The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

by Michio Kaku

  The Camp Fire glinted into existence around 6:15 that Thursday morning. Cal Fire hasn’t yet released its full investigation, but the available evidence indicates that a hook on a PG&E electrical tower near the community of Pulga snapped, allowing a wire to spring free. The wire flapped against the skeletal metal tower, throwing sparks into the wind, most likely for a fraction of a second before the system’s safety controls could have flipped. Still, it was enough: The sparks started a fire; the fire spread.

  In the end, PG&E chose not to de-energize its lines. Even with warm, dry air gushing through the canyon early that morning, blowing 30 miles per hour and gusting up to 51, the company claimed that conditions never reached the thresholds it had determined would necessitate a shutoff. “That revealed a failure of imagination on PG&E’s part,” says Michael Wara, who directs the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. PG&E was largely forced into the position of having to shut off people’s power in the first place, Wara argues, because it failed for decades to invest in the kind of maintenance and innovation that would allow its infrastructure to stand up to more hostile conditions, as climate change gradually exacerbated the overall risk. But now, Wara said, the decision to keep operating that morning suggested that the company still hadn’t fully accepted the kind of resoluteness this new reality demanded. Three weeks earlier, PG&E instituted its first, and ultimately only, shutdown of the 2018 fire season, cutting electricity during a windstorm to nearly 60,000 customers in seven counties. It took two days to restore everyone’s power; citizens and local governments fumed. “One has to wonder,” Wara says, “if the negative publicity and pushback PG&E received influenced decision making on the day of the Camp Fire.” (“We will not speculate on past events,” a PG&E spokesman said in an email. “The devastating wildfires of the past two years have made it clear that more must be done, and with greater urgency, to adapt and address the issue.”)

  An even starker truth: it probably wouldn’t have mattered. The lines at that particular tower in Pulga wouldn’t have been included in a shutoff that morning anyway; PG&E’s protocols at the time appeared not to consider such high-voltage transmission lines a severe risk. A shutdown, however, would have de-energized other lower-voltage lines a few miles west of the tower, where, shortly after the first fire started, some vegetation, most likely a tree branch, blew into the equipment and triggered a second blaze.

  In a preliminary report, Cal Fire’s investigators seemed to regard this subsequent event as negligible, however. Within thirty minutes of igniting, the second fire had been consumed by the first, which was ripping through a fast-burning landscape, powered forward by its own metabolism and pushed by the wind. It had advanced four miles and was already swallowing the small town of Concow. The Camp Fire was moving too fast to be fought.

  * * *

  “It was pretty much complete chaos,” Joe Kennedy said. Kennedy is a Cal Fire heavy-equipment operator based in Nevada City, southeast of Paradise. He was called to the Camp Fire at 7:16 that morning and hurtled toward the Ridge with his siren on, in an eighteen-wheeler flatbed with his bulldozer lashed to the back.

  Kennedy is thirty-six, a fantastically giant man with a shaved head and a friendly face but the affect of a granite wall; he spoke quietly and, it seemed, never a syllable more than necessary. He had operated heavy equipment his entire adult life, working as a contractor in the same small mountain towns around the Sierra where he grew up, then joined Cal Fire in 2014, just before he and his wife had a child. He claimed his supremely taciturn nature was a by-product of fatherhood; until then, he explained, he was a more reckless adrenaline junkie. But Kennedy loved bulldozers, and he loved the rush of barreling toward a fire in one. “Dozer driver” seemed to be less his job description than his identity, his tribe. “In ten years,” he joked, “they’ll probably consider it a mental disorder.”

  Kennedy was dispatched to the Adventist Health Feather River hospital on Pentz Road. By the time he arrived, spot fires were igniting everywhere. The chatter on the radio was hard to penetrate. Now that he was in position, Kennedy couldn’t get in touch with anyone to give him a specific assignment, so he fell back on his training and a precept known as “leader’s intent”: if someone were to give him an order, he asked himself, what would it be?

