Paradise

by Lizzie Johnson

  Only fire engines and news crew vans now rolled through Paradise. They barely slowed down at the toppled stop signs. Downhill, checkpoints blocked the four routes into town, barring residents from entering the burn zone. A few homeowners waited at the roadblock sealing off the Skyway, wanting to know what remained of their houses, their town. Many more evacuees languished—exhausted and shaken—at shelters in Chico, hoping for good news from up the mountain.

  The police station on Black Olive Drive had somehow withstood the firestorm. Now officers gathered before their shifts in the station’s back room, dressed in the yellow fire-resistant uniforms of firefighters. They drank lukewarm coffee and compared the filthy air filters in their patrol cars, then left to protect a ghost town.

  Sheriff’s deputy Tiffany Larson, thirty-two, couldn’t pause to process the destruction while she had a job to do. The horror of the disaster was underscored by the desperate effort to find people who had not been heard from, a problem compounded by the downed cellphone towers. An unknown number of victims remained missing—at one point, the count surpassed three thousand. Larson, an investigator, had been chosen to lead one of thirteen search-and-recovery teams. Carr might have seen her at base camp: dark hair stuffed under a black Adidas baseball cap, thick-rimmed eyeglasses.

  Larson’s job was to look. For what, exactly, she was not always sure. Officials called the work she and others were doing “welfare checks.” The hope, fading day by day, was that the missing had escaped somehow and just hadn’t made contact with their loved ones. In Chico, flyers printed with their faces plastered storefronts and coffee shops.

  Larson led a team of three other sheriff’s deputies and a chaplain whose house had burned down twice before: once in the 2008 Humboldt Fire, then again in the Camp Fire. She drove across Paradise, guiding the caravan past shopping carts toppled in the Kmart parking lot and over tree branches that crunched under her tires. They drove over a downed electrical line, barely pausing. Several days earlier, such a power line would have been a big deal, demanding the placement of orange cones and a call to PG&E; traffic would have snarled. But no longer. At Feather River hospital, IV poles, gurneys, and wheelchairs cluttered the helipad. Ash whirled in the puddled water. All that remained of the cardiology wing were four standing walls. The ceiling was gone, the interior a heap of rusted metal. Mangled pipes and electrical wires were scattered on the ground like a massive game of pick-up sticks. The remains of white cinderblock walls marked ruined offices: human resources, marketing, information technology. Another half dozen structures had sustained severe smoke and water damage, including the cancer center, the outpatient surgery center, and the Birth Day Place. In the surrounding neighborhoods, wind chimes tinkled on a few front lawns. The ordinary cheerfulness of their tune was jarring.

  Larson parked at a mobile home park and got out of her SUV, instructing the men to follow. Their search, aided by a list of addresses, took them past compost bins set on the curb and campaign signs staked in the ditches. They picked their way through the first home, registering a mental list: Melted Rolling Rock and Heineken beer bottles stuck to the asphalt. Cans of vegetables so scorched and dehydrated that they sounded like maracas when shaken. The talismans of exurban life. And then, curved white shards on a box spring. “I think these are…” Larson trailed off, pointing at what looked like femur bones. “No, no, those are tack strips,” said a deputy from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, which was assisting in the wake of the disaster. He bent to look closer. This was his first wildfire, and he had never seen anything like it. “Bones have tiny air pockets in them.”

  Larson nodded and moved on. She was younger and more petite than the men she led, but she was from Paradise, and with her heritage came a certain authority. She had loved this community and known it long before it was reduced to an apocalyptic wasteland. When she spoke, they listened.

