“Um, thank you for having me,” Aaron Johnson began, staring out at the packed auditorium. “I’m going to admit to being a little bit nervous here tonight.” Chuckles rippled through the audience. “I do want to start on a personal note and just say, I’ve been up here representing the company since the fire…. As you all know, I’m sure, Cal Fire announced last week that it was determined that our electrical transmission lines near Pulga were the cause of the Camp Fire. While we have not seen the full report yet, we accept this determination. This news is a weight that we carry, and all PG&E employees feel that burden.” Johnson gripped the microphone. “It wasn’t unexpected. From the outset, we have tried to be as transparent as possible that our lines may have caused this fire…. So, as I stand in front of you here tonight, on behalf of my company, I want to apologize for the role our equipment had in this tragedy. Nothing I can say in front of you is going to undo that, and I know that. We also understand it creates an obligation for us to do the right thing for this community.”
Johnson thanked the first responders who had risked their lives during the Camp Fire and announced PG&E’s new Wildfire Assistance Fund, a $105 million program intended to help those who had been displaced by wildfires in 2017 and 2018. The utility, he announced, also planned to spend the next five years installing a new underground electrical system in Paradise—a small piece of the plan that an observer had earlier deemed too expensive. At this news, the Town Council stood in a show of support. “We don’t deserve that, but I’ll take it,” Johnson joked. “Our new CEO, Bill Johnson—no relation, unlucky for me—came up here during his first full week on the job. One of the things he did was have lunch with a group of our employees who lost their homes in the fire.” That group, the vice president said, had only one request for the CEO: that Paradise needed to be rebuilt in a way that made it safer and more robust. PG&E was going to try to make that happen, he finished.
Residents lined up for public comment. For Warren Harvey, the utility’s newfound contrition did little to temper his bitterness. “I’ve been a resident here since 1947, so if you don’t agree with me, that’s okay, but I got here first,” Harvey began, addressing Johnson. “Here’s my problem with you. You’re going to underground the power lines, but you’ve already cut down seven trees on my property that were over a hundred years old. You didn’t need to kill the value of my property. Now that you have decided that you’re involved, just make me whole, and I’ll be happy. Get your checkbook out—my name’s Warren Harvey—and I’d love to see a check from you.”
As a chorus of boos arose, directed at him, Johnson looked overwhelmed. “I hear you,” he replied.
* * *
—
JUDGE WILLIAM ALSUP had his own plan for making PG&E confront its negligence. After Aaron Johnson’s visit to Paradise, the judge, who was responsible for overseeing PG&E’s probation for the San Bruno explosion, ordered all of the company’s executives and board members to tour the Camp Fire burn scar. Their guide, District Attorney Ramsey, organized the stops. Privately, the two men called it the Tour de Ashes. Ramsey hoped company officials would be swayed into doing the right thing for the people of Butte County after witnessing the damage caused by PG&E’s neglected infrastructure.
Earlier that year, Judge Alsup had learned about the settlement the company had brokered with Ramsey over the Honey Fire. Alsup was livid that the company had evaded responsibility once again, and so in late January 2019, he had summoned PG&E’s attorneys to his chambers at the Northern District of California court, near San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, for a dressing down. The utility had recently appeared in the same courthouse to fine-tune the details of its bankruptcy protection, but on that midwinter morning, its attorneys instead headed to Courtroom 12 on the nineteenth floor. The room had high ceilings and wood-paneled walls. The air conditioning blasted. Alsup, seventy-three, liked to keep his chambers cold and his audience alert.
