Paradise

by Lizzie Johnson

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  PG&E’S TAINTED TRACK RECORD was alarming not just to the general public. It also had a demoralizing impact on its twenty-three thousand employees, many of whom lived and worked in the very communities that had been devastated by its mistakes—some had lost their homes, too. Even so, many of the linemen, who could be seen driving through Chico and Paradise in blue company trucks, became lightning rods for people’s anger. “The people on the front lines don’t make policy,” explained Bob Dean, fifty-seven, who had lived in Paradise for fifteen years and was a representative at IBEW Local 1245, which represented about twelve thousand of the utility’s employees. “We just know that when something bad happens, we have to run and fix it. It’s crushing. PG&E probably caused the fire, and our guys are taking the blame.”

  By Christmastime, the simmering rage toward PG&E had reached a boiling point. Across Butte County, residents hurled trash at the utility’s workers. They spat and yelled. They slashed their tires and painted “85”—the number of the dead—in red paint on their vehicle doors. Hotels wouldn’t rent them rooms; restaurants refused them service. One employee said he’d had a gun pulled on him.

  Sitting in his blue truck at a gas station, Luke Bellefeuille held his breath as a stranger approached, hoping the other customer would pass. He found himself struggling to justify working for the utility. PG&E had been a good employer to the thirty-eight-year-old—it offered benefits, health insurance, and a retirement plan, a rarity in his hometown of Paradise. It had taken him many years to earn a spot at the company, scoring a job first as a painter, then in hydropower maintenance. Bellefeuille, who stood six foot seven, had been proud of his extra-tall uniform, his blue company-issued truck, and his civic-mindedness: roadwork, welding, flume repairs. But that was before he’d become one of 89 employees who had lost their homes in the Camp Fire, and one of 122 whose homes had been destroyed by PG&E-caused wildfires since 2017. The only trace of Bellefeuille’s property was the in-ground swimming pool. He and his girlfriend, along with her nine-year-old son, had only recently moved into their newly constructed dream home on the lower Skyway. Now, when they should have been celebrating the anniversary of their move, they found themselves homeless.

  Bellefeuille’s co-workers had reported being flipped off or sworn at by local residents. “We’re out here busting our butts every day, even though we lost everything,” Bellefeuille said. “And people treat us like this? We’re victims too.” He knew he had become a scapegoat for his employer’s failings—but he didn’t think he could quit. Paradise was all he knew. He had learned to fish in the Feather River and had ridden his first dirt bike through these foothills.

  And every December, Bellefeuille had sipped hot cocoa at Mountain View Tree Farm, then helped his father, a general contractor, chop down their prize pine and lug it home. But this year, he knew, would be different. Ash was drifting like snow across Paradise. The tree farm lay in ruin, the pines scabbed with charcoal. When a friend offered to let him join his company clearing destroyed lots, Bellefeuille stopped hesitating. He turned in his resignation at PG&E. He figured the career change was a way to give back to his hometown.

  The business manager of PG&E’s union wasn’t surprised. Over the past twenty years, Tom Dalzell had seen stress like Bellefeuille’s accumulate in many employees as “one crisis after another” eroded their faith in PG&E. “One San Bruno,” he said, “goes a long way toward undermining public confidence.”

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  AFTER TWENTY-NINE DAYS, it was time for the people of Paradise to return to their town. It was mid-December, and the Butte County Sheriff’s Office had sent a CodeRed alert to announce the news—the end of the evacuation organized by zones, just as it had begun. Only this time, the alerts dispatched properly. The text read: “The Butte County Sheriff’s Office, the Paradise Police Department and other agencies will lift evacuation orders at 10 a.m. for ‘Zones 3, 8 and 14’ along the Pentz Road corridor.” This had been the first area hit when the Camp Fire stormed through.