  They hadn’t found anything yet and didn’t particularly want to, even though they knew that finding a body could help a family desperate for answers. Larson thought of her home on Newland Road, also lost in the fire, as she dug through the rubble. She and her husband, Bobby, had bought it six years earlier. They had met at Paradise High’s homecoming dance her sophomore year, and that was that. They had been married for eleven years. Bobby worked for the Sheriff’s Office too. He was nights; she was days. Since the Camp Fire ignited, they had seen each other for only about ten minutes at a colleague’s home in Chico, where they were staying with their four dogs and two cats until they figured out what to do next. Larson’s whole family—Bobby’s side included—had lived in Paradise: three sisters, one brother, five brothers-in-law, and four sisters-in-law. Grandparents, too. Almost all of their homes had been destroyed.

  On Walnut Street, a man leaned over a fence, wearing a crew-neck sweatshirt that read ATTITUDE IS EVERYTHING. His was the only home on the road that had survived. The man hadn’t been able to corral his cat, so he had defied evacuation orders and stayed, risking his own life. “Does he realize he’s lucky he’s not in a coroner’s bag?” Larson grumbled. Nearby, she found a red rose, singed black around the edges. Fires were capricious in what they took and what they didn’t, and somehow this bloom had survived. “Hey, Sarge, I got this for you,” Larson said, smiling and turning to the deputy as she held out the flower. For a moment, he smiled too.

  The work was grim, though, and sometimes precarious. An investigator on another team had recently stepped through the brittle concrete lid of a septic tank and fallen into raw sewage. Thousands of damaged tanks were hidden beneath the ash. A crew usually started in the garage, where the burnt frames of cars rested on their axels, aluminum pooled around them like congealed cake batter. Then they sought out metal box springs, an indication of a bedroom. Stoves and freezers implied a kitchen, washers and dryers the laundry room. There was little else to go on. Larson and her team looked for clues at the Pine Springs Mobile Home Park, nestled behind the Hope Christian Church on Clark Road. The park had held about sixty trailers, mostly housing for elderly residents. Only three of the units had survived. Two people were still unaccounted for. One of them, John Digby, seventy-eight, was a retired mail carrier and Air Force veteran who had been home with a sore throat when the fire broke out. His son, who lived in Minnesota, hadn’t heard from him.

  At a unit nestled under tall pines, Larson spotted a white wheelchair lift, still raised. The porch steps were gone; the railing hung in the air, leading to nowhere. Under it, an orange tabby cat with singed fur lay dead on its side. “Theoretically, if they had gotten out and into their car, this would be down,” Larson said as she pointed to the lift.

  “Unless there’s another way out or someone took them,” the sergeant said. “But the pet is still here. The wheelchair is still here. The lift’s up. These are telltale signs.”

  “Yeah,” Larson added, “somebody is not going to push it back up when they’re trying to get the hell out.”

  The mobile home’s aluminum roof had collapsed and buried everything underneath it. The search team couldn’t go farther. Firefighter crews would have to return later with specialized machinery to pull the roof back, allowing forensic investigators with trained dogs to hunt for bone fragments, molars, dentures, surgical implants—anything to indicate the presence of a body. The specialized team in their gas masks, safety suits, and thick boots looked like astronauts on a moonwalk. Larson and her team didn’t have such expertise or equipment, so she tagged the home with special tape, signaling an incomplete search. She hopped into her SUV and crossed the address off her list, then turned onto the next block. At the intersection, she paused to let a hearse headed to the morgue pass.

  * * *

  —

  CARR SPENT SEVERAL HOURS with his team, also searching through houses. Now he needed to convince his colleagues—people like Larson—that it was going to be okay, that they would get through this tragedy. But he couldn’t say it like that; it w
ould sound trite. He needed to convey it somehow with his presence. After his team had returned to base camp, leaving the destruction in Paradise behind, Carr tried to make himself useful—but no one needed him quite yet. He found himself thinking about the dead. It was one thing to rob people of their possessions. But their lives? That was a whole other sort of senselessness. And in that moment, it came to him. You are a pastor, you pray over the dead all the time, Carr thought. Go to them.

