The spot fires belched poisonous smoke as they reached for the next home. There were rows upon rows of houses to devour. Flames raced through the heart of town and gnawed at structures, a firestorm similar to the conflagration that annihilated Hamburg, Germany, after the famous Allied aerial attack of 1943. The flames left the ponderosa pines standing, too busy torching homes and businesses to scale into the canopy. But they roasted their exteriors, eating at their scabby bark. Millions of trees underwent a quiet death that day too.
The smaller fires merged into a wall of flame and plowed ahead to gobble untouched areas that other spot fires had skipped over. More than twenty square miles had already burned, and the line of flame in Paradise stretched the length of Manhattan. The coals slammed into houses like red-hot bricks thrown at 50 mph. Flames reared upward as high as 200 feet. Thick black smoke unfurled in complete darkness. Fire engines that had just arrived raced along the town’s roads as if there was something they could do.
CHAPTER 8
SAVING TEZZRAH
Jamie had never imagined that flames would blitz into town from the east—maybe from the west, but not out of the impenetrable Feather River Canyon. Heritage Paradise was located across town from where the wildfire had trapped the ambulance crew off Pentz Road. The last Jamie had heard, from the news program playing in the care facility’s lobby, the flames were still a comfortable distance away. He had also received a smattering of text messages from various family members warning that the wildfire was closer than expected. Jamie didn’t consider himself an expert, but he figured that if the wildfire advanced to Heritage, which was on the Skyway, flames would have had to take out the heart of downtown—and that was unthinkable.
But then a stranger in a blue polo drove his Harley-Davidson into the parking lot and pounded on the care facility’s front door, telling Jamie’s boss that downtown was exactly where the wildfire was burning. He warned that the flames were heading their way and offered to help out. Jamie’s boss instructed the man to help triage residents, organizing the wheelchair-bound patients under the rain awning, away from the falling embers. An evacuation from a place like Heritage would have been difficult under ordinary circumstances. Now, pressed for time, they needed every bit of assistance they could get.
Jamie stood outside the entrance of Heritage, trying to calm his boss as chaos unfolded around them. They were good friends and had a friendly rapport, jokingly calling each other their “work spouse.” Her cellphone hadn’t pinged with a CodeRed evacuation alert, but she was sure one would come soon. Heritage would be ahead of it. Another administrator had already ordered four medical transport vans to carry their elderly charges downhill.
In the parking lot, staff tried to keep all fifty-six residents calm as they waited for rescue. The patients were mostly oblivious to the closing distance between themselves and the wildfire. A change of clothing and jumble of medications dangled in plastic bags from the handles on each wheelchair and walker. One woman had begged a nurse to run back inside for her purse, where she had hidden a box cutter in case escape wasn’t possible. As a child, she had suffered severe burns and knew she’d rather end her life than face flames again. The nurse thought the woman might have forgotten her prescription inhaler and obliged.
Now, as Jamie’s boss talked with him, her phone jingled. One of the van drivers was calling to say that California Highway Patrol officers stationed downhill had turned the medical vehicles away. The Skyway was a snarl of traffic, each lane gridlocked in the same direction, and the officers didn’t want to risk disaster by allowing cars uphill. This made sense: The road was built to handle sixteen hundred vehicles an hour—not nearly forty thousand—and they needed as many downhill lanes as they could get. Jamie’s boss exhaled sharply, frustrated, then implored the man with the Harley-Davidson to weave around the lanes of stalled traffic to the bottom of the hill. Maybe he could persuade the officers to let the vans through. If they didn’t arrive, the patients would be burned alive.
Fire was a particular threat to convalescent homes, whose residents were often too frail or medically vulnerable to evacuate quickly. Compared to the general population, elderly adults were twice as likely to die or be injured in a blaze. The number of senior citizens in Paradise made the threat exponentially greater. “Newlywed and nearly dead,” residents often joked about the town’s skewed demographics. Retirees had sought the sanctuary and affordability that Paradise offered, along with vital medical services and small-town safety. About 25 percent of residents were older than sixty-five, compared to 14 percent statewide, and the disability rate was nearly twice the state average. But few government programs had been created to help the elderly and infirm survive a natural disaster—even though wildfires were a known threat. Instead, it was up to ordinary civilians to step in and make sure their neighbors got out.
