiny demeanor, she offered a sharp contrast to her boss’s aloofness. She organized Gill’s calendar and stood sentry for her. Now, double-checking the six evacuation zones scribbled on her steno pad, she tapped out a Facebook post: “This is a very dynamic situation; roads are closing and opening quickly due to the fire movement. Please be aware of your surroundings and listen to emergency personnel.”
Soon after, her office line trilled. Curtis paused to give a live interview to a television journalist in Redding who wanted an update on the Camp Fire. The smoke was so thick near the northern city that residents initially believed a wildfire had ignited nearby—but it was just the ash billowing from Butte County. The chief meteorologist, who also spoke on the segment, had already commented on the Camp Fire’s punishing sprint from Pulga. “Unfortunately, we’ve got the gusty winds of twenty-five miles per hour out there and the low humidity of eighteen percent,” he had said, gesturing toward an onscreen map of Paradise. “Those are the two main factors that we have been tracking during the Red Flag Warning, and unfortunately, they are right on schedule. What makes it more treacherous is you have all of these canyons and ridges, which makes it even more difficult for the firefighters. If you look at this map”—he flipped to a satellite image, which showed a red wave barreling toward Paradise—“you’ll see we’ve got a really hot fire.”
On the program, Curtis explained that the eastern zones along the Pentz Road corridor were being evacuated. Next door to her, Gill had just left her office to give Marquis more instructions. At 9:09 a.m., more than twenty-five minutes after he had sent Town Hall’s first alert for Pentz Road, Marquis sent a second CodeRed evacuation order, which included two additional zones, totaling eight of the town’s fourteen. The message read: “This is an immediate evacuation order for zones 2, 3, 5, 6, 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.” The notice was dispatched to 2,765 phone numbers. But the telecommunications system was badly overloaded, and 42 percent of the alerts were never delivered. (Forty-seven percent of residents hadn’t even received the first alert.) Marquis tried to print the information so Curtis could post it on Facebook, but Gill stopped him. “We need to evacuate the next third of the town,” she said.
“We can’t do it,” he shot back. “You can’t do it that quickly. People need time to empty the roads out.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Gill replied.
Marquis tapped the information into the CodeRed program—but it wouldn’t send. The town’s Comcast Internet had cut out as the infrastructure melted. The AT&T landlines followed minutes later.
Outside Gill’s office, Curtis was finishing the interview. “What should people know right now?” the journalist asked her. “Listen to the local authorities and get your bags ready to go, even if you’re not in an evacuation area,” she replied. “Be prepared and be aware of your surroundings.”
As Curtis was speaking, a car veered into the parking lot of Town Hall. A panicked man emerged, running past Gill’s office and into the council chambers. The nearby hillside was on fire, he said, and within minutes Town Hall would be too.
George Morris, a retired fire chief who had recently arrived at Town Hall—interrupting his morning game of golf—assumed the man was nuts. Morris had started his career with Cal Fire in coastal Humboldt County in 1973. He was as solid as a wall, with thinning white hair and weathered pink cheeks from a career spent outdoors. He and Gill lived a few blocks from each other near Butte Creek Canyon, and she trusted him completely. At the EOC, Morris translated Cal Fire’s convoluted radio lingo into plain English for her. But it didn’t take long for Morris to decide that the newcomer was speaking the truth. Chatter on the Cal Fire radio frequency indicated new spot fires throughout town. Flames had blocked Pearson Road. If dispatchers knew about fires at Bille and Clark roads—in the middle of town, near the Dollar General and Paradise Alliance Church—there were probably hundreds more that they didn’t know about. He told Gill that they needed to evacuate the building.
She hurried toward her office, where she saw Curtis, still on the phone with the journalist. Gesturing, Gill asked what Curtis was doing. “Hang up the phone!” Gill implored, pantomiming with one hand, her thumb and pinky extended to look like an old-school receiver, wanting to rip the phone from her hands. She needed Curtis to call the school district and confirm that students were being relocated. “This is a live interview,” Curtis mouthed back silently. “I can’t just hang up!” Gill threw up her hands and stepped into the hallway. Curtis thanked the journalist for her time, gently placed the phone in its cradle, and stepped out of the office.