  The makeshift morgue was set up in Butte College’s training facility, where students learned combat techniques on foam pads and took law enforcement classes. It had concrete floors and a big commercial bay with a roll-up metal door. A kitchen and a classroom jutted off the main room. A few officers were there, filling out paperwork that would remain with the bodies until they were driven to Sacramento for processing and identification. Brown paper bags, five-gallon buckets, and zippered body bags labeled with case numbers were arranged on the floor. Carr tried to imagine the lives of these people—the communities and the families they had left behind. Other chaplains were beginning the process of notifying next of kin. None had stayed behind with the victims in the cold training facility. “Would it weird you out if I prayed with the bodies?” Carr asked the clerk manning the front desk. The clerk shook his head.

  Carr knelt on the hard concrete. He had been raised to value extemporaneous prayer. When he bowed his head and tried to pray, though, the words wouldn’t come. He wasn’t sure where to begin.

  Over the next week, he would follow the same routine, spending a few minutes with each victim. Day after day, more bags and buckets would arrive, and Carr would feel horribly limited. Silence gripped him. He was reminded of the chasm between the world as it was and the world as it should be. He knew he was supposed to be a source of hope, but in moments like these it seemed impossible. There was no hope. He couldn’t find a prayer within himself. How am I going to show these dead humans love? Where are you, God?

  Then an answer emerged. Carr lowered his head. Under fluorescent lights, knees pressed into the unforgiving concrete, he prayed the Catholic requiem: “May everlasting light shine upon you,” he said. “May the angels lead you into paradise.”

  OBSERVATION: IDENTIFICATION AND HOT SAUCE

  After Carr finished his nightly prayer, the bodies—or more often just fragments of them—were driven ninety miles south to the state capital, where they were stored in a refrigerated semi truck in the parking lot of the county morgue. The building itself was full. The state’s Office of Emergency Services had called in Sacramento County coroner Kim Gin to help with body identification efforts. She processed seven thousand bodies annually, including many from smaller counties, like Butte, that didn’t have a dedicated facility. But even she was overwhelmed by the scale of this disaster. In the past nineteen years, she had processed, at most, five victims simultaneously—a fraction of the dozens coming from Paradise.

  To deal with the unprecedented workload, Gin set up makeshift processing stations on the receiving dock and called in more people to help. She repurposed coffee tables and covered cardboard boxes with plastic sheets. The stench of smoke clung to the remains; investigators hacked dryly from the carbon particles. Any piece of evidence found near the victim helped investigators assign a name: a wedding ring, a purse, military dog tags, an antique muscle car, a partially burned Social Security card. Paired with missing person reports, these remnants provided context as to who the victim likely was. Still, they didn’t offer enough confirmation on their own, and false identification was worse than slow identification. Sometimes all Gin had to work with were a few molars or bones. Or, in two particular cases, the soft tissue on a victim’s feet and a man’s carbonized appendage.

  Even matches that should have been straightforward were proving complicated. Of the eighteen dentists living in Paradise, ten had seen their offices burn down. Critical patient records had been lost. In the absence of dental information, Gin knew that any steel hardware with serial numbers—artificial hips, knees, shoulders—could prove helpful, since she could match the numbers to hospital records. The steel tended to be badly tarnished, so she relied on an old trick she had learned in school: soaking the devices in a natural corrosive—Taco Bell hot sauce. Her team grabbed handfuls of packets from the restaurant.

  Along with the identifications came the task of assigning causes of death. That, too, was a challenge. Unless she could test for carbon monoxide in the blood to prove that the victim had perished from smoke inhalation, the death was simply marked “fire related.” She taped large sheets of white paper to the walls of a conference room, one for each body—a floating cemetery of tombstone-like markers. On each sheet, doctors scrawled observations about a body in black marker. The cases were grouped by category: confirmed or unconfirmed.

