Paradise

by Lizzie Johnson

  All morning, Kevin had referred to the timber in Paradise as fuel—a phrase that Mary and Abbie had never heard. To them, trees were a source of beauty. Mary described the town’s ponderosa pine groves as the “rainforest” of Paradise. It’s what made the town feel like home. But looking ahead, Kevin’s word choice made sense. Roe Road was claustrophobic. It was harrowing on an ordinary day because the line of sight was so limited. Now it looked as if the brush could ignite at any moment.

  A Paradise Police officer flagged Kevin down. “Do you have kids on this bus?” the officer said, peering up at Kevin as he cranked open the driver’s window. “I’m about to shut this road down, but you go first. Get out of here.”

  “Hey, man, Roe Road is highly overgrown,” Kevin argued. “I’m worried about getting through there.”

  “Just go,” the officer replied. “There’s no other way out.”

  Kevin halted in the middle of the intersection of Scottwood and Roe, trying to leave a football field’s length between the bus and the car ahead. The pause also gave him the opportunity to attempt a getaway: He tried, very slowly, to pivot away from Roe Road and take a different route, against the officer’s recommendation. The drivers behind him laid on their horns, livid that he wasn’t moving forward. They wedged their vehicles into the clearance, and the patrolman directed a few more cars forward into the intersection, trapping Kevin in place. In the confusion, an elderly driver scraped the back of the bus, jostling the children from their seats. Kevin was stuck. The decision had been made for him: The only way out was forward.

  Mary, who had been helping calm a student, recognized the road. She walked to the front of the bus. “What the heck, Kevin!” she said, her voice cracking. “Why are you taking us down Roe Road?” She begged him to go a different way. “You know it’s a death trap,” Mary said. “Please do not take us down this road.” Kevin gripped the steering wheel. They didn’t have a choice, he said.

  Abbie interrupted, saying she thought some of the children were in shock. She didn’t know what to do. Mary switched places with her, sitting with a young girl who usually had a lively personality but had turned strangely morose. Kevin continued to stall in the intersection, Roe Road before him. The children grew drowsy, some on the verge of passing out, nauseated by the carbon monoxide and exhaust fumes. Hours had passed since they’d last had food or water. The bus was unbearably warm. Kevin kept his eyes locked on the tunnel ahead. The canopy ruffled, ready to catch flame. Mary squeezed the girl’s hand once more, then walked back to the front of the bus, sliding into a seat with Abbie. She was weary and depleted.

  For a moment, the two women found solace in each other. “Look out the window, Mary,” Abbie whispered. “I don’t think we’re going to make it.” They clutched hands, imprinting tiny half moons on each other’s skin with their nails, Abbie’s fist as small as a songbird. She revealed that she had already lost one fiancé in a riverboating accident—and now the man who had offered her a second chance at love was refusing to leave town for her sake. What if he died while waiting for her? Together, she and Mary prayed aloud. Mary wondered whether the school district might later fire her for this public show of faith. Perhaps, she thought, they would understand that this was a special circumstance.

  “Please,” they pleaded, “let the smoke kill us first.”

  CHAPTER 10

  THE BEST SPOT TO DIE

  A fierce gust of wind shook Sean Norman’s SUV and sent waves of fire sheeting across Wagstaff Road. The Cal Fire captain peered through his windshield. Just ahead, he made out the silhouette of a Chico Fire Department engine. The crew was spraying water on a cluster of flaming homes. Norman crept forward a few more feet, then rolled down his window. He knew how hard it was to go against the instinct to save burning buildings—but it was no longer their priority. “Hey!” he shouted, until he caught the firefighters’ attention. “Don’t try to put that house out. See if people are in there and get them out.” They nodded, leaning over the hose to roll it up. Norman closed his window, muting the howl of the wind. The Cal Fire seal plastered on his door, which normally made traffic a nonissue, now brought him little advantage. No one was moving, period.

