Thickets of gray pine, gutted by the firestorm and too weak to stand, crumpled around them as they sped through the forest. The four-wheeler juddered over volleyball-sized boulders. After about two miles, they arrived on the sloping lava cap. The men hiked downhill to the spot where Paul and Suzie lay. They hadn’t moved, though their eyes blinked open as the firefighters approached.
Paul’s skin was sloughing off, mottled red and black. Suzie’s burn injuries were oozing a clear liquid, soaking what remained of her clothing. They needed to get them to a hospital, fast. It was clear that they had third-degree burns, meaning the flames had scorched their skin through the subcutaneous tissue, damaging the delicate nerve level. The firefighters worried that if their throats were too scorched to breathe, the swelling could suffocate them. One of them cradled Suzie as he carried her to the top of the hill. Her long hair swished against his arms. He placed her on the back of Travis’s four-wheeler. Then he and his colleague returned for Paul. “This is going to hurt,” they warned, reaching for his arms and legs.
“Just take me,” he replied.
They carried him uphill, too.
The firefighters jury-rigged Paul’s quad into a makeshift ambulance, sandwiching the man between them. The screwdriver had been lost in the darkness, so they used a pocketknife to get the engine running. Travis drove Suzie.
“Paul’s medications are in the cooler,” she murmured. “And the last tomatoes from our garden. They’re the last two.”
Travis knew it had to be a big deal if Suzie was pushing this hard. He hobbled down to the boulder for the untouched tomatoes. Maybe they would give them something to hope for, the seeds of a new garden.
As they gunned back for South Libby Road, Paul and Suzie shrieked. Their cooked skin slid and shed every time the wheels struck a boulder or rattled over a downed tree. Paul tried to apologize.
“Yell and scream as much as you want,” the firefighter reassured him. “I’m sure it hurts.”
Reaching South Libby Road, the firefighters lifted Paul and Suzie into their tall engine. They would be airlifted to UC Davis’s burn center in Sacramento, where they would be treated for second- and third-degree burns. Travis didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. The engine departed in a roar, leaving him alone, standing alongside his quad as the fire burned on.
* * *
—
AROUND DINNERTIME, the Camp Fire came for Station 36. Embers rocketed into the mature timber around it, setting the canopy aflame. Captain Matt McKenzie, who had spent the past ten hours trying to stop the fire from crossing Highway 70, had been told to abandon those plans and save his station.
“Do not let it burn,” his chief had said.
The words echoed in his head. As he stood outside with his crew, McKenzie felt like he was on a motorcycle going 70 mph through a swarm of bugs without a helmet on—only it was the wind that was speeding and the bugs were firebrands. Across the highway, an Alameda County strike team was defending Scooters Café from certain destruction. Hidden behind a screen of tall pine, the Jarbo Gap station was about to catch fire too.
Inside, the crock pot remained on the counter, and the diced potatoes floated in their bowl of water. The French roast coffee grounds sat unbrewed in their pot—the failed beginning to their day. McKenzie thought of everything they had worked for as he looked up at his beloved station. Decades of protecting the land and the people, of being prepared for the worst, only to watch it burn. All of those years, and what was the point?
McKenzie and his crew fought to protect Station 36 as if it were any other building, pulling hose line out of their engines and hoping they didn’t run through the thousand gallons of water too fast. The Vietnam War–era storage building out back—with its dusty lawn mowers, chainsaws, paint supplies, screws—combusted. The wind swelled and crashed. Embers plinked against McKenzie’s goggles like hail, and detritus from the forest drummed against his helmet. The trees spat bark, cones, and sap at his face and singed small holes in his fire-resistant suit. It felt like an hour, though it was probably only five minutes.
The station had been saved.
Somewhere in the unending darkness, farther away than McKenzie could see, the remotely operated weather site tipped over and crashed behind its chain-link fence.
OBSERVATION: NIGHTFALL
Around 4 p.m., Sheriff Kory Honea gathered reporters for a press conference in the ill-lit basement of the main law enforcement office in Oroville. One journalist waited behind a blinking video camera and three more slouched in the front row. The rows of hard plastic chairs were otherwise empty. Most news outlets were focused on the Woolsey Fire, which was devouring mansions and mobile home parks in Malibu and threatening the homes of celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Chrissy Teigen.
Finally away from the front lines, officials collapsed into chairs or leaned against the wall at the front of the room. Among them were Paradise Police chief Eric Reinbold; Cal Fire unit chief Darren Read, who towered above the other speakers; Social Services director Shelby Boston; and county supervisor Doug Teeter. He lived on Rockford Lane, in a house built by his grandfather, and had just watched it burn before evacuating in a bulldozer. His face was coated in ash.
Honea stood at a podium in front of an American flag, staring out at the sparse audience. “Are we waiting on anyone else?” he asked the department spokeswoman. “We are only a minute out. Do you think we have anybody else?” The sheriff paused, then walked around the podium to lightly slap the back of a local reporter from his hometown newspaper, the Redding Record Searchlight, thanking him for coming. In the days to come, hundreds of journalists and TV news crews would stream into Butte County with big cameras and foam-wrapped microphones. They would pepper fire victims with questions about how they had survived and what their plans were. But for now, none of them had arrived yet.
