Paradise

by Lizzie Johnson

  Despite the holiday, Butte County officials had already convened a housing task force. They had realized a new crisis was looming. The inferno had destroyed 14 percent of the county’s housing, and now there wasn’t enough to replace what had been lost. The rental vacancy rate countywide had been 1.5 percent before the Camp Fire. Now it hit zero. Like many places across the state, the local governments in Paradise and Chico had been slow to construct housing. In a good year, for example, the Town of Paradise had approved permits for no more than thirty-five new homes. Now Ed Mayer, the Butte County Housing Authority executive director, was grappling with the question of where people would live. “There is no availability in California,” he said.

  People were desperate. The day before the Camp Fire, 243 homes had been listed for sale in Chico. One week later, fewer than 75 remained on the market. Realtors saw offers come in at $50,000 above the asking price. In Chico, the median home price rose from $310,000 to $370,000. Rents skyrocketed. Even Paradise Police chief Reinbold had given up hope of finding something suitable, signing a lease on an apartment in a complex populated by college students. It was the only place with enough room for his three young children. His new neighbors openly smoked joints and partied on their balconies, unperturbed by his badge and uniform.

  * * *

  —

  THE THANKSGIVING DINNER for evacuees at Chico State was not nearly as well attended as organizers had hoped. There had been issues with the buses hired to shuttle people in from the dozen evacuation shelters. Still, firefighters—who had been sleeping at the fairgrounds to free up hotel rooms—arrived to help with the meal, gamely trading their unwieldy firehoses and heavy axes for serving spoons. They snapped on plastic gloves and covered their heads with hairnets, some trying to stuff ponytails under the webbing. They unwrapped metal trays of rolls, lettuce, and turkey, vegan and otherwise, along with pumpkin pies with delicate whirls of whipped cream that, within a half hour, had collapsed into runny dollops. “Hot, green beans, hot!” yelled a volunteer, edging her way through the crowd.

  Reinbold and other local figures and politicians stopped by the cloth-covered tables to eat with their fellow evacuees. Some brought their teenage children, who avoided the bright lights of television news crews—there to film a holiday segment—to hunch over their devices. A man in a Santa Claus costume hugged the smaller kids, who giggled and patted his white beard. Virginia Partain, sixty-four, bussed dirty plates from one of the tables. She’d lost her home on South Libby Road. She had photos of it saved on her phone, which she now took out to show a reporter. In one picture, the dogwood tree out front was festooned with red fall leaves. She took off her plastic gloves so she could scroll better. In the next photo, the garage door was crumpled on the driveway.

  “That’s my life now,” Partain said, shrugging. “I just want to feel normal again.” She had lived in a friend’s home office for a bit, then moved to a rental in Chico, but the losses felt unspeakable. Partain, a Paradise High School English teacher—one of the students’ favorites—knew she had to stop doing this, scrolling through photos of a home that no longer existed. She didn’t want to ruminate. She was dressed in the same clothes she had worn during the evacuation: tie-dyed socks and a tie-dyed shirt. Her purple hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail. Turning away, she left to clear more tables. Anytime she spotted her students eating with their parents, she gave them a big hug and called them “my babies.”

  And then she filled her own plate and rested. The cranberry sauce ran into the turkey and into the side salad. There were things to be thankful for, things she had forgotten you should be thankful for. Clean air, the acrid odor of burning homes replaced by cool mountain breezes and the scent of gravy. Her life, her health. Rainstorms that fell and tempered the flames. A plate of hot food steaming on the table.

  For a moment, she was full.

  CHAPTER 18

  SECONDARY BURNS

  Sheriff Honea thought he knew how to prepare for the nightly press conferences at the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds. Now forty-eight, he had worked in law enforcement for more than two decades, handling murder cases as a homicide investigator and then a deputy sheriff before being elected to his current role in 2014. He had a law degree and experience in the district attorney’s office, where he had worked as chief investigator. The previous winter, after the spillway on the Oroville Dam nearly failed and threatened to inundate the valley under a massive wall of water, Honea had called for a 188,000-person evacuation. Though controversial, the order had cemented his reputation as a decisive leader.