  “I’m cut off by fire on Wagstaff and the traffic is completely gridlocked coming down south on the Skyway,” Norman said over the radio to his supervisor. The supervisor called back, asking him to cover the northern half of Paradise and the outskirts of Magalia—an area that incident commander John Messina was calling Division Hotel. The made-up designation helped everyone understand which area of the foothills firefighters were reporting from on the radio. It was a tough assignment, because in the midst of the unfolding hell, some residents still hadn’t received an emergency alert or accepted that they needed to evacuate. Norman was one of thousands of firefighting personnel that had responded through the state’s mutual aid system and were being sent into the burn zone to persuade people to leave their homes behind—without losing their own lives in the process. The calculus of such a task sometimes felt overwhelming.

  “Don’t die out there,” Messina had warned him.

  The gravity of Norman’s job had hit him hard earlier that summer. A thirty-seven-year-old city fire prevention inspector had died while evacuating residents from the Carr Fire in Redding, leaving behind a wife and two small children. The fire tornado had repeatedly flipped his 5,000-pound Ford F-150 truck down the road, then dumped it into the woods. For months his colleagues had searched for his lost helmet, which had blown away, to give to his family. They never found it.

  Death was a risk that came with the job—but it was a job that Norman, forty-seven, had wanted since he was five years old. His grandmother had worked as a secretary for the San Francisco Fire Department’s arson division, and as a child he had loved visiting her at the station. He had studied the firefighters as they scrubbed the engines to perfection, the red doors gleaming in the sun. After his family moved to Sonoma County, Norman had taken to biking to local fires whenever he heard alarms sound at the volunteer station downtown. He would stay and watch the firefighters work until the flames dwindled, then wave at them as they departed in their engine. The idea that he could someday work among them was thrilling. His childhood fascination had never faded—terrifying his father, a psychologist, and mother, a preschool teacher. Once, after training as a volunteer firefighter in high school, he had rushed into a burning house near his mother’s preschool. She had been outside with her students and witnessed the act. “How do you just do that?” she asked him later that evening. “That’s what we do,” he answered earnestly.

  His job had gotten more difficult in recent years. Norman couldn’t imagine anything worse than what he had seen a year ago. The colossal Thomas Fire, which had ripped through the chaparral hillsides north of Los Angeles in 2017, had burned well past Christmas and brought firefighters to the brink of insanity; the mud flows that followed buried a fire-scarred community on the coast and killed twenty-three people. Some of the bodies were submerged so deep beneath the muck that they were never recovered. It had made Norman worry about the fate of his own town of Grass Valley, in the foothills southeast of Paradise. He and his wife had moved from the Bay Area to the hamlet of thirteen thousand in 1997. Having grown up on two and a half acres, Norman couldn’t imagine ever living in a suburban neighborhood of tract homes. Priced out of Sonoma County, like so many other families, they had looked to the wildland-urban interface for a piece of land. It was only after a trip through Grass Valley on a work assignment that Norman decided that this town was the place. Several miles away from their new home was Rough and Ready, where the PG&E-caused Trauner Fire had burned down a historic schoolhouse in 1994.

  Grass Valley was sixty miles northeast of Sacramento, neighboring the vast wilderness of the Tahoe National Forest. Property was cheap and plentiful. The town was similar to Paradise in topography and forestry, nuzzled against the overgrown Sierra Nevada and often
buffeted by menacing seasonal winds. Fire officials cautioned that Grass Valley met the conditions for a historic burn. The movie theater in the small downtown even played fire preparedness trailers before the main film screening. Still, Norman savored the isolation. His five-acre property on Oak Drive was secluded and shaded by pine; it meant his son and daughter could have the kind of childhood he and his wife had imagined for them. His six-year-old, Patrick, was obsessed with toy fire engines and the outdoors, while his four-year-old, Katie, was fixated on horses. She wanted to own as many as their barn could hold. “What job are you going to do to pay for all of these horses?” he would ask her. “Mom will pay for me!” she would taunt, knowing her mother was more likely to cave to her demands.

