Tammy climbed inside the truck with her colleagues Chardonnay and Crissy, eager to drive downhill. The driver headed toward what Cal Fire’s Emergency Command Center had announced was now the safest spot to shelter in Paradise. The flames had already steamrolled past, after all, and diligent landscaping work had made the area less likely to burn again. Crissy looked at Tammy, confused, as they pulled in to a familiar parking lot. “We are supposed to be at Enloe,” Crissy said, looking around the gray campus of Feather River hospital. “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here!”
OBSERVATION: TEN THOUSAND FEET ABOVE THE FIRE
Nearly ninety miles south of Paradise, in the foothill town of Auburn, a California Highway Patrol plane rose into the air. Brent Sallis, thirty-eight, piloted the Australian-made GippsAero GA8 Airvan, while Joe Airoso, thirty-six, peered out the window. It was a clear morning, a touch windy, but nothing exceptional. Even their radio was quiet, unlike most days. Sacramento Police had requested their help tracking a murder suspect as he zigzagged across the state capital. They planned to hover above the grid of suburban homes, relaying the man’s whereabouts to officers on the ground. But as they lifted off from the municipal airport and headed south, an impenetrable fog seeped over the horizon behind them. From forty miles away, the smoke plume punched through the fall sky. Soon Sallis and Airoso were redirected to Paradise to assist with a massive new wildfire.
They whirred north, taking a half hour to reach the Ridge. Below them, Highway 70 carved through the valley and flames hiked up the buttes. As they neared Paradise, the smoke condensed, thick as milk, as it scudded along the mountaintops. They snapped on oxygen masks to breathe, then climbed to 13,000 feet—twice as high as they normally flew—to avoid the turbulent updrafts and minimize the ash filtering into the cabin. To Airoso, it looked like a bomb had gone off. “There was this huge column of smoke that was not moving, like a solid, physical object in the sky,” he would later recall. “It had dimension, black at the base and gray and white at the top. It smelled like everything was burning…. It looked like an apocalypse.”
Their eight-passenger aircraft was used for aerial intelligence. Faster than a helicopter and heavier than an air tanker, the airvan contained heat-sensing technology that was invaluable to firefighters on the ground. A thermal camera hooked to the aircraft’s belly could cut through the dark strata of smoke, offering a God’s-eye view of the terrain below. The camera worked by detecting the heat signature of the landscape. Radiation registered as a gray-scale gradient on Airoso’s computer monitor. The hotter the object, the paler it was.
Sallis steered the aircraft north. Seated behind him, Airoso toggled the camera’s joystick and studied the images flickering on his screen. Blowing embers looked like pinprick stars in the night sky, twinkling almost merrily. The computer program superimposed a map on top of the camera footage, so Airoso could see the name of every street in Paradise. His radio was set to Scan, switching between the frequencies of Cal Fire and local law enforcement agencies like Chico Police and the Butte County Sheriff’s Office.
But where is the fire? Airoso wondered.
On the screen, he saw traffic obstructing the four escape routes out of Paradise. The fire was everywhere—in canyons, along roadsides. The town was a maze, and in their panic no one could find the exit. On Clark Road, the wildfire had blackened the hillsides down to Highway 70 near Oroville, leading officers to hold back traffic needlessly. They surmised that the blaze must be below them, when in reality they needed to send the vehicles in exactly that direction, over the safe burnt-out land.
Meanwhile, thousands of people blocked the Skyway as a wave of white heat pushed toward them. Some of the cars on the northern stretch had already caught fire, kernels of white-hot silver on Airoso’s screen. Nobody was getting around the molten barrier. Thousands of feet below him, he could hear his 94 Highway Patrol colleagues communicating over the radio, their voices tight with desperation. The biggest problem, Airoso saw, was Highway 99. Three special response teams had been assigned to shut down every exit into Chico, but they hadn’t yet released vehicles onto the northbound side of the highway. They were worried that forcing traffic south to Oroville in both directions would cause a fatal collision—they didn’t realize no one was driving into Paradise at this point.
