That the ceremony was even taking place was a small miracle. Schools superintendent Michelle John had pulled off the impossible. The very features of Paradise that residents had cherished—the isolation, hulking trees, sloping hills—had greatly complicated the clearing of burned lots, and Paradise High had been closed for the past 210 days. Undeterred, John had fought her way through the bureaucratic red tape to make graduation at the school happen. (Her success would feel deeply bittersweet three days later, when her husband, Phil John, the chairman of the local Fire Safe Council, would die of complications from a heart attack—likely compounded by the stress of the Camp Fire—sustained during a bike race. He was a half mile from the finish line.)
The evening was perfect. Golden light filtered through the charred pines. Principal Loren Lighthall, forty-six, paced near the stage in his signature black Crocs. The students arrived in two uneven lines, converging with fist bumps, elaborate handshakes, explosions of confetti, and long hugs, before filing into the folding chairs. They wore leis made of folded dollar bills. Lighthall moved to the podium, testing the microphone and shuffling papers. The audience broke out in cheers: “Lighthall! Lighthall! Lighthall!” “They’re talking about you, Lance,” he joked, scanning the rows of seniors for the face of his seventeen-year-old son. “Welcome and good evening, graduates, faculty, and friends. I am Loren Lighthall, the proud principal of Paradise High School.”
He paused. It would be his last time saying these words. Over the past two years, Lighthall and his wife, along with their seven children, had become integrated into a community they adored. But after their 2,200-square-foot home had burned down, they realized they couldn’t afford, emotionally or financially, to help rebuild what was lost. Lighthall cherished his students: He had attended every sports game and stocked his office with candy and granola bars so that teenagers would drop by and chat. He was proud to count rodeo champions, beauty queens, and the only National Merit Scholar in the region among his senior class. But that spring, his job had begun to feel increasingly untenable. The daily trauma and his family’s cramped apartment in Chico were too much to deal with.
Paradise High School hadn’t burned down, but some of its storage buildings for sports equipment and uniforms had, and the main building had sustained smoke damage. About four hundred pine trees on campus were at risk of toppling at any moment. Enrollment had dropped by half, and normal classes weren’t expected to resume until August 2019. More than 90 percent of the district’s thirty-four hundred students had lost their homes, as had dozens of teachers and several school board members. After school, most students drove to temporary homes as much as an hour away, like Faith, or crammed into thirty-foot travel trailers. Lighthall knew that many families were waiting out the semester before making the decision to move permanently. They had one foot in each world, straddling their old life and their new one. Some of Lighthall’s students hadn’t even known what address to type on their college application forms. When Lighthall announced his resignation, it made the Sacramento evening news.
That morning, eating some celebratory egg burritos with seniors in the cafeteria, he had started to feel pangs of regret over the decision. Students he’d known for two years flooded into the cafeteria. The building felt different, smaller and quieter, after their long absence, and smelled of dust and citrus cleaning solution. Outside, crews had painted the bleachers and watered the flowers, which had been planted in the shape of a P, on the lawn. Dead pines had been felled, sawdust hanging in the air. Volunteers had set up the stage where Lighthall now stood, looking out on the students he loved.
The crowd quieted, and after Lighthall, other speakers climbed onto the stage. There was Bob Wilson, a San Diego businessman who had written every student, teacher, administrator, bus driver, and custodian a $1,000 check after reading about the Camp Fire in his local newspaper, and Sheriff Honea, of course. A few students spoke too. They remembered Mall School and the Fortress and the weirdness of seeing airplanes from their English classroom. The sky drained of color as the graduates snaked across the field, Faith among them. She had decided to attend college near Paradise after all. Airhorns blared from the audience. Lighthall handed diplomas to his students, and then to his son—a moment he would watch on a video recording a half dozen times in the following weeks.