  Now, as he drove farther into Paradise, the wind pounded and pulled at Norman’s SUV as if trying to lure it off the pavement. He forced his way toward Bille Road, then uphill toward Magalia. A few houses had caught fire, distracting him. People were pouring out of them. They ran, leaving their cars behind; without electricity, they couldn’t remember how to get the garage doors to open manually.

  In the doorway of one home, Norman saw an older woman silhouetted against a patch of light, crawling on her hands and knees. He swerved off Wagstaff Road, parked in her yard, and ran to her, pulling the woman to her feet to help her into the back of his SUV. She was light in his arms, her face wizened, her wrists notched and delicate. She didn’t say a word. Norman settled her inside and closed the door, then tried to get his bearings in the choking smoke. Anytime the smog cleared, giving him a chance to see, flames would appear, the neighborhood around him warping like a demented funhouse mirror. He pictured his children, happy at home, clinging to this thought like a talisman. They needed a father who came home at the end of the day.

  “Don’t make a mistake,” he repeated to himself.

  * * *

  —

  BEFORE FIRE OFFICIALS and legislators in California began calling record-breaking wildfires “the new normal,” widespread fires in the United States were not that normal at all. There had been one historic siege in 1910, when indiscriminate logging led to the “Big Blowup,” a fire that sparked among the dead timber and burned up more than 3 million acres in the Northern Rockies, killing eighty-five people—many of them firefighters—and forcing evacuations across Idaho, Montana, and Washington. But after that, wildfires largely faded from the landscape, helped in part by the legacy of President Theodore Roosevelt, whose devotion to conservation and public lands had led to the creation of the U.S. Forest Service. The agency had taken an aggressive stance toward wildfires, pushing its “10 a.m. policy,” which called for every wildfire to be doused by the morning after it ignited.

  Across the country, federal and state agencies responded in kind, shoring up resources to help protect the land. The California Department of Forestry was founded in 1905. Though its mission was to safeguard and manage the state’s timberland, before long it was also providing emergency services, contracting with local communities as a way of subsidizing its existence. The agency’s “ranger” title was swapped for “chief.” Green and khaki uniforms and wide-brimmed hats were replaced with the navy blue garb of urban fire departments. On the agency’s patch, a red flame was added next to the green conifer. Even legislators embraced the shift, supporting the agency’s emergency responder role by funding an armada of engines and all-terrain vehicles, as well as bulldozers, air tankers, helicopters—and even inmates, who were paid $1 per hour by the state to help fight fires.

  The rarity of out-of-control wildfires meant that millions of homes began to freckle the wildland-urban interface. Power lines traced their advance, crisscrossing the land. But as development increased, so did the potential for fire. The power lines were vulnerable. Dead and diseased timber piled up. Residents required protection. And so California legislators promised to forestall and conquer fire rather than accommodate it. In 2006, the agency rebranded itself with a new name: Cal Fire. The change could not have come soon enough: Over the previous four decades, fire season had increased by seventy-eight days. The dangers would grow even worse in the decade that followed. “Climate change has impacted California significantly,” Cal Fire director Ken Pimlott cautioned in a 2016 memo. Temperatures had increased, weather patterns had changed, and plant and animal species had migrated. Not to mention urban development, which was still spreading unchecked. “We are averaging 25 percent more fires than the five-year average,” Pimlott concluded.

  Across the state, 189 communities, including Paradise, were listed in Cal Fire’s “very high fire hazard severity zones”—the livelihoods of 3 million people at risk of complete erasure. In 2017, conflagrations set new state records for size and destruction. The damage was worse the following year, with flames threatening Yosemite National Park, torching mansions in Malibu, and rippling along the outskirts of Redding. By 2018, Cal Fire’s expenditures had skyrocketed to $947 million, more than ten times its costs in 2010. That summer, the agency exhausted its nearly $450 million budget within the first two months of its fiscal year. The wildfires began to seem less like outliers and more like an ominous new reality.