  Gin and Honea hoped to provide closure to families of the missing within three weeks, by Thanksgiving—but forensic pathology, especially at this scale, takes time. (More than eighteen years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, about a thousand sets of remains still have not been identified.) To help the process, Gin accepted assistance from a company that offered its “Rapid DNA” technology for free—a first-of-its-kind collaboration following a mass tragedy. Richard Selden, the founder and chief scientific officer of ANDE Corp., flew in from Massachusetts. Many of the victims’ organs, which had burned at temperatures upwards of 1,500 degrees, were crispy but intact. This meant that pathologists could gather blood and tissue samples, which Selden’s team of technicians then placed in a microwave-sized instrument that parsed the DNA. Each scan took 104 minutes. They ran four of the machines simultaneously, the devices humming as they processed the samples. The soft tissue was so damaged that the technicians were not sure the specimens would register results—they planned to run tests on bones next—but, amazingly, the tissue delivered just the DNA answers Gin was hoping for.

  In Butte County, relatives of the missing stepped inside mobile laboratories to have the insides of their cheeks swabbed. The ideal DNA for a match was from a parent or child; more distant relationships made for less certain results. From there, scans of the swabbed material took ninety-four minutes to process. When two scans matched, the computer screen would flash a probability, such as 100 million to 1, indicating the odds that the match might be false.

  Identifications ticked up. The Department of Justice’s Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit helped gather samples, as did local police units. In one case, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police even volunteered their services. Gin would name forty-one victims by the end of November, missing her goal but making good headway. In the conference room, she moved more sheets of paper to the “confirmed” wall.

  CHAPTER 17

  MAYOR OF NOWHERE

  Less than a week after the Camp Fire roared through Paradise, the Town Council convened on a chilly Tuesday evening at the old Municipal Building in Chico. A white sticker had been smoothed onto the door of a first-floor office once occupied by the city’s Chamber of Commerce. It read: PARADISE TOWN HALL.

  The five councilmembers were in uncharted territory: without homes, without a workplace, without even email, because their server was down. In the interim, they had created a temporary account: townofparadisestaff@gmail.com. They couldn’t return to Paradise until search teams declared an end to the body recovery efforts. As teams like Larson’s sorted through the debris, linemen from PG&E were restringing electrical wires and Public Works crews were pushing toppled trees from the roads to make the town safe for habitation.

  The meeting agenda for November 13 had been set the day before the worst wildfire in a century had razed their town. Now Paradise’s leaders found themselves caught between two realities: the normality of the past and the uncertainty of the future. For the past few days, they had worked at the Emergency Operations Center, moved to the Chico Fire Training Center. A few of them had volunteered to help with a “windshield survey,” driving through the carnag
e to get an estimate of the number of homes that had been destroyed so staff could start applying for disaster and recovery grants. It looked more like a moonscape than a landscape. “It’s emotionally hard,” said Paradise Ridge Fire Safe Council chairman Phil John, who had once composed the “Wildfire Ready” rap, of the experience. “You look as far as you can see and there’s nothing. Everybody you know doesn’t have shit—not even their pets. Every time somebody asks, ‘Can you check on my dog?’ I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, but you don’t have a house. I imagine the dog is not there either.’ ”

  Now, about forty people, some of them Paradise residents and others from nearby cities showing their support, filed into the chamber. An emergency session to pass a resolution for spending public money had been tacked on to the opening agenda for the meeting, which would then continue as usual.

  Mayor Jones presided over the meeting, having recently won reelection with 4,417 votes. When the ballots were in, she had celebrated her victory at a fellow councilmember’s home, serving grocery store cookies and chocolate sheet cake to about thirty friends, as well as a reporter from the small local newspaper, the Paradise Post. Jones had sipped red wine that night as she chatted with her supporters. With diamond rings on each hand and polished nails, she was the kind of woman who celebrated with a single glass of Zinfandel. An avid hunter, she had considered hosting a dinner of homemade venison stew at her remodeled farmhouse, which was decorated with the taxidermied heads of exotic animals she and her husband had shot on an African hunting safari. She had done so after her previous win, but this year decided against the hoopla.