Across the room, analysts sitting at computer keyboards studied the sixteen screens on the wall, which relayed everything from weather forecasts and pressure gradients to satellite images and footage from wildfire cameras. A few screens displayed maps that showed, in red and purple swirls, the elevated levels of fire risk across the state—high and extreme danger. Directly behind the employees, through a row of windows overlooking the bay, sunshine glinted on the choppy water. But no one was paying attention to the view. On the front wall of the room, in big blue letters, a sign read nothing is more important than the safety of our communities!
PG&E adhered to the Incident Command System, like Cal Fire and the Town of Paradise. This meant that in a building next door, the company’s Emergency Operations Center—activated when something had gone terribly wrong—would soon open as well. Employees were already being diverted from their normal jobs to staff the EOC; they would work in twelve-hour shifts until the Camp Fire was contained. This room was white and looked to be freshly painted, with a hundred computer terminals organized into rows. Off to the side was a meeting space labeled the “Huddle Room.” In the EOC, everyone wore a vest of some kind to represent their role: red for meteorology, hazard-orange for external visitors, black for the CEO, and green, of course, for finance. Though the existence of the center projected order and control, in reality there was very little the utility could change or contribute at this point.
By the end of the day, they would need to have some idea of what had caused the Camp Fire—and what role they had played in it. PG&E was required to submit an “electric incident report” to the public utilities commission within two hours of an issue occurring in its system. The rule applied to any event that might have been caused by its infrastructure if it had resulted in a fatality, inflicted damage greater than $50,000, or drawn significant public attention. From January 1, 2017, through December 20, 2018, the utility submitted 131 reports, 86 of which were related to fire.
Streams of data flooded across the computer monitors. The electrical grid indicated that more than 34,200 customers had lost power because of the Camp Fire. At 10:36 a.m., PG&E had turned off natural gas service to Paradise, affecting 12,000 customers. Even more ominous—possibly implicating the company—an outage had registered on the Caribou-Palermo transmission line at 6:15 a.m. The timing seemed to correspond with the ignition of the Camp Fire. Company leaders hoped to get a helicopter up to examine the line soon.
It was nearly noon. PG&E had already missed the two-hour window for issuing its report.
* * *
—
THE FIRE REACHED THEM, a flash of brilliant light in the black sky. Travis watched in horror as Paul and Suzie vanished into the flames, screaming. I’m next, Travis thought, sprinting downhill. He crouched behind another boulder—just in time. The main fire front passed overhead, the rock taking the brunt of the heat. Bits of flaming grass swirled around him. Voracious tendrils of fire reached for his body, singeing his clothes.
Travis leaped through the remaining flames to the scorched area that had just burned. The edge of the lava cap was a dark line in the distance, marking where the canyon dropped off. The Paradise Ridge had been formed after Mount Lassen exploded 65 million years ago, sending layers of lava more than a hundred miles south. The magma had calcified into a series of gently sloping ridges. Then, during the Ice Age, geological upheaval had tilted the land. Across the Sierra Nevada, powerful rivers carved V-shaped valleys in the foothills. The Feather River and Butte Creek whittled away at the table that would become known as Paradise, etching its steep-walled canyons for millennia with the patience known only to water. Travis was now standing near the edge of another ridge. On a good day, he could see past the county seat to Table Mountain near Lake Oroville—but not on this morning.
The blackness was disorienting, a bank of smoke rolling around him. Orange suffused the air in patches, delineating land and sky. Tall pines stood out against the supernatural glow of the wildfire, swaying from side to side, embers flickering in their branches. Travis noticed that Paul’s quad—about a hundred feet uphill—was starting to smolder. He couldn’t imagine that his friends hadn’t survived. They would need the vehicle to ride to safety. Besides, Paul loved that thing. Travis hobbled up the incline, intent on putting the fire out. The plastic milk crate where Paul stashed his gear was already melting. Travis snuffed the flames, knocking the screwdriver that Paul used to jump-start the engine onto the dark, rocky ground. He paused to record a video of the scene on his cellphone, because he didn’t know what else to do. On the screen, the world became smaller and more manageable. It was 11:29 a.m.