  Conflagrations had increasingly defied firefighters’ efforts to control them. They were more powerful and erratic, and they were striking communities in ways that had once seemed unfathomable. From 2013 to 2018, blazes scorched 12.7 million acres in California, razing 50,615 structures and killing 186 people. At a news conference in August 2018, outside the Emergency Operations Center in Sacramento, Governor Jerry Brown told reporters that the state was in for “a really rough” ride. Firefighters were working in triple-digit temperatures to stamp out flames across California.

  “The predictions that I see, the more serious predictions of warming and fires to occur later in the century, 2040 or 2050, they’re now occurring in real time,” Brown said. “It’s going to get expensive. It’s going to get dangerous, and we have to apply all our creativity to make the best of what is going to be an increasingly bad situation.”

  * * *

  —

  NORMAN STEERED AROUND the corner, only to run into more fire. He backed up and got lodged on a planter box, his SUV butting up against the front door of a house. He couldn’t see much through the windshield. Suddenly a wooden PG&E distribution pole fell, denting his hood with a massive bang. The elderly woman in his backseat gasped, her arms quivering. Norman didn’t know what to tell her. He was beyond offering comfort. He decided to gun over the power line, which was supposed to be de-energized. But then the line arced, still live. Norman cursed. He drove through a few more front yards, tearing up the dirt and grass, his vehicle getting pounded with rocks, picket fencing, debris. At least the car wasn’t engulfed in flames. His mapping system was updating slowly—too slowly, worthless. Norman wasn’t familiar with this part of town, wasn’t sure where to turn.

  Then somehow he ended up on Oak Way, a half-mile access road that ran north, paralleling the Skyway and connecting Bille and Wagstaff roads. He hadn’t even known the street existed. He made his way toward the Skyway and deposited the woman in the parking lot of a Walgreens, where firefighters had jimmied open the store’s door, grabbing fire extinguishers off the shelves and creating a temporary refuge area for residents. Like their terrified charges, other people across the Ridge were sheltering in their cars at a grocery store, a reservoir, a vacant storefront, a thrift store, an intersection—any place where they might be spared from roasting in their vehicles. “The fire is right behind me,” Norman told the firefighters. “Put people inside the Walgreens. Otherwise they are going to die in their cars.”

  Other residents were running down the Skyway, terrified, devastated, furious. Some seemed to be unfazed. A man wearing a backpack walked his Labrador on a leash, as if he were hiking along a trail on a warm fall afternoon. An old woman dragged a suitcase, the fabric fraying on the pavement. A woman tugged at her young son’s hand, urging him forward
. Too many people for Norman to help at one time. The decision whether to evacuate was deeply personal, with people often misjudging the danger they were in, especially when they lacked good information. Orders from government agencies got everyone moving faster. Without them, people tended to act according to their experience in the last wildfire, relying on an erroneous sense of knowledge.

  Psychologists have identified three distinct phases in a human’s response to disasters. The first is denial. Previous wildfires had brought a series of near misses to the Ridge, and the memory of these experiences was powerful, bringing with it a false sense of security. Denial was partly why people called friends and family members or scrolled indefinitely through their Facebook news feed instead of taking action. Others focused on their belongings, wasting valuable time cramming their vehicles instead of getting out. Facing the unknown, they found security in their possessions. Psychologists have found that at least 75 percent of people in a catastrophe remain frozen in this state of inaction.

  After denial came the second and third phases—deliberation and action. Though the Town of Paradise had practiced evacuating before, people often made irrational choices when it mattered. Like passengers in airplane crashes—who often ignore closer exits to follow the crowd—drivers mindlessly headed in a conga line toward the Skyway, not thinking of alternatives. They ignored other open roads and paused at red lights and stop signs, even though police certainly wouldn’t have ticketed them for blasting through the intersections. Others chose not to evacuate at all, overestimating their abilities and chances of survival. This sense of exceptionalism has come to be known as the Lake Wobegon effect, a term coined by a physician in the 1980s after he noticed that hundreds of elementary schools across the nation claimed their students were above average—which, statistically, could not be true. The elderly were particularly guilty of this thinking, because input from others did little to sway a lifetime of survived experiences. Disliking change and the hassle of an evacuation, they often underestimated a wildfire’s risk.