Airoso talked with the Highway Patrol’s dispatch center, trying to guide field commanders. They were distracted by the radio traffic. Airoso tried to raise his voice above the babble, but he was barely audible over the other conversations. At last, Highway Patrol division chief Brent Newman, fifty-two, who oversaw ten counties and four major highways across Northern California, overheard Airoso’s directions. He knew his high-ranking status would make everyone pause what they were doing and actually listen. “Just call it!” he bellowed to Airoso over the radio.
The line fell silent.
Airoso spoke into the sudden hush. “Let the lanes go on Highway 99. And send more people down Clark or Pentz.”
Below, as the flaming front advanced, a police sergeant at the back of the line on the Skyway was uttering his last prayer. Suddenly he saw the brake lights in front of him fade as traffic lurched forward. Gridlock broke and thousands of vehicles began flowing out of Paradise.
“Chief Newman,” Airoso said over the radio, watching the movement below with relief, “mission complete, sir.”
THE FIRE: PARTICLES OF POISON
By early afternoon, the wildfire had taken out the southern half of Magalia. It blasted the town sign standing on the roadside—MAGALIA, POPULATION 11,500—bubbling its green surface and leaving the text illegible. The blaze circled the historic one-room Community Church and scorched the three crosses staked out front. Along an elbow stretch of the upper Skyway, the waxy cones from McNab cypress trees—adapted to high fire risk climates—burst from the heat, their seeds freed after decades deprived of fire. The local Subway, the Dolly-“O” Donuts, the hardware store, all leveled. Flames skipped over the town’s only grocery store, Sav-Mor, and Jaki’s Hilltop Café. The wind blew ambient heat down residential streets, drying the homes so drastically that they ignited under the assault and coughed toxic smoke. Already, 20,000 acres across the Ridge had burned.
More than 3.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and noxious gas puffed into the atmosphere, the equivalent of all the pollution produced by the state’s factories and traffic in a week. An invisible siege of water vapor, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide dispersed in the pall, mixing with the toxins from cleaning solutions, insulation, plywood, carpet, furniture, electronics, rubber toys. The fine particles measured less than 2.5 microns—about one-fifth the size of a particle of dust—and lodged themselves inside every living creature, causing irritation with each rasping breath.
The soot rolling off the wildfire poisoned people from the inside out, burning eyes, inflaming throats, and stinging lungs. The carcinogenic chemicals crossed into the bloodstream and stressed the heart. Scientists had only recently begun to study the long-term health impacts of wildfires, running tests on housecats that had been trapped in fire zones. They had found that cardiac arrest for humans was as much as 70 percent more likely to occur on smoky days. And the amount of wildfire smoke in California was only expected to double in the next century, along with the number of deaths due to chronic wildfire smoke exposure. In the United States, smoke claimed twenty thousand victims annually.
But the fire was undeterred. Roiling and fuming and seething, the blaze clawed north.
CHAPTER 14
PARADISE ABLAZE
The brake lights ahead of Kevin dimmed, and traffic moved forward. Roe Road, with its drooping oak and pine boughs and tangled brush, lay ahead. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he saw the two teachers huddled together in a single seat. He didn’t like seeing them so upset. “All right, girls, we’ve got a job to do!” he hollered.
Mary, her prayer finished, darted forward
and crouched by his seat. Her eyes were bloodshot from the six hours she had spent in the smoke. Even inside the bus, the air was hot and ashen. Earlier, Abbie had told Mary that she was worried they would lose a kindergartner to smoke inhalation or carbon monoxide poisoning. Maybe Kevin would have an answer. “Hey, Kevin,” Mary said, “the kids are starting to pass out. They can’t breathe. What should we do?”