Travis was terrified to return to where he had left Paul and Suzie, terrified of what he would discover. He walked back downhill toward the boulder. They were still there, a heap of limbs and blackened clothing. Paul had tried to shield his wife’s body with his own, but Suzie’s pants had melted off and her shoes had liquefied. Several inches of her golden hair, streaked with silver, were charred. Paul’s new leather boots, which he had bought two weeks earlier, were plastered to his shins, his feet baked into their soles. The yellow and orange shoelaces were shriveled on the ground, nestled among buttons from Suzie’s shirt. They were talking to each other quietly, Travis realized.
Paul’s arm twitched. He was trying to put out the fire near them with the strawberries from their cooler. “Are you okay?” Travis asked, approaching. They were alive—for now. He stared at Suzie’s feet. He could have sworn she’d been wearing shoes when they left Edgewood Lane. Travis knelt and gathered ice packs from the Igloo cooler, placing them on his friends’ hot skin. Seeing Paul contort with pain, Travis ran uphill and ripped the seat off his neighbor’s quad. He brought it back, settling Paul in the recliner so he wouldn’t have to lie on the hot lava cap, which was sharp as razors. Strawberries scattered the ground, and he fed Paul some of the sweet fruit, trying to pull him back from shock. His gibberish wasn’t making sense. Tears streaked his face; Travis had never seen him cry before.
The couple were too injured to drive. Suzie couldn’t stand on her burned feet, and when Travis reached for Paul’s hand, the skin slipped off in his palm. He would have to leave them in order to find help. He knew he was their only hope: If he stayed, first responders wouldn’t know how to locate them. Travis looked at his friends through the smoke, deliberating. Suzie caught his eye and whispered: “Don’t forget about us. Promise you’ll come back.”
KONKOW LEGEND
Over fields and valleys, across the dry streams and the mountains, the flames scorched the dry, parched earth, burning the trees and melting the rocks, with the people fleeing in terror before them. But the flames were faster, and everything that was alive—the game and the wild beasts and even the birds in the forestland and all the Konkows but two—was destroyed.
Peuchano, so named from his great sufferings, was a kindly, pious man, and he and Umwanata, his mate, had always thanked the Great Spirit for his kindness to them, and he remembered them even in the great fire. The flames came roaring toward them like wild beasts, but they rolled away on every side as if pressed back by an invisible hand—the hand of Wahnonopem, the Great Spirit.
CHAPTER 12
THE LONGEST DRIVE
The sky crashed around Chris as he searched for Rachelle, the smoke swallowing his windshield and whistling through the vents of his Suburban. He’d decided to get back in the car and head to Chico, hoping he’d find his wife there. Now he puttered forward on access roads, trying to ignore the storm surging outside. The plastic taillight covers wrinkled from the heat. He called everyone he thought might have information about evacuees, including his sister-in-law, who was a nurse at Enloe Medical Center in Chico, and a close friend whose wife processed medical records at the same hospital.
Chris’s phone pinged with an incoming call. It was Stacey Zuccolillo, the wife of Rachelle’s ex-husband. She was sitting on the Skyway, three c
hildren crammed in the backseat of her Toyota 4Runner: her daughter, Aubree, along with Rachelle’s Aubrey and Vincent. She connected the call to her Bluetooth speaker so the little kids could hear his voice. They were excited to meet their baby brother later that evening. Chris told them their mother and Lincoln were okay. “On their way to Enloe,” he said firmly. He couldn’t tell them the truth: that he didn’t actually know where they were or whether they were safe. Before Stacey could switch the call off the speaker, though, Chris paused and continued in a different voice: “Hey, Stacey? I actually can’t reach Rachelle. Can you help me find her?”