This meant that some folks got missed, as Julian Binstock and his dog had been near Feather River hospital. At Ridgewood Mobile Home Park, a retirement community off Pentz and Merrill roads, three women were left behind. The husband-and-wife property managers had knocked on every door, but some residents hadn’t answered. Every second mattered, and the managers couldn’t wait. Flames tore through the pastel-colored trailers, which were bordered by small gardens mulched with redwood chips. The trailers were decades old, manufactured long before the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development enacted building regulations for mobile homes in 1976. They fell like dominoes, their particleboard and thin aluminum incinerating within seconds. There was little space between one flaming trailer and another, and soon all were ash.
Butte County had devised two programs that might have helped the elderly population. The first was the In Home Support Services program, or IHSS, which helped older and disabled residents live independently by sending social workers to check on them in their homes. The Ridge had an enrollment of 960—a sliver of the thousands of residents in Paradise and Magalia who had reported to the U.S. Census that they had a disability of some kind. Moreover, state and federal laws protecting private health-related information prevented the county’s emergency services officer from accessing the list of IHSS clients until a natural disaster warranted it. By then it was often too late to help them. As the Camp Fire galloped from Pulga, the program activated a phone tree. Staff individually dialed each of the Ridge’s 960 IHSS clients to ask if they had a relative who could assist them or if they needed law enforcement to pick them up. They got through to only 215 clients. They left 247 voicemails and were unable to contact 498 clients whose numbers were unlisted or disconnected.
The county’s second program was the Special Needs Awareness Program, or SNAP, which had been founded in 2008 and had an enrollment of thirty-seven hundred people. Registrants voluntarily submitted their contact information to let the county know they would need assistance during a disaster. The Sheriff’s Office had a map of their addresses so that officers would know who might need extra help, if they had time to locate their homes. But SNAP was more of a voluntary educational program that emphasized personal preparedness than a tool widely used by law enforcement. As part of the program, Butte County posted a sample emergency preparedness plan on its website. The twenty-page document, drafted by San Diego County in the wake of the 2003 Cedar Fire and 2007 Witch Fire, included tips on what to pack in a go-bag and how to establish a support team. It didn’t include any phone numbers to call for help. SNAP also issued reflective window placards to residents, so that first responders could spot their homes during a disaster. But at the time of the Camp Fire, it was not clear how many people—if any—had actually placed the placards in their windows. Many first responders didn’t remember seeing them.
At Heritage, the residents were lucky. They had Jamie and his colleagues. The facility’s recent renovation had given staff members new energy and inspired focus on patients’ quality of life. The owner had hired a professional chef and encouraged staff to spend more time wit
h residents. He wanted to make sure they felt seen and valued in a way that—because of their age or health conditions—they often weren’t by society. He scheduled bingo tournaments with prizes like beaded necklaces and scented lotions. In good times, these thoughtful attentions made residents happy. In bad times, they made them stick together.
Jamie’s boss thought out loud, talking with Jamie as she deliberated how she might save their elderly charges if the vans didn’t arrive. If it came down to it, she said, staff could shelter residents in the tiled showers, or perhaps the walk-in freezer. Another option could be to walk patients off the mountain, navigating their wheelchairs and walkers down the Skyway, until someone offered up a spare seat. Jamie told his boss that he wouldn’t leave her side until they knew everyone was safe.