“We’re evacuating,” Gill said. “Grab your stuff and go.”
Marquis, who had just walked up behind Gill, paused for a moment before turning to Curtis. “Can you help me with something really quick?” he asked. He led her to the storage room where the expensive police body cameras were stored. “If the building burns down, these can’t go down too,” he said, jamming them into a box. He looked through the window, struck by the sight. “Why don’t you just go,” he said to Curtis, his voice strained.
“Are you sure?”
“Just go, I’ll be right behind you.”
As Curtis pushed through the front door, turning for a last glimpse of the building, she saw that the house behind Town Hall had caught fire. She stared and snapped a photo on her cellphone. Marquis hurried after her, loading the cameras, along with the town’s servers and backup tapes, into his Jeep. They climbed into their vehicles and merged onto the Skyway, one after the other. Behind them, the parking lot emptied of staffers’ cars.
But Gill and Morris stayed behind. She wanted to sort out whether their local EOC would join the county’s in Chico. Where would her staff go when they reached the valley floor? Was the Public Works crew safe? Gill needed to find out. Her phone vibrated with messages from unknown numbers, the area codes from all across the country. She ignored them. Around 10 a.m., her cellphone buzzed with a call from Rick Silva, editor of the Paradise Post. Gill knew him well and answered. “I’m hearing there is a townwide evacuation, is that true?” Reeling and numb with shock, Gill gave him the only answer that she knew to be true:
“If residents feel they need to leave, they should.”
* * *
—
AS TOWN HALL was evacuating, the Paradise Police Department building was about to burn down.
At 10:20 a.m., another call from Cal Fire’s Emergency Command Center rang through. Carol Ladrini answered. “Are you still there?” the other dispatcher said, astonished. “You need to evacuate and get to safety.” Ladrini had been joined by two more colleagues, who had helped her answer phone calls, then monitor radio traffic from officers in the field. More than a thousand calls had streamed in from across the county. In Paradise, 132 calls were answered between 6:30 a.m. and 8:20 a.m., when the 911 line had been rerouted to Chico. Alarm companies alerted dispatchers to single houses burning even as entire neighborhood blocks fell.
Family members of the elderly and the vulnerable submitted more than six hundred requests for law enforcement to check on their loved ones. In Magalia, an eleven-year-old girl was home alone from school. Her parents were at work and couldn’t pick her up. A quadriplegic on Honey Run Road needed an ambulance. A family on Bille Road was engulfed in ash. Ladrini’s tone had become caustic as she faced an unending stream of situations that she couldn’t control. She relied on her training, triaging an emerg
ency and providing recommendations based on a script. But over and over, she had to reiterate that help was not on the way. Now there was nothing to do but leave. Cal Fire was right—the police station on Black Olive Drive was about to be destroyed, along with the fire station next door. In the police parking lot, a few strangers waited with a shaggy brown dog, hoping for a ride. They had come to the station for help evacuating since they didn’t have a car. Ladrini unbuckled her grandchild’s car seat and tossed it into the trunk, helping them into her black Mazda CX-9.
Within the hour, Morris and Gill faced a similar reckoning. The retired fire chief feared Town Hall was going to catch fire. They had been spared an hour earlier, when the wind shifted and blew the flames from the burning house in the opposite direction. “If we’re going to go, we should go now, because the fence out back is on fire,” Morris said, as serenely as if he were asking Gill how she liked her coffee.
“What are our options?” she asked. The only other hope for survival, he explained, would be sheltering in the parking lot by lying flat on their stomachs and letting the fire pass over them.
“Do you have any of those little fire blanket things?” Gill asked. Morris didn’t.
“It looks like our neighborhood is gone,” he said after a moment, pausing to listen to Cal Fire’s radio traffic again.
