If you only read one book about California's 2018 Camp Fire, it must be this one. It is the most accurate account I've read, compared to others that were merely cash-grabs with incorrect information. This one also addresses head-on one of the main causes of a lengthening fire season, with bigger, hotter, more destructive fires coming now year after year: CLIMATE CHANGE.
This story is a deeply personal one to me. A friend of mine is from Paradise. I texted her in a panic, saying to just please let me know she was okay. She did, so I could at least be sure she was safe. Over the next few days the videos, photos, and graphics she sent were horrifying. When we finally spoke by phone, she relayed the whole story - how she arrived at school for the day, the students coming not long after. It wouldn't be long before they started evacuating though, and the last bus pulled away as the fire reached school grounds. The video she sent of her own evacuation looked like something from a disaster movie - literally fire everywhere, both sides of the road engulfed in flames. Had she sent that to me in the moment, I would have lost my ever-loving mind. I would not have believed they could escape, but thankfully her entire family was able to get to safety. She was the only family member to not lose her house. She sent me a fire map showing her entire neighborhood, her house the lone green X. The rest of the homes were either totally or partially destroyed.
As Paradise woke on the morning of November 8th, 2018, the sky looked funny, a weird gray-ish orange-ish mix, accompanied by massive windgusts. The fire sparked at 6:30 that morning and within ninety minutes would reach the outskirts of the town. Another two hours and the blaze was devouring everything in sight at the rate of an acre PER SECOND. At that point it was too late for some; residents were trapped in the flames - whether in the homes or cars, trying to escape.
Within a matter of hours, the town of Paradise was all but gone. That's 95% of the buildings incinerated, about 18,000 structures altogether - 11,000 of which were homes. The biggest cost though, was the 85 lives lost in the flames. That is the official total, though the author disagrees; according to her count there were at least fifty more wrongful-death lawsuits filed by families against the culprit, PG&E.
At the time, Lizzie Johnson was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and had spent several years reporting on the many fires that have destroyed California's landscape. She reports from the ground, in the midst of the fire, and for long after. She gathered stories from survivors, making them the focal point of this terrible and traumatic event. Johnson meets them where they are - shelters, hotels, makeshift camps, giving as many as possible a chance to share their experiences and she is able to deliver those experiences with care and empathy. We follow a handful of survivors and Johnson allows us to get to know them as they were before the fire, their history in relation to Paradise, and giving each person a voice to tell their story their way. Even knowing ahead of time they survived, obviously, it did not make the stories any less harrowing. Fear was palpable throughout the entire book and at times it felt like I was there, though this in no way compares to the actual experiences of people who actually were.
She is also able to access public records that include the panicked 911 calls of citizens in need of help, and court records from the grand jury investigation. All of that allows Johnson to show minute-by-minute what happened to Paradise as it burned.
Johnson also does a fantastic job with exploring the root causes of the Camp Fire, which ultimately burned for seventeen days. First and foremost, PG&E's stunning neglect of critical infrastructure. The tower that started the fire had last been inspected in 2001 - despite PG&E's claim that towers are inspected every five years. It all comes down to the little c-hook, about the size of a human hand, made of steel a century ago when the original power line was built. This hook's job was to hold the electrical insulators connected to the tower. But years of friction wore down the metal and the hook snapped. The live power line fell, hitting the tower and sending down a spray of molten metal to the brush below, brittle and dry from severe lack of rain. Unfortunately this is not surprising. A quick internet search will give you a plethora of information about various lawsuits filed against the company for years.
There were other contributing factors to this immense tragedy. There's the aforementioned lack of rain - over seven months without a drop, to be exact. Climate Change is real, can people stop pretending it isn't? The emergency warning system only reached about half the residents because of an undetected flaw. A private warning system was also available, at a cost to subscribe, of course. And what would a massive disaster be without lack of communication between emergency response teams? We saw this seventeen years earlier, on September 11th, with police and fire unable to coordinate because they used different comms systems. Yet somehow, we've still not managed to fix this issue. It also didn't help that a few years earlier, the town council had voted to shrink the four-lane Skyway (main road in and out of town) down to two. They were warned that this could be an issue in the future should the town need to evacuate quickly, but the project went ahead anyway.
This is a tense, traumatic, hopeful read, Highly recommended.
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