“Every time I ask you to admit something, you say you’re ‘still under investigation,’ ” Alsup said to PG&E’s legal team. “Usually a criminal on probation is forthcoming and admits what they need to admit. You haven’t admitted much.” He reminded the lawyers that the company was still on probation until at least 2022. That probation, he ruled, had been violated when PG&E sparked the Honey Fire in Butte County and didn’t properly alert its probation officer. As punishment, Alsup was considering whether to force the company to implement an expensive and sweeping new wildfire prevention proposal. “Now, we need to say another thing,” Alsup said, raising his eyebrows pointedly. “Climate change and global warming make it a lot worse—or at least worse—and so [does] the drought…but the drought did not start the fire. Global warming did not start the fire. According to Cal Fire, PG&E started them, all of them. So that raises the question: What do we do? Does the judge just turn a blind eye and say, ‘PG&E, continue your business as usual. Kill more people by starting more fires’? I know it’s not quite that simple, because we’ve got to have electricity in this state, but can’t we have electricity that is delivered safely?”
Kevin Orsini, a $1,500-an-hour attorney from a prestigious New York City law firm, stepped to the front of the chambers. At forty, he had dark, wavy hair that had begun to retreat. He leaned in to the microphone, talking quickly, trying to make his points before Alsup could interrupt, as he tended to do. “We have an inherently dangerous product, is the fact,” Orsini acknowledged. “We have electric running through high-power lines in areas that are incredibly susceptible to wildfire conditions…. PG&E understands and accepts that it has a credibility problem. Which is why I couldn’t stand up here and say to Your Honor, ‘Trust us. We’ve got it.’ ”
Alsup looked pained. “What troubles me,” he replied, “is…come June 21—I’m unofficially saying that’s the start of the wildfire season and it will run to the first big rain in October, November, or December…six months, and it will be dry as can be and the fire season will be on us and the emergency will be on us, and will we be seeing headlines ‘PG&E has done it again, started another fire’ and some other town has burned down?”
“We share that concern, Your Honor,” Orsini said.
Five months later, Alsup—not so convinced by PG&E’s “commitment” to change—arranged for the Tour de Ashes. Now the group boarded a nondescript white bus and ascended into the foothills. The excursion was conducted under such secrecy that not even Paradise’s councilmembers were initially aware it was taking place. Alsup didn’t want any distractions. No media, no cameras. And certainly no self-congratulatory press release from the PG&E public relations team.
First stop: Jarbo Gap. The group of about thirty-five got off the bus at Scooters Café, where they heard from several Concow residents. The wildfire was more destructive than anything they had ever seen, said resident Peggy Moak. After PG&E electrical lines fell and blocked the main evacuation route out of Concow, she and her husband, Pete, had chopped them apart with an ax, not knowing whether they were electrified, to help their neighbors escape. Now she was worried that her beautifully rugged community would scatter and disappear completely. For Sale signs flecked the residential streets around the reservoir. Moak saw more of the signs with each passing week.
Next, the group headed to the Paradise Performing Arts Center, and on the way, Ramsey played video footage from first responders and residents as they fled for their lives, synchronizing the bus’s route with the depicted locations. The driver stopped in front of a ruined hillside home on Norwood Drive. Ramsey flipped to a ten-minute 911 recording from three generations of women: an immobile grandmother, her daughter, and her disabled granddaughter. From the Emergency Command Center in Oroville, a Cal Fire captain listened to the Hefferns—Matilde, sixty-eight, Christina, forty, and Ishka, twenty—die in the exact spot the PG&E executives were now looking at. “Ma’am, can you get out of the house?” the captain asked Matilde on the recording. It was 9:19 a.m. “
We can’t breathe,” she said. “Please help us.” He told her to try kicking through the wall or going to the front porch to wait for first responders. Help was on the way, he promised. Matilde’s daughter and granddaughter moaned and screamed in the background. The matriarch, breathing heavily, explained that every door was on fire and her skin was burning. “Don’t leave me,” she said. “Please, please, sir, please. Are we going to die?” The line crackled. “Are you in the house?” the dispatcher asked. “Are you out?”
He never received an answer.
The bus began moving again. At a mobile home park near Feather River hospital, Sheriff Honea boarded. He showed the executives a photo of what remained of the three women: a small, clear bag filled with bone shards. Ramsey shared the story of another victim, a woman who had refused to evacuate her trailer—located in the park they were sitting in—without her cats. One of his investigators had finally succeeded in persuading her to leave, only for her to slip out of his hands and run back into her home as it burst into flames. Weeks later, the same investigator had had to return to collect her remains.