Aubrey’s and Vincent’s eyes grew as big as moons. They looked at each other, shaken. They knew that they weren’t supposed to have heard this news. They had just left behind their councilman father, who was directing traffic on the Skyway, and now their mother was missing. What if they never saw either of their parents again? Stacey promised to help Chris as soon as she could, but there was little she could contribute while trapped in Paradise. People ran alongside her SUV, their backpacks bouncing with each stride. In the distance, there was orange light in all the places orange wasn’t supposed to be. Even during their short call, the fire had lurched closer.
Chris tried to dispatch a text message to Rachelle: “I wish you were with me.”
* * *
—
DAVID FLIPPED HIS NISSAN around and headed east toward Pentz Road, pushing against the direction of motionless traffic. He and Rachelle didn’t make it far, easing into the parking lot of a liquor store near the intersection of Bille Road, where they had a little more space. The market was white-walled and spare, its name printed in block letters above a Bud Light poster. It offered little protection—but at least it hadn’t caught fire. Firefighters spritzed water over the cars parked on the road, but the water was quickly running out—the irrigation district’s water tanks had bled dry. In the span of a few hours, 9.5 million gallons of water had disappeared. The engine crews continued trying to siphon water from the dried-out hydrants.
Firefighters handed out bottled water to those snared in gridlock, reaching through the partially opened windows with a smile. Their faces were smeared with sweat and ash—and something less tangible. Rachelle had never seen grown men look so shell-shocked. She accepted one of the bottles gratefully, pouring the liquid into her mouth. Her tongue was scratchy and dry. Lincoln gazed up at her, his blue eyes unfocused. With his narrow nose and blond fuzz, he reminded Rachelle of her daughter. David hopped outside again, kicking away the pine needles and leaves gathering beneath the tires, and then drove the car in a circle around the parking lot. By nosing into southbound traffic on Pentz Road, he hoped to be among the first to leave the convenience store when traffic started moving. Maybe they could find another route.
They waited.
David noticed Rachelle’s IV bag askew on the floor mat. He picked it up and tried to get the saline solution and medication flowing again: He traced the cord, made sure the clamps were open, and hung the IV from the rearview mirror—but there was no pump to force the pain medication into Rachelle’s veins. David’s job didn’t involve patient care, and he wasn’t sure how to proceed. He left the car again. “Is there a nurse here by chance?” he asked, speed-walking over to a group of people huddled on the shoulder of Pentz Road. An older woman raised a gauze-wrapped hand and said she was a retired nurse. She had only one eye, David registered with surprise. She walked with him to his Nissan and leaned over Rachelle, examining the line. She managed to get the solution pumping again, but before she could plug the port back into Rachelle’s arm, police officers interrupted them.
“Everybody get back in your cars and follow us—now!” they roared, leaving no room for argument. The fire was approaching again. The one-eyed woman waved goodbye, turning back to her own car. David and Rachelle followed the syncopated blue-and-red lights north on Pentz Road. They were among the first in line. One of the officers turned west onto Wagstaff Road and pointed them toward the parking lot outside Kmart. It was the biggest store in the shopping center, which also housed a Dollar General, a Save Mart supermarket, and an Allstate insurance office.
Firefighters had turned the parking lot into a temporary refuge area, or TRA, a place to shelter when escape was cut off. First responders had learned from previous fires that last-minute evacuations were often flawed—and more likely to kill residents than if they simply waited in a safe place for the flames to pass. The tactic had been tested by Forest Service ranger Edward Pulaski more than a century earlier, during the “Big Blowup” of 1910. Forced to shelter in an abandoned mineshaft as fires raged across Idaho, he and forty-five others had lain facedown on the ground to avoid inhaling the superheated gas, which could roast their lungs and sear their throats shut. According to legend, Pulaski had hunched near the entrance with a loaded gun to prevent the panicked firefighters from fleeing to their deaths.