  But the Camp Fire was unprecedented, and it had stunned his home county. Residents were in the beginning stages of filing what would amount to 27,784 insurance claims. One small insurance company, the Merced Property and Casualty Company, would be forced into insolvency. The staggering figures didn’t include uninsured losses, which topped billions of dollars. Even those who had been lucky enough to have insurance worried about losing their coverage in the future. In Butte County, nearly six thousand homeowners had been denied coverage in 2018 because they lived in high fire risk areas. It was part of a trend across the state: Between 2014 and 2018, 340,000 customers in zip codes affected by past wildfires had been refused coverage. (In 2020, the California legislature would propose a law making this practice illegal.)

  Journalists and residents alike wanted answers. Every morning that November and December, Honea woke to the knowledge that he would have to face their questions at 6 p.m. During the day, he compiled notes and decided what information to share, his anxiety building until his daily 4:30 p.m. meeting with his investigators. There was no easy way to make sense of the eighty-five fatalities. Of the victims, twelve had been participants in the county’s In Home Support Services program, including Ernest Foss, the musician on Edgewood Lane. Despite the efforts of staff members to reach them, they had perished in their homes or while trying to flee, enduring horrific deaths. The official tally included only people who had died in the fire or directly from fire-related injuries, so those like Jeanne Williams, who died of a brain bleed on the helipad at Feather River hospital, weren’t counted among the victims. (Wrongful death suits against PG&E eventually included an additional fifty people who had died of interrupted medical care, smoke inhalation, or stress.) Honea worried about the long-term emotional impact of the tragedy, even on himself. “I wake up at 3 a.m. and lie awake, my mind running,” he later said. “There’s this general sense of impending doom.”

  Inevitably, the biggest questions always came at the tail end of each day’s press conference. Did authorities know yet why the Camp Fire had ignited? Who was responsible for causing such death and destruction? Honea didn’t have answers. Rumors were swirling that PG&E was at fault, and in early December, when the company submitted two electric incident reports to the California Public Utilities Commission, speculation reached a deafening pitch. The reports acknowledged outages on the Caribou-Palermo Line at 6:15 a.m. and the Big Bend Distribution Line at 6:45 a.m. on November 8—suspiciously close timing to the Camp Fire.

  Honea understood that the answer wasn’t so simple. The utility might have sparked the fire, but other factors had already transformed the Ridge into a tinderbox.

  Climate change was one of the biggest drivers. As temperatures rose and periods of drought increased, the state’s forests withered. Rainfall became erratic, and snowpack melted weeks early. Under these conditions, even the smallest blazes could mutate into a destructive megafire, exploding in size and intensity as they ripped across the parched landscape. Global warming had managed to change even the rhythm of lightning. Researchers found that strikes could double if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t reduced—significantly increasing the threat of uncontrollable fire. Overall, the amount of land burned in the West is expected to rise sixfold.

  But the state’s flawed forestry management had also played a role. By imposing a century’s worth of colonial fire
suppression policies, foresters had allowed the woods to become diseased and overgrown. Sickened by insects—mostly bark beetles—and packed too close together, more than 129 million trees in California died during the state’s recent drought. Rather than allowing low-intensity burns that might have cleared out this kindling—as Indigenous people have long practiced—nearly all fire was stamped out. Attempts at “prescribed” burning, or so-called “good” fire, failed at scale, slowed by the bureaucracy of permitting and complaints about smoky air. The risk compounded.

