CHAPTER 3
RED FLAG OVER PARADISE
Officials had predicted strong northeast winds beginning late Wednesday evening. The National Weather Service issued a Red Flag Warning—the highest level of fire risk, determined by a combination of dryness and strong winds—in the Sacramento Valley and parts of the Bay Area, including the Oakland Hills. Across Northern California, Cal Fire held additional firefighters on duty in case a wildfire sparked. The crews were stationed in regions where a blaze was most likely to ignite: Lake County and Sonoma County, Marin County and Alameda County. Butte County, too, which staffed three additional engines.
Jamie Mansanares, thirty-five, didn’t think anything of the yellow pine needles collecting on his roof. It was standard for November. He usually woke before dawn and drove straight to the gym, but this morning he let himself sleep in. The smell of hot oil permeated his Magalia house and roused him from bed. His wife, Erin, was frying sausage. As it sizzled and popped in the pan, she whipped glaze for homemade doughnuts. He could hear the clink of dishes and the laughter of their daughters in the other room. He crawled out of bed, then helped Erin feed and dress their three girls, shoving small limbs into leggings and long-sleeved shirts. Erin packed lunch for Tezzrah, their lanky seven-year-old, a second grader at Achieve Charter School—in the same class as Rachelle’s daughter, Aubrey. Mariah, four, and Arrianah, two, were recovering from bronchitis. They curled up on the new leather couch, which smelled of plastic wrap and was so big it made the living room feel like a movie theater. Jamie hadn’t snipped off the tags yet.
He had grown up above a pizza parlor in San Francisco’s Richmond neighborhood, without the luxury of new furniture. His parents had rented a two-bedroom apartment in a six-story building. Their unit always smelled of melting cheese and rising dough from the pizzeria below. Jamie had shared a bedroom with his older sister and whichever member of his extended family happened to be visiting. His father washed airplanes at San Francisco International Airport, and his mother worked as a technician in an X-ray laboratory. They did the best they could with what they had. Jamie and his sister had entertained themselves by cruising down the city’s steep hills on their skateboards, jamming their heels against the pavement to stop.
When Jamie was six, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake struck just before the World Series game at Candlestick Park. The Oakland Athletics were playing the San Francisco Giants—rival teams across the bay from each other. The earthquake registered a 6.9 magnitude in the twenty seconds that it shook the ground and managed to collapse a section of the double-deck Nimitz Freeway, killing forty-two motorists. Across the Bay Area, sixty-three people died.
Jamie’s family moved soon after, settling in Oroville, near where his aunt lived. San Francisco was getting pricier and more populated, and they didn’t want to face another natural disaster. His parents bought a house this time, with enough space for Jamie and his sister to have their own bedrooms. His father got a job with the city’s recreation and parks department while his mother stayed home with the children. Their new neighborhood had bumpy dirt roads and no sidewalks. The snick of cicadas and keening of red-tailed hawks replaced the hum of trash trucks and the hydraulic screech of city buses. Jamie and his sister encountered their first hillbillies. They had mullets and dirt-lined nails and were tweaked out on something—probably methamphetamine—but they were surprisingly nice, Jamie thought. His family still didn’t have much, but what they had, they shared. His mother never turned anyone away from her dinner table, cooking elaborate Mexican dishes. Jamie’s new classmates were poor and white, but none of them treated him differently because of his brown skin. He could make friends anywhere, even in Butte County.
Jamie finished high school in Oroville and returned to the Bay Area to work for the California Conservation Corps, a state-run program that provided job training to young people. They advertised their programs with a tongue-in-cheek campaign: “Hard work, low pay, miserable conditions and more! Learn skills, earn scholarships, make friends—the best year of your life.” In the following years, he bounced between Oroville, Paradise, Las Vegas, and Alaska doing handyman and seasonal jobs. He liked to work with his hands and earned money plastering walls, tiling stucco, processing salmon, and, once, laying thousand-year-old stones for a masonry job. His life didn’t gain direction until he met Erin at a friend’s backyard barbecue.