Kevin slithered out of his polo and yanked his undershirt over his head, tossing it at Mary. She held the undershirt gingerly. “Tear it into twenty-five squares, so we each have one,” Kevin explained, pulling the black polo back over his belly. He put his foot on the brake and showed her how to rip the cotton undershirt into rags. “We’ll douse it with some water, and the kids can use them as masks.”
Mary shredded the thin shirt and handed the cloths to Abbie, who pulled a half-full plastic bottle from her purse—the only water on the bus. She dampened the masks before dispensing them to the twenty-two children and instructing them to hold the fabric over their mouths. “I want you guys to suck on the rag a little bit,” said Mary. “It’ll make your throats feel better. But I have to warn you, I don’t know when bus driver Kevin last washed his undershirt!” The students giggled.
Abbie walked down the aisle with the last dregs of water, giving each child a sip. She would have loved some herself: Her chest ached, her head swam, and each intake of breath scratched her throat like gravel. But she had to save as much as she could. Someone might need it more.
Mary took over to give Abbie a second to rest. As she walked down the bus aisle with the bottle, she tripped, spilling the precious water. “Kevin, I need to get off this bus to get more water,” she said as she returned to the driver’s seat.
“I’m not letting you off. It’s way too dangerous out there,” he said, eyeing her in the rearview mirror.
“I don’t care, Kevin,” Mary replied. “We need water.”
He knew she was right. He opened the door with a huff, and she descended into the darkness.
Feeling her way along Roe Road, Mary bumped into a tall, rangy figure. He was a young man in his twenties who had abandoned his car to see why traffic wasn’t moving. Inked with tattoos, he appeared to be part of the populace that many locals had taken to calling the New Ridge: harder-looking adults who lived in trailer parks on the outskirts of town and were known to struggle with addiction.
“Do you have any water?” Mary asked, uncertain how he would react. “I have twenty-two kids on a bus, and we need it badly.”
His smile was bright in the gloom. “Let me check my car,” he said, cutting back through traffic.
A few minutes later, he reappeared with two plastic bottles. They were crunched and nearly empty, as if they had been rolling around his floorboards for a year, but they contained some water. His generosity felt staggering. “Thank you,” Mary said, squeezing his arm.
She returned to the bus, climbing through the door to Kevin’s whoops and cheers. It hadn’t gone far: Every ten minutes or so, the bus would shudder forward an inch, if that. They had been trapped on Roe Road for more than an hour, though they were only half a mile from merging onto Neal Road, which promised a direct route to Oroville—and safety.
Mary and Abbie were resoaking the rags when Kevin noticed an older man hosing the shingles on his mobile home. He asked Mary to hop off the bus to fill up their three water bottles one more time. Mary complied, feet crunching across the desiccated grass. Reaching the man, she held out the three bottles and asked if he would fill them. “Of course,” he replied. She returned to the bus, doling out the water, then rushed back for one last refill. “How many kids do you have?” he asked. She told him and he ducked inside his home, returning with a half case of water bottles. He handed the flat to Mary without a word.
“If the bus catches fire, can we come huddle with you?” Mary asked.
“Sure,” the man said, splashing more water onto his roof.
“Mary,” Kevin yelled to her. “Get back on board!” The bus was creeping forward, and though they weren’t going that far, he didn’t want her out of sight. Mary sprinted back. They were careful not to spill any of the precious liquid again. Mary took the rows behind Kevin; Abbie took the other side. They drizzled more water into the children’s tiny mouths, which opened and closed like goldfish’s. Their lips were chapped from the smoke, and their faces were pink with exertion. The students did whatever was asked of them without complaint, though they were exhausted. The fire outside had heated the metal bus up like a pizza oven. Mary estimated that it had to be at least 100 degrees. The children were sweating through their clothing. One little boy had undone the pearl buttons on his flannel shirt, exposing his pale, bare chest.