Gill finally acquiesced. She had wanted to be the last person to leave Paradise, doing whatever she could to help everyone else make it out alive. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing an employee—or leaving any staff behind while she saved herself. If it wasn’t for Morris, she might have stayed. But she didn’t want to be responsible for his death. Gill followed him out of the building and locked the front door. Trembling with adrenaline, she asked Morris to drive them downhill to safety in her red Volvo, leaving his truck—golf clubs in the exposed back—behind. She felt safe with him. “You’ll get more work done, too, if I drive,” Morris said kindly.
They departed Town Hall without calling for evacuations in the final six zones—1, 4, 9, 10, 11, and 12—along Butte Creek Canyon. Only 4,855 phone numbers had received a CodeRed notification out of a total population of 26,500, which meant that almost 82 percent of Paradise residents never received an emergency alert from any of the systems. As they pushed through the flames that leaped along both sides of the Skyway, where traffic was still jammed, Gill tapped out a final series of text messages to the Town Council chat group, littered with misspellings and punctuation errors. She was in shock, her hands shaking. “We are moving eco to chico fore center…so is the county.” And another: “No one is in our eoc.” “George Morris and I were the last ones drove through fire.” “Resources are coming.” “Traffic is moving.”
“Is everyone ok.”
For nearly two hours, no one answered.
* * *
—
AT ACHIEVE CHARTER SCHOOL, where Jamie’s daughter Tezzrah and Rachelle’s daughter Aubrey were in second grade, cars lurched onto the curb in parents’ haste to pick up their children. Tezzrah was the fifth-to-last student to leave, waiting for more than a half hour to hear the principal call her name over the intercom, longing for the familiar sight of her father’s Subaru. Aubrey’s stepmother had picked her up from the same classroom.
Across Paradise, on Edgewood Lane, Travis looked up from his yardwork to see his neighbors Paul and Suzie Ernest straddling their four-wheeler. “Edgewood is blocked by trees,” they said. A long line of cars shot by, funneling toward the dead end of the finger ridge, not realizing it was a trap.
And in Magalia, Kevin McKay opened the doors of Bus 963 to two teachers and about two dozen students, their eyes wide with fear. The twin daughters of the immigrant couple who owned Sophia’s, the local Thai restaurant. The ten-year-old daughter of a bartender. A seven-year-old whose father was in nearby Tehama, painting the small-town mayor’s front door. Their parents commuted to distant communities or worked hourly low-wage jobs that they couldn’t walk away from, even in an emergency. They weren’t able to collect their sons and daughters in time. The children filed onto the bus, and Kevin closed the doors behind them.
KONKOW LEGEND
All those who had heard the teachings of the good men became conscience-stricken and built the kakanecomes, the sweat houses, and bowing down therein invoked the Great Spirit, praying for the mercy of Wahnonopem, and that the fruit of the evergreen and everbearing tree in the land of the stars, near the Great Spirit, might be showered down to them. But Wahnonopem had veiled his face in his anger and would not hear. He had said that he would send the great fire to destroy his bad children, and his word was the great law upon the earth, in the waters, and in all the skies.
The good men had told the Konkows that the kakanecomes were sacred, and that no women or children were to go down into them. Only the men who were feeding the holy fire were to bow down before it, with the wickedness in them purified by the fire. But one day when all the people were out on the plain, wringing their hands in their anguish and despair and praying for relief in their suffering, two little boys went down into the kakanecomes and threw some pitch pine sticks upon the fire. The flames flew up to the roof and from there spread everywhere, licking and destroying everything in their way.
CHAPTER 6
ABANDONING THE HOSPITAL
Walking to the parking lot, Chris put his cellphone to his ear and half-listened, groggy. The call was from one of his landscaping employees. Rachelle’s phone charger, which he had brought from home, dangled in his hand. Smoke was spilling over the mountains from Concow, the employee said, sounding frightened. She wasn’t going to make it in to work that day. Chris fiddled with the phone charger, rubbing the cord between his calloused fingers. He looked up. A thunderhead of smoke was unfurling above the tree line.