  And Paradise’s haphazard growth over the last century was also at fault—an act of willful disregard in view of its treacherous location. When George Bille, one of the town’s first prominent settlers, arrived in Paradise in 1909, the community was loosely parceled into generous tracts; the only structure on his 160-acre homestead was a wooden miner’s cabin. Bille cleared the old-growth oak and pine from his lot, seeded a barley field, and dug a well. But by 1960, after his death, his property had been parceled into tracts for seventy-five homes. Across the Ridge, builders carved subdivision after subdivision into the red dirt. The building regulations were minimal, applying only to properties that consisted of five or more parcels, at which point state zoning laws mandated the addition of a sewage system, sidewalks, and gutters. To skirt these rules, developers divided properties into just four parcels, selling the land to their friends and business partners, who quartered and sold them again, and so on, in an approach known as “four by fouring.” The Butte County Board of Supervisors, more interested in encouraging development in the city of Chico than in policing new construction uphill in Paradise, had allowed the town to expand without proper planning or infrastructure.

  “We just kept growing and growing, creeping and creeping,” remembered Dona Gavagan Dausey, who served as vice mayor on Paradise’s first Town Council in 1979. “It was like spider vein growth. Every time I drove down the street, I would find another road that I had never heard of before…. They were selling all of these quarter-acre lots for three thousand dollars. People were buying them up like pancakes.”

  The notion of limiting how people could build on their land was a relatively new one. In much of California, growth had always been a matter of manifest destiny. “The future of Paradise is absolutely assured,” read an editorial in the Chico Record in July 1908. “It is no longer a question as to whether it will survive. The only possible question is, how fast will it grow?” Development cut through forestland everywhere in the Golden State. Rural counties gratefully collected the property taxes for these new homes. By the time the California legislature voted in the 1970s for long-term planning, zoning, and environmental reviews to inform land use decisions, Paradise was already locked into place as a town as vulnerable as it was beautiful.

  For the most part, the population had been happy with the town’s indiscriminate sprawl. There were no rules, no requirements. No developer’s fees, no zoning. It had taken four attempts for Paradise to incorporate as a town before it finally wrested control from the Butte County Board of Supervisors in 1979. Its residents loathed government intervention and didn’t want the county making decisions for them. In 1991, voters had recalled the Town Council after it proposed establishing a downtown sewer district. In 2015, when the water district tried to increase rates by 30 percent—adding about $6 per household bill—two board members had been recalled, and a third was ousted in the next election. The district manager had been forced to take a new job in Chico. The architects of Paradise’s original General Plan bemoaned the lost potential of their town. They kept trying to compensate for past failures, only to face a community unwilling to commit to any sort of change, whether large or small.

  The hodgepodge growth of communities like Paradise was enabled, of course, by the spread of electricity. Following World War II, electrical lines ferried energy from hydroelectric plants in the Sierra Nevada to places where development hadn’t historically been possible. By the 2010s, one in four Californians—about 2.7 million people—lived on flammable land, a number that continues to skyrocket despite the inherent risk. (“There’s something that is truly Californian about the wilderness and the wild and pioneering spirit,” Newsom would later tell reporters as he explained why he wouldn’t block building in fire-prone areas.) California’s relentless hunger for energy had allowed PG&E to cannibalize other utilities until it became a monster conglomerate. The state grew too reliant on PG&E to be able to halt its expansion.

  And then PG&E became too powerful to halt at all.

  * * *

  —

  ON TUESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2018, Meredith E. Allen, the senior director of regulator relations for PG&E, submitted a supplemental incident report to the California Public Utilities Commission. In the report, Allen explained that PG&E had done an aerial patrol on the afternoon that the Camp Fire ignited and noted a flash mark—essentially a black scar left by the fire—on Tower 27/222. She declined to say when the tower had last been climbed for a detailed inspection—a fact important for deciding the company’s liability, and its fate. Legislators were considering whether the utility should be broken up or restructured. Newsom, preparing to assume the role of governor in January 2019, was threatening a state takeover—though in truth, few lawmakers wanted to deal with the headache of safely providing power to 16 million Californians.