While they entertained her hopeless plans, the motorcyclist was attempting to persuade the patrolmen at the blockade to release the vans uphill—in what was looking like a losing argument. Staff began lining up their own cars and loading residents in twos and threes, just as nurses had done at Feather River hospital, in a makeshift evacuation. Jamie offered to lift the heavier patients. As a maintenance man, he wasn’t trained in moving the medically frail, but he tried to mimic the nurses, gently supporting the elderly under their arms. His wife would have known what to do. Erin’s arms were so toned from moving patients that Jamie had nicknamed her the Pull-up Queen.
A man driving a tall Dodge truck pulled in to the parking lot, offering two extra seats. The wildfire was closing in, he said. Staff members slid two of the immobile patients onto the truck’s bench seat in the spacious back, stacked some wheelchairs in the truck bed, and asked the driver to drop the patients off at a Chico facility. Slowly, over the course of the next half hour, all of the residents were packed up and sent off, except for the seven least mobile. Several of them were obese and couldn’t move because of their size. Some were recovering from hip and back surgeries and couldn’t bear extra weight on their limbs; the staff depended on mechanical lifts to transport them. It would have been difficult and dangerous to shove them into tiny vehicles.
On the roof, a few members of the maintenance crew were hosing down the shingles in hopes of saving the building. “Where are we in this?” Jamie’s boss called up to them.
“I think we have defensible space,” the lead maintenance man shouted back. “We can wait here.”
“I don’t think we have a choice,” she said, throwing up her hands. She hoped the vans would arrive soon. In the distance, the fire was a mushroom-shaped monster, its dark smoke puffing from the base and mottling the sky. The rupturing of propane tanks ricocheted through the air.
* * *
—
AT 9:45 a.m., Jamie’s boss was about to usher residents back indoors to shelter in place in the walk-in freezer or tiled showers when she saw a white van pull in to the parking lot. A second van followed, then a third and a fourth. They were, she thought, like Moses parting the Red Sea, if the Red Sea had been an ocean of parked cars. Somehow the motorcyclist had gotten the patrolmen to let them through. She heaved a sigh of relief, the knot in her throat releasing. It felt like a miracle—the residents would be okay. With the help of the van drivers, staff finished loading the last wheelchairs and walkers.
His job done, Jamie headed into the living room adjoining the facility’s lobby, where his daughter was waiting. He had picked up Tezzrah from Achieve Charter School just before 8 a.m., managing to drive from Heritage to her school and back before the streets filled with vehicles. He had considered leaving town with the seven-year-old but brushed the thought away. Heritage needed him.
Tezzrah had known there was a wildfire nearby. She was sharp, peppering her father with questions about the blaze’s proximity. “It looks big,” she had commented. Jamie tried to stay quiet. It was impossible to ignore the claustrophobic blanket of smoke, but he didn’t have any answers.
Now, about to face his daughter again, he realized he still didn’t. For the past hour and a half, Tezzrah had waited in the living room with an administrator’s young daughters, twelve months and five years old. A nurse had brought her dog to the facility, and the girls petted him as they watched cartoons and ate orange Tic Tacs. Through the closed doors, the children could hear some of the residents with dementia shrieking in their confusion. Their wailing startled even the nurses. “I’m not leaving without my recliner!” one woman had shouted. “I’m a little concerned we aren’t going to make it out, so we aren’t going to look into the recliner right now,” an administrator had answered, nimbly buckling the patient into the medical van. As they retrieved supplies from indoors, staff members tried to hide their fear so they wouldn’t further terrify the patients—or the little girls.
When Jamie finally reappeared, Tezzrah burst into tears. She could imagine the flames engulfing her hair and her clothes. She felt things deeply and had always had a dramatic flair. Though Mariah and Arrianah sometimes irritated her by stealing her favorite art supplies and patterned washi tape, she missed her sisters now, as well as her mom. Erin had always been the parent to pick her up after school—not Jamie, who did drop-offs—and the break in routine had to mean that something was very wrong.