“Graduates, please stand and face the audience,” the principal said. “It is with great honor that we present the Paradise graduating class of 2019!” Mortarboards flew through the air. The seniors rushed off the field, scattering confetti in their wake. The Camp Fire had ended life as they had known it—and now graduation would do the same. Lighthall watched as they folded into the backseats of family minivans and friends’ sedans to leave, wishing that graduation wasn’t ending, wishing that he could stay. He waited an hour longer, until he was the last person on the field.
OBSERVATION: ANNIVERSARY
On the anniversary of the Camp Fire, more than fifteen hundred people crowded the parking lot of the old Bank of America branch in Paradise. Only 2,034 residents had returned—a fraction of its population of 26,500. Governor Newsom had reclassified the town as a “rural area.” There were two grocery stores, three gas stations, and five restaurants. Most establishments closed by 7 p.m. The ruins of scattered houses puckered the ground.
Around 10:30 a.m., the microphone clicked. Mayor Jones announced that the ceremony was beginning. Officials like Representative Doug LaMalfa planned to speak. Though LaMalfa’s congressional district had been repeatedly struck by climate disasters, he maintained that global warming wasn’t real. “The climate of the globe has been fluctuating since God created it,” he had said during a candidate forum in Redding earlier that year. But LaMalfa, often wearing his signature white cowboy hat, his graying goatee neatly trimmed, was never one to miss a press opportunity.
As Jones finished speaking, there was a ruckus from the Skyway.
“We can’t hear you,” a resident shouted at her.
“That’s such a Paradise thing to happen,” a man said, chuckling at the dysfunction. He was standing next to Steve “Woody” Culleton, the former mayor who had made a point of walking inside the home he and his wife were rebuilding on Forest Service Road at 8:30 a.m., exactly the time they had evacuated the previous November. Now his car alarm screeched, interrupting the ceremony. Culleton fumbled with his key fob to mute it.
The day was already hot, the sun toasting bald heads pink. A toddler laughed, reaching for his mother’s nose. LaMalfa talked about the strength of Paradise. Other people spoke of hope, resiliency, and perseverance—the buzzwords of disaster recovery. Councilman Mike Zuccolillo took the microphone as 11:08 a.m.—chosen to mirror the date, 11/08—neared. The town had planned eighty-five seconds of silence for the eighty-five people who had lost their lives. Across Butte County, everyone was uniting for this moment to remember, even if they couldn’t physically be together.
“You’ve heard the word ‘resilient’ time and time again,” Zuccolillo said. “This is the true definition of it.”
An unnatural stillness descended outside the old Bank of America branch. There was a subdued shuffling of flip-flops, sneakers, work boots, and sequined ballet flats. Tissues were pressed to damp eyes. The people gathered thought about many things in that minute and a half. The eighty-five victims. The keys that no longer opened front doors. The neighbors who had moved away. The feeling of being asked, “Should you really rebuild?” when the answer wasn’t so simple, because where else would they go? Home was here, and their families were here, and this town was all they had ever known.
They thought about the few homes that had inexplicably survived, an odd kind of luck, the kind that spared some people and not others for no apparent reason. The rumble of debris trucks weighted down with the ashen remains of their lives. The rumble of construction trucks loaded up with fresh-milled lumber and new dreams.
They thought about all the thin
gs they had lost: the Gold Nugget Museum, the Elks Lodge, Mendon’s Nursery. The old Paradise sign topped by the bandsaw halo. The one million crippled ponderosa pines. The sound of children on playgrounds, the bustle of downtown. Eighty-five seconds of silence for how much it had hurt, and still hurt. Silence, too, for the things that they had held on to: Johnny Appleseed Days and Gold Nugget Days; trick-or-treating for full-size candy bars on Lancaster Loop; balmy summer evenings at the drive-in movie theater, a mattress thrown in the truck bed; the red dirt that stained their clothing; how every phone number began with 877 and directions were simply “upper,” “middle,” or “lower” Paradise—no explanation needed; the cool waters of the Feather River; the air that smelled like heaven after the first winter rain or the first warm day of summer. Somehow it all felt holy.