The friend had promised that she was worth meeting. Erin was tough but warm, hardheaded but gracious, with enough drive for both of them. She was petite, with a heart-shaped face and dark, fluffy hair that brushed her waist. Erin thought Jamie looked like a stereotypical bad boy. He had faux diamond studs in each earlobe and spoke with a drawl. Every thought was a run-on sentence. But she loved his booming laugh and shy smile. She discovered that Jamie was in fact a teddy bear. They became inseparable. After their rental on Almond Street in Paradise nearly burned down in the Humboldt Fire of 2008, they moved into a travel trailer on her parents’ property in Magalia to save money for their own place. Though they had been fortunate that time, and their rental survived, Erin knew she wanted her own home.
She planned to purchase a house whether or not she and Jamie stayed together. Erin had lived with an older brother and three younger siblings in a trailer until she started elementary school, when her family moved into their two-bedroom home in Magalia. For the family of seven, space had always been tight, and at fourteen, Erin decided to put aside her babysitting money for a house. She had been saving ever since. She longed for the freedom to nail whatever holes in the wall she wanted and to decorate a chef-themed kitchen, complete with wallpaper emblazoned with cartoon men in tall white hats. That spring, Erin paid $126,000 for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house built in 1984. The driveway was matted with dead leaves and pine needles. She had to drag her feet to uncover the asphalt. But the closets: The hallway one was four feet deep, and the master bedroom had a walk-in. She had never had a closet of her own. She made the down payment in cash before Jamie ever saw it. She was twenty years old.
Erin’s younger brother moved in with her and Jamie. They insulated the garage, laid a new roof, and installed gutters. Jamie repaved the asphalt driveway with concrete. A wooden fence bordered the backyard, and they stacked cords of firewood along its length. After two years of dating, they had a baby, Tezzrah. She was dark-complexioned, with thick black hair like Jamie’s, though his had mostly receded by that point. Erin’s family liked to tease that she didn’t look much like her mother, though they loved Jamie and didn’t mind having a mixed-race family.
When Tezzrah was two, Jamie and Erin got married. They held the ceremony at Merlo Park in Stirling City, a logging community higher up in the foothills. His family cooked a Mexican buffet. Hers carved an archway as a backdrop for their vows. They lit a hand-dipped unity candle. Erin baked a lemon cake with cream cheese frosting, adding two extra layers so the three tiers would stand straight. She placed a glass heart engraved with their names on top. The cake topper later disappeared—stolen or thrown away, they never figured it out. Tezzrah danced until she crumpled into a family friend’s lap. It was the happiest day of Jamie’s life.
Mariah and Arrianah soon followed. Jamie was outnumbered, but he treasured his girls, and he told them so all the time. They took their first steps down the hallway with the four-foot-deep closet and liked to do gymnastics in the living room. On Easter, the family’s favorite holiday, they hunted for hundreds of plastic eggs in the backyard, ducking under the massive oak tree with the tire swing hitched to a branch. One year, Erin’s brother surprised the girls with a crate of baby rabbits. Tezzrah named the tiniest one Cinnamon and adopted it as a pet. The rest eventually became dinner.
Jamie worked as the maintenance man at a long-term care facility called Heritage Paradise, where Erin was a certified nurse’s assistant. They had both been hired recently. Erin’s grandparents hadn’t been around when she was a child, and she loved braiding the
women’s long hair and sneaking in donuts from Dolly-“O” to selected residents. Everyone looked forward to Jamie’s visits, and he gave his phone number to anyone who asked. “Just call me,” he would say, always willing to fit in a quick chat. He was responsible for the building’s upkeep and access, making sure the hallways were cleared of medical carts and locking the emergency exits so patients with memory issues couldn’t wander off.
Even more beloved at Heritage Paradise were Jamie and Erin’s three girls. Recently, on Halloween, the couple had brought Tezzrah and her younger sisters to the facility for trick-or-treating. They went from room to room asking for candy to plonk into their plastic pumpkin buckets. The residents kissed and hugged the girls, who were bright-eyed and happy, who never shied away from their wheelchairs or oxygen machines, who made them laugh with their absurd questions. Given their parents’ jobs, the girls were used to being around the sick and infirm. Death didn’t scare them.