On Facebook, Jamie had seen photos of the approaching wildfire posted by Ridgeview High, a continuation school for at-risk youth. In the pictures, snapped from an old lookout platform in Magalia, an orange tsunami scaled the Feather River Canyon. Jamie wouldn’t have believed the images if someone had described them to him. He called Erin as he finished packing up the last patients, instructing his wife to evacuate with Mariah and Arrianah north through the mountains—not through Paradise. Known as the “Upper Skyway,” the highway had been paved in 2013 at a cost of $21 million on a recommendation from the Butte County Civil Grand Jury. The former gravel road was the only evacuation route that avoided Paradise. After following its length, Erin could hook south to Chico. It was an hourslong drive, and she was apprehensive, never having driven the route before. In the background, Jamie could hear his younger daughters crying. “I guarantee you that all of Magalia will be going that way,” he said. “Just follow the line of cars.
“As soon as you can, let me know where you’re at and if you’re okay,” Jamie continued. “Finish packing up. Paradise is on fire right now, and so are parts of Old Magalia. There is no way for you to come down here. I will do my best to keep Tezzrah safe. I love you.”
It had been their last conversation before Jamie’s cell service cut off. Around 10 a.m., as the final medical vans departed, he walked Tezzrah out of Heritage and settled her in the back of his Subaru Outback. One of his colleagues was going to hitch a ride with them. She waited with Tezzrah in the car while Jamie ducked back inside the facility to grab snacks and supplies, the weight of his daughter’s eyes on his back. He jogged through the empty hallways. Emergency lights blinked on and off and radio stations blared news of the destruction outside. Was it even real? Jamie had witnessed scenes like this only in movies. His stomach roiled, as it often did when he was anxious. He felt a wave of nausea rise in him; he had a weak stomach at the best of times.
He headed to the basement, where he found bottled water and snacks in a maintenance locker. Grabbing an armful, he thought of his seven-year-old. She would get hungry or thirsty—those, at least, were problems Jamie could solve. Tezzrah was his first child, the one who had taught him the meaning of promise and parenthood. From the second Jamie had witnessed her dark eyes open for the first time, he had vowed to protect her. He remembered how small Tezzrah had been, how she fit perfectly in the crook of his arm: as compact as a football, her thicket of black hair soft against his skin. Tezzrah believed the world was a safe place because Jamie always made it safe for her. How much longer could he continue to protect her?
Jamie hurried. He knew Tezzrah would panic if he was gone for too long. “This is really happening,” he said to himself as he cut back through the dimly l
it building, skirting the abandoned medical carts that scattered the hallway.
OBSERVATION: PARADISE IRRIGATION DISTRICT
High above Paradise, on a narrow plateau in Magalia, the town’s water treatment plant was nestled in a cove of ponderosa pine. The Paradise Irrigation District had constructed the plant in the neighboring community because of its proximity to Magalia Reservoir and Paradise Lake. These pristine pools collected the rainwater that flowed downhill. The irrigation district was consistently water-rich, receiving more rainfall per year than Seattle, sometimes up to ten inches a day in the winter. The rugged topography wrung storm clouds out like rags. Other water districts in Butte County had to neutralize agricultural runoff and industrial waste; by contrast, Paradise’s gravity-fed system was blessedly simple. Workers filtered out dirt and debris, added a bleach sterilizer, tested the water, and then sent it downhill to Paradise. In a state dominated by battles over water—who owned it, how to transport it, whether to divert it—the Ridge had gotten lucky. The water in Paradise even tasted different. Everyone said so. It was crisp and clear, as if it had been bottled at a mineral spring.
Water district workers Ken Capra, sixty-one, and Jeremy Gentry, thirty-nine, had spent years laboring at the plant. They worked in twenty-four-hour blocks: one day on, two days off. At night, they slept on a pull-down Murphy bed at the plant, receiving partial pay while they slumbered. It didn’t make either man a fortune, but it did provide abundant free time to do the kinds of things—bass fishing, woodworking—they couldn’t have done with a traditional day job. For Gentry, it meant extra time with his sixteen-month-old daughter.
Paradise Page 15