  By then, the hospital staff had completed a swift evacuation of the facility. Nurses later described doing precisely what they practiced in their annual drills but at three or four times the speed: wheeling patients through the halls at a sprint, staging everyone in the ER lobby, then sorting all sixty-seven inpatients into a haphazard fleet of ambulances and civilians’ cars arriving outside to carry them away. Many didn’t make it far. One ambulance, carrying a woman who had just had a C-section and was still immobilized from the waist down, quickly caught fire in the traffic on Pentz. Paramedics hustled the woman into a nearby empty house. Others took shelter there as well. A Cal Fire officer, David Hawks, mobilized them into an ad hoc fire brigade to rake out the gutters and hose down the roof as structures on either side began to burn.

  Kennedy caught snippets on his radio about this group and others hunkered in nearby houses. He’d found his assignment. He climbed into his bulldozer, a colossal Caterpillar D5H that traveled on towering treads like a tank and was outfitted with a huge steel shovel, or “blade.” It also had a pretty killer sound system, and as Kennedy turned the ignition, the stereo automatically connected to his phone through Bluetooth and started playing Pantera. Kennedy’s technical skill and experience as a heavy-machinery operator was formidable; so was his knowledge of wildland firefighting tactics. But, given the scale of disaster unfolding around him, all that expertise now concentrated into one urgent, almost blockheadedly simple directive: “Take the fire away from the houses.”

  Of course, Kennedy had no idea which houses any of these people were in. All around the hospital lay a sprawl of mostly ranch homes, packed together on small, wooded lots. A great many were already burning, so Kennedy homed in on the others and started clearing anything flammable, or anything already in flames, away from them. Ornamental landscaping, woodpiles, trees—​he ripped it all out of the ground, pushed it aside or plowed straight through it, clearing a buffer around each home. He worked quickly, brutally, unhindered by any remorse over the collateral damage he was causing; it’s impossible, he explained, to maneuver an eighteen-ton bulldozer between two adjacent houses and not scrape up a few corners.

  Before long, Kennedy lost track of exactly where he was; he hadn’t even bothered to switch on the GPS in his dozer yet. “It seemed like forever, but it was probably a half-hour,” he said. “I think I got eight or nine houses. I made a pretty big mess.”

  * * *

  Wildfires are typically attacked by strategically positioned columns of firefighters who advance on the fire’s head, heel, or flanks like knights confronting a dragon. If a fire is spreading too rapidly for such an offensive, they instead work to contain it, drawing boundaries around the blaze—​a “big box,” it’s called. Work crews or bulldozers clear vegetation and cut fire breaks to harden that perimeter. Aircraft drop retardants. Everything in the big box can be ceded to the fire; if you have to, you let it burn. But ideally, you hold those lines, and the flames don’t spread any farther.

  As wildfires get fiercer and more unruly, firefighters aren’t just unable to mount direct attacks but are also forced to draw larger and larger boxes to keep from being overrun themselves. “The big box is a lot bigger now,” one Cal Fire officer explained. (He asked not to be named, hesitant to publicly concede that “our tactics need to change.”) But this strategy breaks down when the fire is racing toward a populated area. The extra space you would surrender to the fire might contain a neighborhood of several hundred homes.

  Wildfires aren’t solid objects, moving in a particular direction at a particular speed. They are frequently erratic and fluid, ejecting embers in all directions, producing arrays of spot fires that
then pull together and ingest any empty space between them. On November 8, the wind was so strong that gusts easily lofted embers from one rim of the Feather River Canyon to the other like a trebuchet, launching fire out of the wilderness into Fisher’s neighborhood.

  As this swirl of live embers descended, like the flecks in a snow globe, each had the potential to land in a receptive fuel bed: the dry leaves in someone’s yard, the pine needles in a gutter. Those kinds of fuels were easy to find. It was November, after all, past the time of year that wildfires traditionally start, and Paradise’s trees had carpeted the town with tinder. And every speck of flame that rose up in it had the potential to leap into an air vent and engulf a home. Now it is a spot fire—​a beachhead in the built environment, spattering its own embers everywhere, onto other houses, rebooting the entire process.