  PG&E wasn’t ready to take official blame for the Camp Fire. Allen finished December’s supplemental incident report to the Public Utilities Commission by saying: “These incidents remain under investigation, and this information is preliminary. The cause of these incidents has not been determined and may not be fully understood until additional information becomes available.”

  The company’s attention was focused on a more pressing battle that was about to take place in a San Francisco courthouse—near the utility’s headquarters on Beale Street—over how victims of the Camp Fire would be compensated for their losses. Those impacted by the 2017 Wine Country wildfires were also still waiting to be compensated; they had filed about $30 billion in claims, sending PG&E to the brink of bankruptcy. In the days after the Camp Fire, the company’s stock had lost half its value. (Hedge funds had bought much of the downgraded stock, becoming the largest shareholders.)

  Already the public was expressing fury—not just with PG&E but also with the system that protected it. In late November, dozens of protesters from Butte County had driven to the Bay Area to speak during public comment at a California Public Utilities Commission meeting. They were disillusioned with a system that they thought protected PG&E. “This is the second straight year that we’ve had to choke on the carbonized remains of our neighbors,” a Chico resident remarked. “It’s evil, but it’s not illogical, because if you’re going to bail out PG&E, to provide public money to socialize their losses, what is their incentive to be safe? To act safely? There is none.”

  As PG&E was scrambling to save face, and damages, in court, Butte County district attorney Mike Ramsey had joined forces with Cal Fire to launch a joint criminal investigation into the utility. It was a tough challenge: Ramsey would need to impanel a special grand jury and present enough evidence to prove that the company had been “criminally reckless and grossly negligent.” Resulting charges could range from manslaughter to environmental crimes. If the utility pleaded not guilty, then the case would go to court—at a great cost to taxpayers, particularly if PG&E’s lawyers asked for the trial to be moved to San Francisco, where there was a greater chance of an unbiased jury.

  But Ramsey, seventy, wasn’t intimidated. Gregarious and grandfatherly, the owner of the meth lab tank turned aquarium had light blue eyes and bushy white eyebrows, as well as an acerbic sense of humor that could turn on a dime—a peculiarity that unnerved opposing attorneys. They could never tell when he was making a joke. As a young man, Ramsey had studied history, math, and physics at the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to his hometown of Oroville to work
as a substitute teacher, then as a staff writer at the local newspaper. After a stint as a court reporter, he had gone on to earn a law degree. He had been elected and reelected eight times in Butte County—the longest-serving district attorney in California history.

  For Ramsey, the Camp Fire had been personal. His youngest daughter, pregnant with her fifth child, had almost died while evacuating with her other four children from Paradise; her husband, a Cal Fire captain, had been helping out with evacuations in Concow. (Their infant son—delivered at home—was the first baby born in Paradise after the Camp Fire.) Paul and Suzie Ernest’s daughter, Arielle, worked in Ramsey’s office, and ten of his staff had lost their homes. Like every prosecutor, Ramsey believed in holding people responsible for their actions, and under California law, a corporation could be criminally charged just like an individual. (This is why PG&E had faced criminal charges for the San Bruno explosion in 2010, when its failure to turn off the gas in its broken pipelines eradicated a neighborhood and killed eight people.)

  Still, PG&E would be a tough plaintiff to hold accountable, because of its power and resources. Ramsey knew this from firsthand experience. He had spent much of the previous year mired in talks with the company’s attorneys about its role in igniting the 2017 Honey Fire, which had burned 150 acres near Honey Run Road and scared “the hell out of Paradise,” as Ramsey put it. The blaze had sparked when an untrimmed tree branch snagged a PG&E distribution line. On November 5—three days before the Camp Fire—PG&E had finally agreed to a $1.5 million settlement that would fund a four-year power line inspection program overseen by Cal Fire. Though Ramsey considered it a victory, PG&E had won too: It had avoided adding another criminal charge to its record and escaped the scrutiny of the feds, who were still monitoring the utility after the San Bruno explosion.