In the past decade, sheltering in place had become a matter of policy in another country familiar with wildfires: Australia. Citizens were offered a choice: shelter in place or leave early, otherwise known as “stay or go.” (An alert during the 2020 bush fire siege, for example, read: “You must take shelter before the fire arrives. The extreme heat is likely to kill you well before the flames reach you.”) The government ran educational campaigns that trained Australians to fireproof their homes and safely hunker down within them. Residents were encouraged to purchase sturdy leather boots and nonflammable clothing and select a room with at least two windows or exits.
But it wasn’t a perfect system. After the 2009 Black Saturday bush fires killed 173 people in the state of Victoria, Australia had reexamined its shelter-in-place policies. Many of the victims were found within their ruined homes or on their lawns, having made a last-ditch effort to escape. At least fifty-seven people had hidden in bathrooms—among the worst spots to seek shelter, because there are generally fewer doors and windows to serve as vantage points or exits—and thirty-seven of them had died. The government was sharply criticized for not having adequately articulated the dangers of staying at one’s home. A report published by the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission emphasized that leaving early was always the best option.
In the United States, firefighters urged residents not to defy evacuation orders. But in the event that early evacuation wasn’t possible, some communities did have designated public TRAs—like an athletic field or place of worship—that were less likely to burn. In the 2003 Cedar Fire in San Diego County, thousands of people gathered at Barona Casino after escape became untenable. During the 2008 Tea Fire in Santa Barbara County, residents sheltered in a college gymnasium. As the Woolsey Fire was surging across Malibu, people were congregating at Pepperdine University.
Paradise had two designated gathering points: Paradise Alliance Church and a parking lot outside the 765-seat Performing Arts Center. In addition to those spots, thousands of people were also assembled at ad hoc shelters, including the parking lot outside Kmart, where David and Rachelle were headed. People packed the lot outside the big-box store, tipping their heads back to study the dark seam of smoke in the sky. Shopping carts were flung on their sides on the pavement, tossed by the wind. Dogs jerked at their leashes. The Kmart smoldered, threatening to ignite under showers of embers, but the lot was strangely orderly, even peaceful. People were polite, waiting obediently for instructions. As firefighters knew, people panicked most when they were alone, feeling trapped and helpless, separated from others. The crowd of locals might have been stuck at Kmart, but they were stuck there together—and with friends and neighbors they recognized.
David pulled onto the road shoulder before the shopping center’s entrance. He didn’t want to get trapped in the lot with his vulnerable passengers. While he explained to a firefighter that he needed to evacuate to Enloe Medical Center in Chico, Rachelle stared out the window and tried to bank her diminishing hope. She adjusted Lincoln in her arms, rememb
ering the evening she and Chris had told his daughters about the baby. Rachelle had nearly spilled the news while they were in Missouri for her stepdaughter’s college graduation. She had managed to hold back, not wanting to diminish the young woman’s accomplishment. In private, Chris had already started joking about the timing. He would roll his eyes in mock despair: As soon as he had finished raising his two children, he discovered another one was on its way. They had waited to share the news until his daughters were back in California, making the announcement over a white-tablecloth dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant. The girls had squealed, overjoyed at the prospect of a baby brother. It seemed like so long ago now.
David yanked the sedan out of park, pitching forward. “We’re going to follow him back to the hospital,” he said, with a weary smile. Returning to the Feather River campus felt like defeat, but at least they could find medical care there. As they headed south on Pentz Road, Rachelle scanned the wreckage outside for her home. Many of the trash bins had liquefied, now just blue and green stains on the curb. At her address, only a brick chimney towered in the air. There was nothing else left. The boxes of baby supplies stacked in the foyer, gone. The dresser and crib set, the throw rugs shaped like baseballs, gone. The game room, dubbed Motel 6, which Rachelle had hoped to convert to a master bedroom, gone. Four generations of her family history, lost. The sight took her breath away. She leaned forward to record the scene on her cellphone, the landscape passing in a blur of brown and gray. The grass was scorched in Rorschach splotches. At the end of the driveway, miraculously, the bins were intact.
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