  Rachelle didn’t know how to feel. She had fled a neighborhood but was returning to a “zone scheduled for repopulation.” She tucked Lincoln into his carrier, pulling the blue visor over his face so the sun wouldn’t shine in his eyes. She wasn’t prepared to see her home again—or rather, what was left of it. As Chris started the Suburban—the same one he had driven the morning of the fire—she slipped into the backseat next to Lincoln and checked her phone. Chris backed out of the driveway of their friends’ house. Reindeer decorations stood on the front lawn, the grass limp and yellow. Christmas wreaths dangled in the windows, and lights looped the flagpole.

  A half hour later, after trying first to turn onto Pentz Road, which was still closed, Chris reached the town limits on the Skyway. He flicked off the radio. He and Rachelle noted a series of neon orange signs: DETOUR AHEAD! and ROAD WORK AHEAD! and ROAD CLOSED AHEAD! They joined a line of vehicles. California Highway Patrol officers herded them through a checkpoint in a church parking lot, making sure their driver’s licenses had a Paradise address, then handed them white hazardous materials suits in case they wanted to sift through the toxic rubble. An officer swiped orange paint on their windshield: proof they belonged. Storm clouds churned in the sky. Chris and Rachelle sat in silence. Lincoln was asleep, fists tucked under his chin.

  Near Pentz Road, the landscape became unfamiliar. Ribbons tied on mailboxes signified that the property had been checked for possible victims. Behind the new chain-link fence around Feather River hospital, orange and red leaves littered the parking lot. The berries spangling the bushes had been baked like raisins. The hospital was closed indefinitely; its thirteen hundred employees had been laid off. Chainsaws shrieked as crews felled trees along the streets, their limbs frosted with ash. Only a few blocks on, Rachelle recognized some markers of their old life: Trash bins lining the road. The Ace Hardware, its windows advertising a Christmas tree special that had already expired. On the left side of the road, the owners of one destroyed house had strung up a new American flag in the front yard. The flag was the brightest color for miles. Rachelle could see into the yards of houses that had once been cloaked by forest. In every direction, tiny figures in tiny white suits hunched over the remnants of their homes. In the vast openness, their pain seemed raw and glaring.

  And then they saw their house—or where it should have been. Rachelle knew it would be gone; she had already seen it burn on the day of the fire. The crepe myrtle saplings that Chris had planted that fall were now blackened twigs. So were the purple oleander, their thorns so sharp that they made rosebush thorns feel like butter knives. A mangle of bikes and bedframes lay scattered around the garage. Even the bathtub was unrecognizable. Chris parked and got out first, walking over to the house’s footprint and toeing the ruins. His boots crunched over broken glass and rusted screws. A pitcher’s mound, painted in white on the driveway, was still visible on the concrete, marking the spot where he and Vincent had once tossed the ball.

  “The whole wall fell in?” Rachelle asked, staring aghast at the garage as she stepped from the car. She left Lincoln to sleep in the SUV. Underfoot, the soot was as viscous as paste. The air reeked of smoke and chemicals. “Is this the window frame?” Chris didn’t respond. “I was okay until I saw the kids’ bikes,” Rachelle told him, laughing and then crying, dabbing at her eyes with a shirtsleeve, trying not to smear her mascara. “It doesn’t matter how much they tell you it’s gone. It’s different when you see it. I don’t feel like there’s anything left to search for.”

  They hugged for a moment. Rachelle knew her wedding bands were in the wreckage somewhere. She had taken them off a month before and stored them in her bedroom nightstand, after her fingers had become too swollen from pregnancy to wear them. But she knew she wouldn’t bother to sift through the ash, desperate to find what had once been so precious to her, only to find warped rings she couldn�
�t wear. Mourning her losses again seemed masochistic, like a fire’s secondary burns. What was the point?

  Rachelle spotted her elderly neighbors in the adjacent lot. They plucked decorative deer from their lawn and stacked them near the front steps, salvaging the few items they could locate. She returned to the Suburban and unbuckled Lincoln from his car seat. The baby’s forehead furrowed as she lifted him into the morning brightness. This was the home he was supposed to have returned to, the home where he was supposed to have taken his first wobbly steps under the dogwood in the backyard and learned to throw a baseball in the driveway. His siblings would have played board games with him in the “Motel 6” back bedroom. Outside in the summertime, they would have pointed out constellations to him, backs pressed against the grass. Grief catching in her throat, Rachelle turned her back on that now impossible future.