  Within two hours of the first spot fires being reported near Fisher’s house, others leapfrogged from one end of Paradise to the other. The progression was unintelligible from any one point on the ground. As one man who was at the hospital later told me, “I thought that the only part of Paradise that was on fire was the part of Paradise we were looking at.” And, as happened with Fisher, this generated a horrifying kind of dissonance: scurrying away from the fire only to discover that the fire was suddenly ahead of you and alongside you too.

  * * *

  “Take deep breaths,” Laczko said.

  Fisher had just told him about trying to kill herself. They were barely moving. Embers darted by like schools of bioluminescent fish. Evergreen trees alongside them burned top to bottom. These were the town’s famous pines, stressed from years of drought; the pitch inside was heating to its boiling point and, the moment it vaporized, the length of the trunk would flash into flame all at once. This became one of the more nightmarish and stupefying sights that morning on the Ridge: giant trees suddenly combusting.

  The topography of that particular stretch of Pearson Road made it a distinctly horrible place to be stranded. Beyond the guardrail to Fisher and Laczko’s left, a densely wooded ravine yawned open, with a stream known as Dry Creek Drainage far below. Already, the spot fires and burning trees on either side of the road were casting heat inward. But as the mass of the wildfire moved in, the ravine appeared to create a chimney effect, funneling flames up and over the street—​only to be overridden periodically by the prevailing winds, which pushed the flames back. Everyone on Pearson was caught in the middle.

  A Cal Fire branch director, Tony Brownell, told me that he was astonished to watch fire doubling back across Pearson, washing over the same land it had just scorched, only the second such immediate “reburn” he witnessed in his thirty-one-year career. This was about fifteen minutes before Fisher’s car ignited. Brownell, it turns out, was the fireman in the white pickup truck whom she initially followed into that gridlock from back on Pentz Road. Brownell managed to escape quickly, but as he turned his vehicle around and drove away, he told me, he looked at the flames in his rearview mirror and thought, I just killed that girl.

  “You’d think that people would just hurry up and go,” Fisher said.

  “There’s no place to go,” Laczko told her. “They’re trying. Cal Fire’s here to help.”

  He could see a fire engine a few car-lengths ahead. After fighting to weave forward, it too had been more or less swallowed by the same intractable traffic. Laczko silently made the calculation that if his own truck caught fire, he and Fisher would make a run for it and climb inside to safety.

  This would have been a mistake. The Cal Fire captain driving the fire engine, John Jessen, later estimated that the outside temperature was more than 200 degrees, the air swirling with lethally hot gases. Cars were catching fire everywhere, and four drivers fled toward that fire truck and, one after another, crammed themselves into the cab alongside its three-man crew. When two more people came knocking, Jessen turned them away—​no more room, he said. “That was probably the worst thing I’ve ever had to do,” Jessen said later. “I don’t know if those people made it to another car. I don’t know what happened to them.”

  This was Jessen’s twenty-fourth fire season in California. He’d fought five of the ten most destructive fires in state history and was beginning to feel beaten down. “When I started this career twenty-five years ago, a 10,000-acre fire was a big deal,” he said. “And it was a big deal if we weren’t able to do structure defense and the fire consumed five homes. We took that to heart. We felt like we lost a major battle.” Just moments earlier, around the corner on Pentz, Jessen watched fire consume dozens of homes within minutes. He was knocking on the door of another, to evacuate any stragglers, when he saw the actual fire front for the first time. It was already climbing the near side of the canyon, pounding toward town. The wall of flame was 200 feet tall, he estimated, and stretched for more than two and a half miles. That was the moment Jessen scrambled back to his truck and told his crew it was time to move.

  Now, marooned on Pearson, Jessen radioed for air support. Later, he would seem embarrassed by this request, chalking it up to “muscle memory”: the smoke was too thick for aircraft to fly in. The paint on his hood started burbling from the heat. Inside, the plastic on his steering console was smoking; the stench of its off-gassing filled the cab. The barrel-shaped fuel tanks beneath the doors were splashing diesel around the truck; the brass plugs in their openings got so hot they liquefied.

  Jessen, meanwhile, was making a desperate calculation of his own: if their truck caught fire, he decided, they would extinguish it quickly and take off, saving the civilians aboard by pushing other cars out of the way with the front of his fire engine.