A few rows back, ten-year-old Rowan Stovall couldn’t tear her eyes away from the bus window. The days of fishing for bluegill at the Aquatic Park, baiting them with dandelions, seemed like a thing of the past. She feared there would be no more collecting crystals or skipping rocks at Paradise Lake with her mother, no more karate or horseback riding lessons. Rowan was tough. She never cried when she skinned her knee or bit her lip—she had been raised with male cousins—but she couldn’t hide her emotions if someone hurt her feelings. She loved animals with a tenderness that her mother found humbling: She doted on their three cats and tracked the speckled fawns that munched on their lawn in the evening. Now, as Rowan stared out at the burning forest, she saw a deer trapped by a burning log. Its spotted body stumbled forward, then slumped to the ground, overtaken by flames.
* * *
—
ACROSS TOWN, snared on narrow Oak Way, Cal Fire captain Sean Norman turned onto the town’s paved bike path, which paralleled the Skyway. Other drivers were making the same decision. The Paradise Memorial Trail was carved into a five-mile strip of donated land. The route had once been used as a rail line by the Diamond Match Company, transporting timber to the valley floor until the Southern Pacific Railroad halted operations in 1974. One of the few remaining depots was located in Paradise Community Park.
In September, the Gold Nugget Museum board had gathered at the historic site for a ribbon cutting ceremony, celebrating the conclusion of a $1.3 million trail renovation. A length of the trail had been renamed in honor of Luther Sage “Yellowstone” Kelly, an early Paradise settler and the subject of a 1959 film starring Clint Walker. The museum had installed thirty-one plaques on the trail to commemorate other noteworthy pioneers like him. At the ceremony, the audience had been filled with the smiling faces of families with young children. Now those same families were waiting in roasting cars and the trail had become an impromptu evacuation route. Norman followed the wide path until he hit a parking lot, merging back onto the Skyway near the Walgreens.
The area Norman was responsible for was mobbed. He needed to get people moving downhill. He drove northeast for a half mile, checking on the intersection of the Skyway and Wagstaff Road, where officers had told people like Jamie and Jill to abandon their vehicles. This decision, Norman realized, had trapped everyone to the north behind a blockade of cars. The gas stations on each corner were overrun with people. The wildfire tossed hot embers down their shirts, and the skin on their arms was red and swollen—the telltale sign of a burn injury. One woman patted her curled blond hair, which smoked. Dark clouds gusted overhead. Norman retreated to the Walgreens, past a car that had caught fire with its driver still inside. The blaze had torched the houses behind the drugstore. The dumpster, stuffed with cardboard boxes and wooden shipping pallets, was an inferno.
At Walgreens, the engine stationed in the parking lot was running dry. Norman sent some firefighters inside to rip extinguishers from the store walls. “What do we do?” asked a local cop. “Just keep sending people in,” Norman replied. “Do not let this building catch on fire.” About a hundred people were now sheltered inside. He recognized a pair of buggies surrounded by men dressed in orange instead of the standard-issu
e firefighter yellow: two teams of prisoner hand crews that had managed to beat their way uphill against traffic. This crew was from the Washington Ridge Conservation Camp in Nevada City, near Norman’s hometown.
Minimum-security inmates accounted for as much as 40 percent of California’s firefighting force, saving taxpayers about $100 million annually. The inmates were paid $2.00 daily, plus $2.00 hourly when they were dispatched to a wildfire—a fortune compared with the wages for jobs inside state prisons, which paid 8 to 37 cents per hour. And for each day in the program, they received a two-day reduction in their sentences. Though critics said that the program essentially amounted to slave labor, the prisoners were an invaluable source of manpower, with 218 crews in 29 counties across the state. One Cal Fire division chief likened them to the Marines of the fire service.
The bands of prisoner firefighters were led by two captains whom Norman knew well. He often went kayaking and whitewater rafting with them. They directed the crews to start clearing brush and digging firebreaks, ringing the Walgreens with a bare patch of dirt. As soon as the roads opened up, one of the captains told Norman, they planned to transport civilians downhill in the crew buggies.
Paradise Page 22