What the group wasn’t told, but might have read in the papers, was that twelve more burn victims—among them Paul and Suzie Ernest—remained in serious condition at a specialized burn center in Davis, that dozens of people had sought refuge in a lake, and that one man who had died remained unidentified, and would be for years, if not forever, his remains unable to be returned to his family. And lately, a rash of suicides and heart attacks had taken out community leaders. The fire had gone cold, but the disaster continued.
At the Performing Arts Center, the board ate sandwiches from a local food truck, Camp Fire BBQ. A group of residents lined up to talk, including former mayor, and self-described “former town drunk,” Steve “Woody” Culleton, schools superintendent Michelle John, and the general manager of the irrigation district, Kevin Phillips. John described the trauma the students had endured, how their lives were forever altered. The teachers were the glue holding the children together. “How do you build a town without water?” Phillips, of the water district, beseeched them. Butte County Sheriff’s Office investigator Tiffany Larson, who had spent weeks picking through the rubble for bodies, told them her home was gone—and how could that be, when she had always felt safe in the middle of Paradise? She and her husband likely weren’t coming back, she added, because the cost of rebuilding was too high.
Cellphones jingled. The first Public Safety Power Shutoff of the summer—an electrical blackout like the one in Calistoga in 2017—was about to begin. Seeing the executives glance down at their phones, Steve Bertagna, a Paradise Police sergeant, lost his temper. “What the hell are we?” Bertagna asked them. “Some third-world country that when the breeze blows, we have to turn off the power? We’re the fifth-largest economy in the world!” Bertagna had joined the force seven years earlier after serving as the mayor of Chico and running a small business selling stereos. At fifty-four, he had invested himself in the community, determined to serve others in any way he could. He waved at every child from his patrol car and promised to give “every little old lady a hug if she needed it.” Now Bertagna was tired of hearing chipper people say Paradise was “surviving and rebuilding.” His department had been gutted, and it wasn’t okay. “Can’t you people fucking deliver power safely?” he yelled. His audience was quiet, their cellphones silenced.
Later that afternoon, the bus dipped down the Skyway and descended to the valley floor, heading south to San Francisco. In the spongy soil along the roadside, the executives caught their last glimpse of Paradise—eighty-five memorial crosses, staked in a row.
* * *
—
SPRING, THOUGH, had brought new hope. Volunteers planted thousands of hyacinth and daffodil bulbs at the entrances to Paradise. The pine sapling that had been donated for the town’s tree lighting ceremony in December grew taller. The post office reopened, along with the Holiday Market, Starbucks, and Ace Hardware. Three dozen physicians from Feather River hospital joined the staff of a small health clinic downtown. The VFW hall, in the process of being reroofed, had plans to resume Wednesday night bingo.
Nature regenerated, healthier for the burn. In the ashes, a medley of wildflowers thrived: poppies and scrambled eggs, wild oat and St. John’s wort, scarlet Indian paintbrush and fluted lupine. They ran up the hillsides and bunched in bright splotches around the remains of front steps and along picket fences, growing in places where they never had before. Trees pushed new green shoots through the earth. One couple had planted a new pine sapling in the hollowed trunk of its predecessor. A black bear cub lumbered through the forest and nosed for blackberries in the brush. Mosquitoes multiplied in puddles; they had never been so populous. The red-legged frogs were uproarious in their evening chorus.
And the seniors of Paradise High were about to celebrate their graduation. Faith Brown, seventeen, could hardly wait. Before the wildfire, she had found Paradise stifling. Sometimes, when she took a date to a restaurant, the waitress would text her father that she was out with a boy. “Give him a hard time,” he would reply, because he didn’t want his daughter to date until she was older—when she had a college degree and he was in a nursing home. She had grown up on June Way, near the Mountain View Tree Farm. While many of Faith’s classmates had planned to go to Butte College, she had spent the previous year eyeing Oregon or Colorado, where no one knew her and there were bigger universities.