  Maybe this was the lowest point. The megafire overwhelmed every system people put in place to fight or escape it; now it was scrambling their consciences too. “That’s something I never imagined I would be thinking about,” Jessen confessed, “pushing people closer to the fire so that I could get out.”

  Jessen sat there, watching for signs that his truck was about to catch fire. Laczko sat watching his own truck, ready to run for Jessen’s. Then someone shouted, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Laczko saw a bulldozer churn into view behind him, clobbering one burning car after another.

  * * *

  Joe Kennedy had been mashing through people’s landscaping on Pentz when he heard Jessen’s distress call. There was no time for the standard, numeric identifiers. “John,” Kennedy radioed. “Where you at?”

  He switched on the iPad in his dozer and found Jessen’s position near the corner of Pearson and Stearns Road. It was more than a mile away. The dozer’s maximum speed was 6.3 miles per hour. But Kennedy clipped that distance by disregarding the right angles on his street map and barging his bulldozer through backyards, then eventually barreling down the steep, wooded incline overlooking Pearson and spilling, sloppily, into the middle of the street.

  He produced a spectacular ruckus as he pushed the machine down the hill on its treads. From the road, it sounded like trees crashing—​and some of it probably was. As Kennedy leveled off, he came upon a group of people, including four nurses from the hospital in scrubs. They were stranded in the middle of Pearson, battered by gusts of embers roaring out of the ravine, buckling over, struggling to breathe and keep walking. One nurse, Jeff Roach, was walking straight at Kennedy’s bulldozer, with his arms in the air. Later, Roach explained that he had decided the bulldozer driver would either see him and rescue him and his three friends, or would not see him, keep advancing and crush him under the vehicle’s treads. The burning in Roach’s lungs was so bad, he said, that he had made his peace with either outcome.

  Kennedy stopped. Two of the nurses climbed aboard then scampered to rejoin the others who had piled into a fire engine that appeared behind him. Kennedy began fighting his way up Pearson, toward Jessen, but found cars crammed into both lanes and the shoulder. Some people were idling right beside other vehicles that were expelling fountains of flame. Kennedy turned up the Pantera. He knew what he had to
do: take the fire away from the people.

  He approached the first burning car and pushed it off the embankment and into the ravine with his dozer blade, then backed up to discover a flaming rectangle of asphalt underneath it. He drove through that, pushed more cars. “I was basically on fire,” Kennedy said. A photo later surfaced of an old Land Cruiser shoved so far up the adjacent hillside that it became snared in some sagging power lines. “That was me,” Kennedy explained with a noticeable quantum of pride.

  At least one of the vehicles Kennedy was shoving around had a body in it: Evva Holt, an eighty-five-year-old retired dietitian who lived at Feather Canyon Gracious Retirement Living, close to Fisher’s house. Holt had phoned her daughter that morning to come get her—​her daughter and son-in-law lived nearby and frequently came to perform for Holt and the other residents with their choral group—​but there was no time. An independent caretaker named Lori LeBoa was readying to leave with a 103-year-old woman, and a police officer put Holt in her Chevy Silverado as well. The three women wound up stuck on Pearson. As the fire curled over LeBoa’s pickup, she jumped out and handed off the older woman to another driver. Turning back for Holt, she saw only fire and two arms reaching out.

  Months later, over coffee, I asked Kennedy if he remembered moving that Silverado. He did. The memory seemed painful; he preferred not to talk about it on the record, except to stress that it was clear that he arrived too late to help whoever was inside.

  I asked if he knew any details about the woman, if he wanted me to tell him. “I like the story in my head,” he said.

  * * *

  Kennedy opened enough space for the stranded drivers on Pearson to maneuver and slowly advance. Moments earlier, one nurse who’d leapt into his dozer accidentally knocked into his iPad, switching his GPS into satellite view. Eventually, when Kennedy looked down at the map again, his eyes locked onto a conspicuous, bare rectangle, free of any vegetation or structures—​any fuels to burn. It was a large gravel lot right near Jessen’s fire engine; the firefighters just couldn’t see it through the smoke. Once Kennedy arrived, the firefighters began herding the entire traffic jam—​more than a hundred cars, Jessen says—​into that clearing.