If a town was only houses and buildings, would they still be gathered here?
CHAPTER 20
RECKONING
In March 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic raged and the state of California entered lockdown, PG&E’s lawyers reached an agreement with Butte County district attorney Mike Ramsey. He had concluded his report, though it wouldn’t be released for a few more months. The company announced that it would plead guilty to one count of unlawfully causing a fire and eighty-four counts of involuntary manslaughter. (An eighty-fifth death was proven to be only indirectly related to the wildfire; a Magalia man had committed suicide rather than burn to death in his home, which in a cruel twist of fate had then survived the firestorm.) It was a remarkable step—and one of the greatest admissions of corporate criminal liability in United States history. Eight years earlier, the petroleum company BP had made news by pleading guilty to manslaughter for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed eleven people and polluted the Gulf of Mexico with millions of gallons of crude oil. But those convictions paled in comparison to PG&E’s eighty-four counts. The utility had become one of the country’s most prolific criminals.
A senior inspector helping out in Ramsey’s office had spotted immediate parallels between the Camp Fire and the San Bruno explosion in 2010. He pointed to issues with PG&E’s record-keeping and inspection processes. The oversights were so egregious that if PG&E had been an actual person, a district judge said, it would have faced the maximum sentence of ninety years in state prison. But because a corporation couldn’t be sent to prison, the most the court could do was levy the maximum possible fine for the felonies: $3.48 million. (This amounted to about 20 cents per PG&E customer; in 2017, the company netted $4.6 million in revenue every day.) An additional $500,000 would go to Ramsey’s office as reimbursement for its investigation, plus $15 million to provide water to residents. In all, for the deaths alone—excluding fines—Ramsey could only seek $10,000 per person killed in the Camp Fire. “We decided to take responsibility for the role our equipment played in this fire,” CEO Bill Johnson told a reporter. “We didn’t make this decision lightly, but in the end, I think this is the best course forward, particularly for the victims.” He said he hoped the plea would “move along the process of rebuilding.”
For the families of the victims, however, this hardly seemed like enough. “I don’t believe justice is served by a $3.5 million fine,” said Joseph Downer, whose brother, Andrew, had died in the blaze. “This is my big brother. This is the guy who taught me so much in life. PG&E took all of this from me, all of it.”
Laurie Teague said she had expected more than a wrist slap for PG&E, particularly in view of the terror she knew her seventy-nine-year-old stepfather, Herb Alderman, had experienced before perishing. “He didn’t drive, but he was sharp as a tack,” she recounted. “He knew everything that was going on around him. [A physical therapy receptionist] had been on the phone with him on the morning of the fire. She said he called at least five times, each time sounding more panicky and desperate. He was pleading for help, begging for someone to come and get him. His last words were: ‘The fire is two houses away, help me.’ ”
Paul Ernest had not survived the conflagration either, despite Travis’s best efforts and multiple skin grafts. Arielle Funk, his daughter, was both grief-stricken and livid. “He spent nine months in intensive care with burns on thirty percent of his body,” she said. “He spent the last year unable to walk and breathe on his own. November 8, 2018, has become that day for our family—the defining mark. Before the Camp Fire, or after the Camp Fire.” She continued: “He won’t be present at our annual family beach bash. We won’t get to eat his homegrown produce, which he was so proud of. We won’t get to honor him on Veterans Day—the only day he allowed us to treat him—or celebrate his favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. He’s not here to help my mom through the biggest hardship of her life.”
David Shores, whose brother Don and his wife, Kathy, had died, was more pointed: “Throughout history, there have been many instances where one individual caused deaths and faced years of imprisonment. When a corporation is involved, they only face a hefty fine, which…cuts into their profit margin for one year, and [then they] go back to business as usual. Mass murderers are not tolerated in our society. A corporation should not be a shield to mass deaths.”