  CHAPTER 19

  REBIRTH

  On a Wednesday in early May, people waited in line at Paradise Town Hall. Filing past contaminated water fountains covered with hazard signs, they made their way to the window of the Development Services office, which was adorned with yellow streamers. They came loaded with questions and paperwork, seeking approval to install trailers on their burnt-out lots, or permission to rebuild, though the Town Council was still figuring out the requirements for new construction. “Can we make our town more fire-resistant and still keep it affordable?” Mayor Jones often asked herself in the months after the Camp Fire. She didn’t know the answer. She and her husband had purchased a house in Chico, beating out four other bidders, while they waited to rebuild themselves. New housing would at the very least have to comply with the stricter state building codes enacted in 2008.

  The members of the Town Council, burned out of their homes like everyone else, weren’t prepared for these existential challenges. They had recently voted to allow residents to live in travel trailers on their contaminated properties despite the health hazards, but FEMA had threatened to cut emergency funding and they had rescinded their decision, infuriating the community. “The amount of metals in that ash from asbestos could be dangerous,” said Bob Fenton, the FEMA administrator overseeing the wildfire recovery efforts. “I simply asked the question: Is it hazardous? Or is it not? If it’s not, then I no longer have the authority to remove debris from private property. If it is, I do.”

  Reminders of the tragedy were still easy to find. Residents talked of suffering from “fire brain,” and the landscape mirrored their ravaged emotional state. Shuttered convenience stations still advertised gas prices frozen at an appealing $3.27—while the current prices, now topping $4.00, presented an added hardship for those displaced and facing long commutes, like Jamie’s family. The roads in Paradise were rutted where vehicles had burned, and millions of tons of debris littered the gullies and ridges: rusted cars, liquefied play sets, mangled rebar, shattered glass. The state agency leading the $2 billion clean-up had cleared only 17 percent of the town’s lots. Paradise’s drinking water had been contaminated with cancer-causing benzene after the district’s pipes had melted; officials estimated it could take up to two years and $50 million to restore water service, a sobering testament to the wildfire’s reach—it had destroyed even the underground infrastructure.

  The fire had consumed the town’s tax base, and with customers gone, business owners didn’t know whether they would reopen. Thousands of residents had filed lawsuits against PG&E, hoping to receive some kind of settlement to help them regain what they had lost. A handful of litigators, who called themselves the Northern California Fire Lawyers, plastered billboards along the Skyway, and attorneys from as far away as Texas opened offices in Chico. They brought in Erin Brockovich, of the Hinkley contamination case, to speak with potential clients.

  Downhill from Paradise, cities on the valley floor struggled to absorb the overflow. The number of prescriptions filled at the Walgreens in Chico doubled, as did the number of driver’s licenses issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles office and the amount of sewage handled by Chico’s water district. Compassion for fire victims had given way to resentment on the part of those now inconvenienced by their presence. When Chico’s mayor and a councilman failed to support a state bill that would have accelerated the construction of new housing, bitter residents organized a recall effort, saying they had lost faith in the leaders’ ability “to guide the community” in the aftermath of the Camp Fire. Many more residents of Paradise left California altogether, as a housing official had predicted before Thanksgiving. They settled in places like Hawaii and Florida, or Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, even Micronesia, where they could leave the tragedy far behind. They would be counted among the 1.2 million Americans displaced by natural disasters in 2018.

  The ones who stayed—and who were standing in line for permits that day in May—faced the growing skepticism of urban planners. There was a sense that the usual calculus had changed, that fire-prone communities must discuss not only how to rebuild, as the Town Council was currently doing, but whether they should rebuild at all. Between 1970 and 1999, 94 percent of the roughly three thousand houses destroyed by wildfires in California had been rebuilt in the same spot—and often burned down a second or third time. Rebuilding was a difficult and daunting process, compounded by the high cost of construction materials and labor as well as the rush to meet the two-year deadline for payouts from insurance companies. One year after the 2017 Tubbs Fire, which had destroyed three thousand homes in Santa Rosa, only fifty-five had been rebuilt—less than 2 percent of those lost.