* * *
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THAT THURSDAY MORNING, Jamie finished breakfast and changed into his uniform, packing his work bag. The facility, located just off the Skyway, had opened that summer under new management. Jamie believed in their mission, and he liked the staff. Administrators had poached the best nurses and aides from nearby facilities, promising a good paycheck and a lighter patient load. They had also restained the oak furniture and hung hummingbird feeders on the back patio. After opening on June 1, 2018, Heritage Paradise was finding its rhythm—as was Jamie. He had been promised a promotion and was being trained in the kitchen by Jill Fassler, the facility’s chef. Jamie’s life had been defined by quiet striving—now for his daughters—and this was no different.
He and Erin had heard rumors that the electricity might be cut because of high fire danger, so they had pulled out their cache of oil lamps, just in case. When Tezzrah was a baby, an oak tree had snagged a distribution line and PG&E had stranded them without power for more than ten days. For now, at least, everything was still working. The refrigerator hummed. The television blasted cartoons. “I’ll take Tezzrah to school,” he announced, heading outside to warm up his Subaru Outback. Mornings in the mountains were chilly. Erin was stuffing a load of damp laundry into the dryer when he returned to give her a kiss.
Whenever he left the house, without fail, Jamie told his family that he loved them. He kissed Mariah and Arrianah, who squirmed on the black leather couch, and grabbed Tezzrah’s backpack. He walked out the front door, hand in hand with his oldest daughter. She chattered about her classmates, and how she wanted to stay up late on Friday to build a blanket fort and make buttered popcorn in the microwave. She was working on a word search at school and rehearsing a play about dogs. Jamie listened absentmindedly. “I love you,” he called to his wife over his shoulder.
* * *
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MORE THAN 125,000 MILES of Pacific Gas & Electric Company electrical lines stretched across Central and Northern California—a distance five times the circumference of the earth. PG&E was the largest power provider in the state, delivering electricity and natural gas to more than 16 million people. Its service area covered seventy thousand square miles, and most of California—equivalent to one in twenty Americans—received power from the private utility.
Nearly half of its grid crossed land that the state considered high fire risk. The network consisted of two types of power lines. Transmission lines were high-voltage electrical freeways that ran vast distances to cities; distribution lines were low-voltage cables strung along wooden poles that crisscrossed roadways and neighborhoods. These caused PG&E the most grief because they were closer to the ground and toppled when tree branches snapped, as had happened when Jamie and Erin lost power. For the previous decade, PG&E—criticized for its failures at maintaining both types of lines—had been struggling to invest in its infrastructure and regain public confidence. As millions of trees across the Sierra Nevada died and the landscape withered, it became a losing battle.
The company’s problems had begun in 1993 in Hinkley, an unincorporated community in the high Mojave Desert. A file clerk named Erin Brockovich discovered that PG&E had dumped 370 million gallons of tainted waste from a natural gas pumping station into adjacent unlined ponds. From there, the carcinogenic compounds—used to prevent rust—leached into the groundwater, contaminating the town’s tap water. The utility tried to conceal its role, but the confirmation of hexavalent chromium in the drinking water led to one of the largest direct action lawsuit settlements in American history. More than six hundred residents of the rural San Bernardino County town were paid $333 million, and the case inspired an award-winning film, Erin Brockovich, starring Julia Roberts.
One year later, a valley oak brushed a 21,000-volt distribution line in a hamlet east of Sacramento. The ensuing Trauner Fire blackened 500 acres in Rough and Ready, a town of 950 people, destroying twelve homes and a historic schoolhouse constructed in 1868. The district attorney sued PG&E. She found that the company had diverted more than $77.6 million from its tree trimming budget and put most of it toward corporate profits. Investigators uncovered two hundred safety violations. PG&E was convicted of 739 counts of criminal negligence and forced to pay $24 million in fines. “People v. PG&E affords us a rare (and brief) opportunity to peer at the inner workings of a corporation that claims to be our benefactor,” wrote a local reporter who covered the case. “However, when the curtains part, we discover a cast of characters and a plot that would have suited Dickens or Runyon.”