Ramsey had looked into the possibility of charging specific individuals for the Camp Fire, but he knew he couldn’t meet the burden of proof that California law required to pursue charges against company executives, past or present. There simply wasn’t enough evidence to indict them. Many of the decisions that had led to the Camp Fire, his investigation found, had been made in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. It was almost impossible to prove that a person who had made a decision then had understood that they were laying the groundwork for a catastrophic wildfire decades in the future and had willfully chosen to ignore that risk.
A 696-page report released by the California Public Utilities Commission in December 2019 had already documented some of PG&E’s missteps on a grand scale. That month, the state agency imposed a nearly $2 billion penalty on the company for causing fires in 2017 and 2018. Across the utility’s entire transmission system, it had found a pattern of inadequate inspection and botched maintenance. On the Caribou-Palermo Line alone, twenty-nine high-priority problems had been discovered. The potential consequences were so dire that PG&E permanently shut the line down.
But the biggest finding in the government agency’s report involved Tower 27/222, whose hook had broken and sparked the Camp Fire. The CPUC report revealed catastrophic negligence. Company rules mandated that each transmission tower be climbed once every five years for a detailed inspection. Yet this one had not been scaled since 2001—seventeen years before the historic wildfire. “Timely replacement [of the hook] could have prevented the Camp Fire,” the report concluded.
* * *
—
THAT MONTH, as PG&E was admitting its guilt, Geisha Williams—who had been the CEO of PG&E at the time of the Camp Fire—listed her luxury Marin County home for sale. Located in Tiburon, the house had sweeping views of the bay and the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge. Williams, who had abruptly resigned in January 2019, banking $2.5 million worth of severance payments in cash, had bought the house in 2008, one year after joining PG&E. She stood to earn back upwards of $4.7 million on the sale—more than the price PG&E had had to pay for the eighty-four lives lost on her watch.
* * *
—
THE CONCLUSIONS of the ninety-two-page report compiled by Ramsey’s office were damning, detailing how a company had reduced inspections and overlooked failing equipment on a century-old system. The Caribou-Palermo Line had been erected after World War I by the Great Western Power Company, which PG&E had acquired in 1930, nearly ten years after the line was built. The inherited equipment was never fully cataloged, but many of the original pieces appeared to have remained in place, outliving the laborers who had installed them.
Investigators found extensive deterioration on parts of Tower 27/222, as well as bolted-on replacement plates, which indicated that PG&E w
as “aware that the hooks and holes were rubbing on each other causing wear.” An engineer with expertise in failure analysis and a meteorologist hired by government officials concluded that the weakening of the broken hook was consistent with about “97 years of rotational body-on-body wear.” The ancient hook had been whittled down to the barest thread of metal—less than one eighth of an inch, about the width of the tip of a ballpoint pen—when it finally snapped. Wind and weather had catalyzed its slow decay. It had been bought for 22 cents in 1919; a replacement hook in 2018 would have cost $19.
The hook’s deterioration would have been apparent in any reasonably thorough inspection, but over the decades, such checks had occurred less and less frequently. Per company policy in 1987, crews were required to patrol the transmission line three times a year: once from the ground, twice from the air. They were tasked with climbing 5 percent of the towers annually. By 2005, the line was being patrolled only once a year, with a closer inspection once every five years. As the number of inspections dropped, so did their thoroughness—as did PG&E’s expenses. From 2001 to 2008, PG&E inspected the Caribou-Palermo Line only by helicopter. In 2001, more than one and a half days had been spent on these aerial inspections. By 2018, the inspections concluded within a few hours. Though PG&E employees maintained that they strictly followed company procedures for the inspections, Ramsey’s office found that they did not, largely because of confusion over what those procedures actually were. Even PG&E couldn’t fully explain its process. “This inability to determine who made decisions and upon what those decisions were based frustrated efforts to identify individuals potentially personally liable for policies that led to the conditions which caused the Camp Fire,” read the report.
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