“My name is Kory Honea, I am the sheriff of Butte County,” Honea began, leaning into the microphone and gripping the sides of the lectern. “Uh, today we want to give you the information we have at this point, with regard to the Camp Fire and what has transpired. I want to first say, this was a very serious fire. It was a rapidly moving fire. A lot of the information we have is still preliminary. I want you to understand that.”
He explained that the Camp Fire had left more than thirty-four thousand customers without power in Plumas and Butte counties and forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate Paradise. The blaze remained at 18,000 acres with no containment, he said, and it was making a run for Chico. There had been unverified deaths, he added. “We will get to those areas as soon as we can to check them out, but this is still a very active fire. Some of the areas where we are hearing the reports of deaths, we cannot get to safely. I can assure you, as soon as we are able to, we will. This is a significant crisis. It remains to be seen what the damage is.”
He shuffled the printed papers on the lectern, then added: “This is the fire we always feared would come.”
That day, Gavin Newsom was filling in for Governor Jerry Brown in Sacramento. Brown had left for Chicago that morning for the annual Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists board meeting—he had been named the organization’s executive chair—after a stop in Austin the previous day for an event at the LBJ Library. While Honea was speaking, Newsom declared a state of emergency in Butte County. And from its headquarters on Beale Street in San Francisco, PG&E dispatched a tweet: “PG&E has determined that it will not proceed with plans today for a Public Safety Power Shutoff in portions of 8 Northern CA counties, as weather conditions did not warrant this safety measure. We want to thank our customers for their understanding.”
KONKOW LEGEND
And these two good people ran and wandered for many moons, crying and nearly starving, until one day they halted near Anikato, which the white man calls the Trinity River. Wahnonopem had sent down the rains, the fire died out, the grasses were springing green again all over
the land, the birds were singing everywhere, and Anikato was full with the fish shining and swimming in its limpid waters.
In a sheltered nook upon its banks they made a little home, but they built a kakanecome first. As the moons waned and came again, little children grew around them as plentiful as the grains of sand near the great water; and one day, long, long after, Peuchano and Umwanata, having grown very old, gathered their children and grandchildren around them and told them that the Black Spirit of Death was coming for them soon, but that before they went with him they wanted to sleep in their old welluda, their ancestral home, where they had first seen the wildflowers blooming and heard the glad songs of the birds singing among the pines.
And the women, the young maidens, and the little children waded into Anikato, and made themselves pure by ablutions, and knelt upon the banks, while the old men and the young men went down into the kakanecomes and purified themselves with the holy fire, and they all prayed that Wahnonopem, the Great Spirit, might lead them on their way to their far-off welluda.
CHAPTER 16
UNCONFIRMED DEATHS
A few Chico police officers were slouched over their deli sandwiches at the command post at Butte Community College when Jeremy Carr noticed them. He approached, introduced himself, and asked what they had seen on that terrible morning. “It’s not good,” one of them replied, a respirator hanging loose around his neck. It wasn’t the words that made an impression. Maybe it was the way the officer’s face twitched or his voice cracked. Carr didn’t know for sure. The thirty-one-year-old volunteer chaplain understood in that moment that the devastation that lay ahead was greater than he could have imagined.
Carr worked for the Butte County Sheriff’s Office. His patrol uniform and badge allowed him into the closed circle of first responders: He could use their official radio and zip through California Highway Patrol checkpoints. But access meant only so much, and sometimes Carr felt extraneous. He didn’t have the practical skills of a detective. Rather, his role was to represent comfort, even to the nonbelievers. To let firefighters and police officers know that if they wanted to talk, he was there. His specialty was not disaster but its aftermath.
On Friday, November 9, the day after the Camp Fire sparked, the command post was frenzied. More than five thousand firefighters had arrived from as far away as Missouri and South Dakota. Trailers and industrial shipping containers of supplies filled the parking lots. The sky had taken on the hue of polished walnut, and the weather was chilly. Butte County was socked in by a noxious smog and the sun was obscured by ash, causing the temperature to drop and first responders to cough, their throats burning with every inhale. The Air Quality Index registered pollution above 500—ten times higher than the level considered healthy.
In San Francisco, the smoke was so oppressive that simply breathing was the equivalent of smoking eight cigarettes. Alcatraz Island and Muir Woods closed, and San Francisco’s famed cable cars stopped running. Half-marathons were canceled in Napa, Monterey Bay, Berkeley. “You can’t run in the smoke,” a race director explained to a reporter. More than 180 public school districts closed, keeping more than a million children at home—about one in six of California’s students. The state postponed its high school football playoffs. Paradise High had already forfeited. Hundreds of flights to San Francisco International Airport were delayed, and people wore N95 masks as they bustled about the Financial District.