The company’s safety record only got worse. More than a decade after the Trauner Fire, a natural gas pipeline owned by PG&E ruptured around dinnertime on September 9, 2010, in the San Francisco suburb of San Bruno. The explosion in the Crestmoor subdivision was so loud that first responders initially thought a jetliner had crashed. The 3,000-pound steel pipe registered as a 1.1 magnitude earthquake as it burst, shifting homes from their foundations and gouging a 72-foot-long crater in the concrete. A thousand-foot wall of fire engulfed thirty-eight homes and burned eight people to death, including a mother and her thirteen-year-old daughter. Another fifty-eight were injured. PG&E struggled for more than an hour and a half to shut off the gas.
“It was beyond words,” one resident said of losing her teenage son, husband, mother-in-law, and dog in the explosion. “The loss of my loved ones, my personal belongings, my neighborhood, and my life happened due to the negligence of a greedy company.”
When Crestmoor had been built in 1956, crews had welded the thirty-inch natural gas pipeline incorrectly. The company hadn’t caught that the pipeline was slowly cracking; it didn’t even know where many of its pipes were located. In 2016, a federal jury convicted PG&E on six felony counts of violating safety standards and obstructing the investigation into the explosion. There was subterfuge on a grand scale: Documents were found to contain fabricated data or be printed in erasable ink. State regulators had already fined PG&E $1.6 billion for the incident in 2015—at the time, the largest penalty ever imposed on a utility in the United States. After the federal court sentencing, PG&E was slapped with a second, $3 million fine. Its executives were ordered to perform ten thousand hours of community service. The company was put on court-ordered federal monitoring, like a felon.
The California Public Utilities Commission, known as the CPUC, was tasked with supervising the state’s investor-owned electric and gas utilities, as well as railroads, rail transit, water, telephone, and ride hailing companies like Lyft and Uber. The commission was an economic regulator, not a safety enforcer, and it struggled to oversee all of these entities, particularly PG&E, which was essentially a monopoly: too big, too many resources. And the wall between them was perforated with revolving doors. Employees left the CPUC to work for PG&E or as lobbyists on the company’s behalf, helping to write the laws that governed them. PG&E was a top political donor in Sacramento, shelling out $5.3 million to campaigns in 2017 and 2018. The relationship was so inappropriate that th
e utility paid nearly $100 million in fines following the San Bruno explosion for communications that violated state law. In one of tens of thousands of emails made public, it was revealed that then-CPUC President Michael Peevey had shared a couple of bottles of “good Pinot” over dinner with a PG&E executive and his wife.
PG&E failed to change. People continued to die because of its negligence—in fact, the disasters only increased in scale. On a 102-degree day in September 2015, a 44-foot gray pine fell into a 12,000-volt power line east of Sacramento in Calaveras County. The Butte Fire (nowhere near Butte County, despite the name) destroyed 549 houses. Two people died. Calaveras County sued, on the grounds that PG&E had known the tree was a hazard and had chosen not to trim it. The CPUC imposed an $8 million fine.
Then, on a blustery evening in October 2017, the worst wildfires in modern state history ignited. They ripped across Northern California, pushed by the Diablo Winds. The infernos killed 44 people and hospitalized another 192. They incinerated fabled vineyards and the working-class Santa Rosa neighborhood of Coffey Park. People died in swimming pools, in mobile home parks, in their bedrooms and their cars. A fourteen-year-old perished at the end of his family’s driveway, unable to outrun the flames. PG&E was held responsible for seventeen of the twenty-one wildfires—which burned an area eight times the size of San Francisco—though the company escaped blame for the worst of the bunch. The Tubbs Fire killed twenty-two people in Santa Rosa and the unincorporated neighborhoods on its outskirts. (In 1964, the Hanly Fire had burned the same footprint, destroying only orchard land and a hundred homes.) The culprit, Cal Fire investigators found, was a private power pole owned by a ninety-one-year-old woman near Tubbs Lane that had been damaged by woodpeckers.
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