The fall semester had seemed as if it would end on a good note. At five foot nine inches, Faith was petite for an outside hitter, but she could jump and helped the varsity volleyball team go to the state playoffs. She was smart—she had skipped kindergarten—and received mostly A’s and B’s. After school, she worked at the Boys and Girls Club assisting younger students with homework, and on weekends she and her friends roamed Paradise freely. They knew every hiking spot and swimming hole on the Ridge. They walked on the railroad tracks near the flumes and watched sunsets from Lake Oroville. When there was nothing else to do, they piled into Faith’s green Subaru Outback and drove around looking for unexplored roads.
But then came the Camp Fire, and all that changed. Faith was living with her parents at the DoubleTree hotel in Sacramento; her mother didn’t want to stay in Chico because of the traffic congestion and the people with glazed-over eyes who wandered around like zombies, traumatized by the wildfire. Faith slept on an orange fold-out couch with springs that dug into her back. Her parents slept in the only proper bed. There was a dresser with three drawers; they each got one for their few belongings. They washed the dog dishes in the bathroom sink and ate at Denny’s most nights. Disagreements got blown out of proportion. Faith wished she had a door to slam and a place to be alone. She longed to be with her friends, who were staying in trailers and hotels in Chico, but her mother wanted the family to be together.
On Instagram, some of Faith’s classmates posted photos from San Francisco, Davis, and San Jose. They had moved without saying goodbye. Faith found solace in music, compiling playlists of country music with songs like “What Happens in a Small Town” by Brantley Gilbert and “You’re Gonna Miss This” by Trace Adkins. She named one playlist “Paradise,” another “Home.” When she drove around Chico, Faith could almost pretend it was still possible to turn onto the Skyway and navigate to her old house. On social media, she posted photos of the Paradise she had known: the historic Honey Run Covered Bridge, which had burned down, and the duck pond where she had posed for prom photos the previous year in a form-fitting black gown, her arms around two friends, both in red.
Faith’s final semester of high school felt endless, robbed of normal milestones. In the spring, it was tradition for seniors to pick a night to watch the sunset, then have a massive sleepover together in the parking lot. There was also prom, graduation. Would her diploma even say Paradise High School? She didn’t know. After the wildfire, school officials had scrambled to lease vacant warehouses an
d office buildings in Chico. Classes had first been held in a former LensCrafters store at the Chico Mall, where canned holiday music echoed in the tiled hallways. The students called it Mall School. Then, in January 2019, Paradise High had moved into a cavernous office building near the Chico Municipal Airport, where Faith now reported every day. Students nicknamed their new quarters the Fortress because it was on Fortress Street.
Some days, it felt like she was moving at 65 mph, unable to take in the passing landscape. Her parents offered to make an appointment with a therapist, but she wasn’t ready. “Are you OK?” friends kept texting her. “Yeah, I’m OK,” she would reply. Then it would hit her—how she wasn’t okay at all. How she had driven alone through six hours of flames and seen the McDonald’s where she had ordered McFlurries after school catch flame, along with the church she had attended as a child and the Dutch Bros hut where she had worked. How she felt older. And how she desperately missed the little town she had once hoped to leave far behind.
* * *
—
BY MAY, AT LEAST one of Faith’s wishes had come true. Her diploma would carry the name of her longtime high school. In early June 2019, 220 seniors came together to graduate on Paradise High’s football field, part of a treasured tradition. Volunteers arranged white chairs on Om Wraith Field for the students, and parents sat on the metal bleachers, clutching programs that listed their children’s names. They had anticipated this moment for so long. The seniors clustered on the turf, a sea of green and white gowns, the boys in creased khakis and the girls with lipsticked mouths and curled hair stiffened with hairspray. Students always seemed older on graduation day, but this group had grown up particularly fast, matured by disaster.
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