  In Sacramento, legislators had met at the state capitol earlier in May to discuss the fate of places like Paradise as part of Wildfire Awareness Week. It no longer seemed possible to ignore the destruction wrought in the past five years by drought, overgrown forests, a warming climate, and a vulnerable electrical grid. “We need to have that tough discussion,” said Ghilarducci, the former Oklahoma City bombing incident commander who now worked as the director of the state’s Office of Emergency Services, to his colleagues. “There are too many risks. It’s not just here. You’re looking across the country at climate-related disaster impacts—they are severe. There are communities getting wiped out time and time again, with lives lost, when they could have been prevented by not building in certain areas.”

  James Gallagher, thirty-eight, a Republican whose legislative district in the State Assembly included Paradise, wasn’t ready to abandon the town. Taking the microphone, he argued before his fellow lawmakers that barring development in certain places seemed rash. “If we say, ‘Here are the places in California we can build and not build,’ then I think we are missing a major point,” Gallagher said. “Should we deprioritize places that have earthquake risk? Should we deprioritize places that have flood risk? Because we are going to start running out of places where we can build.”

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  ON MAY 22, 2019, the Paradise Town Council held a special meeting to present its building plan to the public—and to hear from a PG&E executive. Thanks to donations from a local nonprofit, the council had enlisted the help of a firm, Urban Design Associates of Pittsburgh, that had assisted New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Before an audience of about a hundred in the Performing Arts Center, representatives from the firm flipped through a slideshow of neat neighborhoods whose electrical lines were buried underground—a feature that could stave off future wildfires. The images were computer-generated and pristine, the vision extravagant. The downtown would be walkable, and the business district would have an $85 million underground sewage system. Residents listened, wide-eyed. Though the state legislature had announced plans to funnel $31.8 million to fire-affected communities like Paradise, to restore lost property tax revenue, and to provide another $10 million specifically for Camp Fire recovery, the funds would not be nearly enough to cover this futuristic plan. “The town cannot afford this,” one man said bluntly.

  Then Jones announced the next speaker: “At t
his time, we’ll move on to item 1C, which is a presentation by Aaron Johnson from Pacific Gas & Electric Company on their future energy plans for the town of Paradise.”

  Johnson, dressed in khakis and a collared blue shirt, timidly approached the podium. The previous week, Cal Fire had released an official report that held PG&E responsible for the Camp Fire. The state agency had shared its findings with Butte County district attorney Mike Ramsey, who had already formed a Criminal Grand Jury as part of his investigation. Sworn in on March 25, the nineteen members—the number would eventually drop to sixteen after three people couldn’t make the time commitment—had been meeting every week in secret to review the evidence. Not even their friends and family knew of their task.

  Publicly at least, PG&E could no longer dodge culpability. Johnson, a former energy adviser to the California Public Utilities Commission and now PG&E’s vice president for electric operations, was the one chosen to face Paradise. He didn’t anticipate a positive reception. At a November meeting at Chico State University, he had been booed off the stage by angry Butte County residents—a searing experience. His cheeks had flushed redder than his hair.

  Meanwhile, at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, a fresh cadre of executives had arrived at the glass offices. Ten new directors had been appointed to the utility’s board, along with a new CEO, Bill Johnson, sixty-five. Johnson, who had taken the reins earlier that month, had previously led the Tennessee Valley Authority for six years. But he was best known for his tenure as the CEO of Duke Energy Corp.—a position he held for just a few hours before stepping down, just long enough to collect more than $40 million in exit payments. (When Duke Energy merged with Progress Energy, where Johnson was CEO, in 2012, he had signed a three-year contract to head up the new company. On the day the merger went into effect, he was forced to resign at midnight.)