A security guard manned the front entrance of Butte College, checking name badges and license plates. In-person classes had been canceled, as had final exams. Carr made the rounds, checking in with first responders. Who has the worst job here? Carr asked himself. Who is most likely to be traumatized? The full answer wouldn’t come until after firefighters had tamped down the blaze within Paradise. They had recently ignited a backburn—an intentional fire to starve the conflagration of fuel—in an effort to save Chico and Durham. Flames were chewing through vegetation in distant canyons and gullies to the east. The National Weather Service had announced more Red Flag conditions—an indication of extreme fire danger—in the coming days.
The Camp Fire was already historic, having nearly wiped the town of Paradise off the map in only four hours. The buildings and bodies were still being tallied, but fatalities were expected to break the state record set eighty-five years earlier, when twenty-nine laborers were killed in Los Angeles by the 1933 Griffith Park Fire, known as the Park Holocaust. The men had been doing landscape maintenance, earning 40 cents an hour—a good wage during the Great Depression—when a small brush fire trapped them in a canyon. “I saw between 20 and 25 men burned to death today, screaming and fighting for life in a tornado of fire,” a survivor had written in a firsthand newspaper account. “Terror-stricken, they leapt through the flames, continued on a few feet and went down in a welter of hot ashes and flames…. Some fought one another in blind terror and indecision. They had to fight something as the flames closed in.”
The true extent of the damage, however, remained unknown. Hundreds of reporters were fanning into Butte County to report on the fire’s aftermath; the turnout was so great that Sheriff Honea moved his ongoing press conferences to a smoky, low-slung building at the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds in Chico. He was doing interviews with journalists from as far away as China—becoming so well known that a clothing company would eventually sell $120,000 worth of T-shirts printed with a graphic of his face and the phrase HONEA IS MY HOMIE. (The money went to Camp Fire relief efforts.)
Soon Carr would join a search-and-recovery team tasked with looking for the dead. The team would comb the streets, hunt through ruined homes and cars, explore ditches and gullies. It was unrelentingly sad work, but it brought some fulfillment and meaning to the disaster. Tragedy, Carr knew, turned the human experience inside out and forced people to confront realities they never had to in times of prosperity. Trauma eventually came to everyone, in greater or lesser degrees. The trick was to notice the signs of distress: When a normally upbeat person shut down. When an introvert talked too much. When a leader drank to excess. How were first responders going to deal with this tragedy? What story were they going to tell themselves?
The chaplain’s task was to make sure rescue workers had the space to engage with the hard questions. Carr believed God had called him to this job, though at first he hadn’t understood why. He was physically commanding—big-boned and tall at six foot two—with a deep, reverberating voice. He had been raised in Monterey, and in high school his friends had elected him their campus chaplain—which surprised Carr at the time, since he didn’t think he prayed or read the Bible as often as he should. But the role, Carr realized, drew him out of his shell and forced him to engage more fully with others. He went on to earn a degree in biblical studies at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California and then studied at Fuller Theological Seminary nearby. Feeling God’s presence most keenly when he was helping others, Carr sought training as a chaplain in hospitals and hospices. At first, knocking on strangers’ doors felt akin to a crime, as though he were intruding on their pain, but he came to see that his presence was important. He learned to exude peace and acceptance. Emotions needed to be felt, he would reiterate time and time again.
He had wanted to become a military chaplain, but that role required church experience, and a job opening at Foothill Community Church in Oroville had brought him to Butte County in 2015. Carr now worked as an associate pastor, volunteering with the Butte County Sheriff’s Office to gain additional experience serving law enforcement officers. Carr had his own strategies to cope with the hopelessness that could rise like the tide when he bore witness to others’ pain: journaling, crying, talking to his wife, Grace. Or listening to Adagio for Strings, the haunting orchestral work by Samuel Barber that is often performed at funerals and public observations of grief. He would have to rely on those mechanisms again when he and the others finished the search for the dead. Picking through the soot was a lonely job that forced
first responders to swallow their emotions—but no one, Carr knew, could repress that part of themselves forever. Those in the field were already finding that out.
* * *
—
TEN MILES UP the mountain, every familiar place had been reduced to rubble and ruin. Much of the town was ash, from the downtown corridor to the country lanes. The Camp Fire had incinerated more than 18,800 structures and everything inside them, including the local history museum and its heirloom dolls, old mining certificates, antique shotguns, and a 54-pound plaster replica of the “Dogtown Nugget.” Nor did the fire spare what was alleged to be one of the world’s most valuable gemstones, the 500-pound, $280 million “Beleza Emerald,” which a local couple said had been stashed in their home safe. In Paradise, 95 percent of the commercial buildings and 90 percent of the homes—about eleven thousand—were gone. Another three thousand houses had been leveled in Magalia and Concow.
Search and rescue workers discovered that flames had played hopscotch, destroying entire blocks while skipping over random structures. On one residential street, a smattering of lemon and persimmon trees had survived. They dropped their fruit to rot on the road’s pocked macadam as the rest of the forest smoldered, releasing the musky scent of pine. The death toll—a number complicated by how little remained of the victims—rose and fell according to what workers could infer as they sifted through homes and vehicles. By the end of the search, though, it would stand at eighty-five people.
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