“Get out of Paradise,” he urged her.
He walked back through the hospital’s doors. In the few minutes he’d been outside, a flurry of activity had overtaken the hallways. Fire alarms were shrieking on the walls. A line of patients had suddenly materialized, snaking down the foyer that led to the ambulance bay. Waiting to be evacuated, the patients held tattered maroon binders containing their medical charts and records, the spines marked with stickers denoting allergies and primary doctor information. Anyone who could “walk and talk” was being led out first, including the pregnant woman from Redding. The linoleum floor was streaked with ash from the shoes of people who’d walked in and out of the parking lot.
There were sixty-seven patients to discharge—more than usual for this time of year. Their ailments ranged from pneumonia and chronic respiratory problems to dehydration and sepsis. Employees who weren’t involved in patient care, such as secretaries, housekeepers, and students, had already been told to leave. The remaining staff filtered through the hallway, checking on patients. The corridor was a riot of colors in a department that knew only the black scrubs of emergency room nurses: navy blue for the surgical staff, charcoal gray for nursing assistants, bright pink for birthing center staff, maroon for pharmacists. Sweat soaked the cotton fabric, ringing their collars. A couple of them jammed open the ER doors to keep them from swinging shut. Chris couldn’t find Rachelle in the line. He stepped back to let a cluster of nurses pass, pushing intensive care patients on gurneys.
“We’re running out of wheelchairs,” someone shouted.
Six nurses walked by, rolling a hospital bed on which a heavy man with cerebral palsy lay. He was intubated and under an anesthetic called propofol, a milky drug so powerful that it could disable the body’s respiratory system. (It was known as the Michael Jackson drug because the pop star died in 2009 from an overdose of the sedative.) If the man were disconnected from his ventilator, he could die. Unfortunately, the expensive respiratory machine wasn’t portable. Staff members heaved him onto a gurney and hooked him to an Ambu Bag, a portable breathing device. They did a check: clear airway, untangled lines, the EKG registering smooth
waves—all good signs. They continued down the hall toward the exit, throwing their bodies against the wheeled bed to slow it (the gurney had no brakes). Medical helicopters hadn’t been able to land in the smoke, so the nurses lifted the intubated patient into one of two ambulances. Into the second ambulance went an elderly woman who had fallen in her bathroom and sustained a brain bleed, along with a paraplegic and a local woman who had given birth to a daughter a few minutes earlier. The obstetrics surgeon had hastened to suture the woman’s C-section as the evacuation started. Her husband had scooped up the bundled baby girl—still streaked in amniotic fluid—and driven to safety.
Downhill, the patient financial services office caught fire, threatening the marketing department and human resources center. In nearby homes, propane tanks began to explode, shaking the ground. As temperatures rose to 2,000 degrees, the liquid gas was boiling inside the metal containers, turning into a high-pressure vapor that ruptured the tanks with an ear-splitting whine and ignited into a fireball, torpedoing the tanks up to 2,500 feet in any direction. Known as a “boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion,” or BLEVE, this was a violent by-product of wildfires in the wildland-urban interface, where residents relied on propane to heat their food, water, and homes. A BLEVE was the most powerful nonnuclear explosion created by man. That evening, two firefighters, including dispatcher Bowersox’s brother, would sustain serious burns when a 250-gallon propane tank exploded in a burning home in Magalia, flinging molten aluminum and pieces of fence at their necks and faces.
In the hospital, the hallways flickered black for about eight seconds until the backup generator sprang to life. The desktop computers where nurses logged chart notes blinked. Staff began affixing white tape and beige cloth into giant X’s on door frames, so that firefighters would know that the rooms were cleared. Others used yellow sticky notes. Roberson, the nurse supervisor, did a final check. The break room, with its six-foot-long folding table and worn green couch, empty. The nurse stations, vacant. The bathrooms echoing, stall doors flung open. Ash from outside rolled down the hallways, searing patients’ eyes. With the doors to the emergency bay jammed open, it was getting harder to breathe.
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