Paradise

by Lizzie Johnson

  Thanks to the camera feeds near her dispatch pod and the civilian reports, Bowersox had a better idea of where the Camp Fire was burning than Lawrie did. But despite the observations she could provide him, he didn’t have enough to go on yet to create a plan of action. The standard approach was to rely on the Incident Command System, a protocol for communicating and coordinating response efforts during an emergency. The U.S. Forest Service, along with several Southern California fire agencies, had developed it in 1974 after a devastating series of wildfires killed sixteen people. The system—a means of imposing order and creating a common language in the midst of chaos—was so effective that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, had adopted it in the 1980s, along with smaller governing bodies like the Paradise Town Council and the Butte County Board of Supervisors. As incident commander, Lawrie needed to divide the wildfire into sections and subsections—called branches and divisions—and establish a chain of command. Firefighters would then manage each section like a fiefdom, funneling information up to him. Lawrie needed their on-the-ground reports in order to make important, fateful decisions, such as when to evacuate people and where to assign his limited resources.

  His colleagues, though, hadn’t reached their posts yet, and McKenzie’s last dispatch was several minutes old. It was clear that the wildfire was well past Pulga, though no one yet knew whether it had traveled the three miles to Concow. Lawrie was left with questions: Where was the fire burning? How big was it? And how close was it to homes and businesses? Over the radio, he heard flames chasing McKenzie’s crew as they inched down Pulga Road. The route was strewn with gravel and boulders and spray-painted with warnings not to speed. McKenzie tossed lawn furniture and firewood from the patios of small cabins and yoga huts. The cushions and chopped logs were easy kindling. He had protected all kinds of structures over the course of his career: barns and outbuildings, a wooden bridge and a sweat lodge, and, once, a carved statue of an eagle clutching a salmon in its talons. But he had never defended yoga huts, he thought wryly.

  Lawrie stood behind his SUV, studying the map he had unfurled on his tailgate. The autumn morning was chilly, the temperature 42 degrees. Born in Camden, Indiana, Lawrie had moved with his family to San Andreas, California, as a young child. He earned a degree in industrial technology before catching the “fire bug” while working for his college’s fire department. Lawrie had devoted thirty years to the fire service—twenty-six of them in Paradise. He had even met Tessa, his wife, through the department. She and Lawrie had clicked after her stepfather—a Cal Fire engineer—invited Lawrie to her college graduation party.

  Now he scanned the paper topography before him, squinting in concentration. The vehicle was custom-built to serve as a mobile command post, its hatchback outfitted with a radio system and drawers that were filled with paperwork and evacuation plans. He listened as Bowersox relayed more civilian reports. The two worked with each other often, and he was comforted by the familiar cadence of her voice. Bowersox’s parents had both been firefighters like Lawrie—her mother was Cal Fire’s very first female hire—and her brother worked as a battalion chief in the neighboring county. Naturally, Bowersox had joined the family profession. At fourteen, she enrolled in the Butte County Fire Explorers program. After she was hired full time, Lawrie had become a trusted colleague. Bowersox appreciated his inherent kindness. She was often teased by her colleagues for having the hobbies of an “eighty-year-old woman and a thirteen-year-old boy.” She liked snowmobiling and cross-stitching, playing video games and drinking tea. But she was best known for her unique blend of compassion and professionalism while working the radio, as she was this morning with Lawrie.

  Bowersox advised him that a PG&E distribution line above Concow had just toppled—downed by a falling ponderosa pine—and sparked a second wildfire, causing blackouts for four customers: the Yankee Hill Fire Safe Council, the Internet provider Digital Path, the cell service provider AT&T, and the local PG&E office. Lawrie named the fire Camp B and called for a crew to check it out using wildland engines. The firefighters nicknamed these engines “weed wagons” because they were taller than city engines, with the four-wheel drive needed to chase down grass fires. At 7:20 a.m., Lawrie asked Bowersox to request that the county Sheriff’s Office issue a warning—but not a mandatory evacuation—for Concow. He didn’t realize that the winds had already heaved firebrands over Concow Reservoir and dumped them on a block of homes well within town limits. The spot fires quickly engulfed them all.

  As the morning brightened and people awoke to the sight of flames out their windows, 911 calls began to inundate police departments across Butte County. Civilians couldn’t call Cal Fire for information directly, so local police dispatchers had to transfer them to the ECC. At the Paradise Police Department, on Black Olive Drive, only one dispatcher was on duty. Carol Ladrini, fifty-eight, had arrived for her shift at 6 a.m., her uniform clean and ironed, her makeup immaculate. She always woke up early, allowing time to curl her short blond hair before work. Some of the other “early morning shift girls,” as she called her fellow dispatchers, didn’t bother, but Ladrini took pride in her appearance. She knew that she represented Paradise Police and brought a no-nonsense attitude to everything she did. Before joining the force eleven years earlier, Ladrini had worked as a digital technician for a company that manufactured picture plaques for headstones. Looking for a change of pace, she had applied for the dispatch job along with a friend. She got the gig; her friend didn’t. Ladrini had been sworn in the day before the first Camp Fire—part of the Butte Lightning Complex—broke out in 2008.

  Now, in a matter-of-fact tone, Ladrini told the frantic residents calling 911 not to worry. Other reports had come in, she reassured them, and the wildfire was still several miles away. From her pod, she could see only her circuit board flicking with incoming calls, not the smoke drifting over Paradise. If Ladrini didn’t answer immediately, the call was redirected to another law enforcement dispatch center in the county.

  One caller, a woman who lived on Dean Road, on the lip of the Feather River Canyon, wanted to know where the wildfire was burning.

  “As far as I know, it’s north of Concow,” Ladrini replied, offering to transfer her to Cal Fire.

  “So we’re not in danger?” the woman asked.

  “Not so far.”

  * * *

  —

  IN THE PARKING LOT at Scooters Café, men in yellow fire suits and tan uniforms paced back and forth. They pressed cellphones to their ears or spoke into handheld radios. Among them were representatives for PG&E, the Highway Patrol, State Parks, and the Sheriff’s Office. They had descended on the incident command post to receive information and orders from Lawrie, relaying what he told them to their respective agencies. Meeting in person was supposed to prevent the spread of misinformation. A police sergeant from Paradise would soon be on his way too.

  A fellow battalion chief parked next to Lawrie’s SUV. He had been assigned to oversee firefighting efforts in Concow. He lumbered out of his Ford F-250 and began studying the map on Lawrie’s tailgate. The battalion chief was edgy. His two sons, twelve and seventeen, were home alone on the family’s three acres in Paradise, and his wife was at a work conference in Sacramento. He sensed that this fire was galloping toward his town. On the drive to Scooters Café, he had watched the smoke swell and darken with every curve of the highway. It was as wild and runny as an inkblot. Normally, plumes rose straight up, billowing tens of thousands of feet in the atmosphere—striking in their awful, purling beauty—but this column pointed toward Paradise like an arrow.

  The man’s panic manifested as aggression. He didn’t think Lawrie was moving fast enough. A PG&E representative tried to cut in as they talked, asking about de-energizing the distribution system, but the battalion chief interrupted him to address Lawrie: “You need to start issuing evacuation warnings for the eastern edge of Paradise. Order forty-five engines, too.” />
  “Are you serious?” Lawrie replied. He tried to process the demand—the first useful request he had received since McKenzie’s last dispatch. There were only thirty-five available engines in their unit, excluding the four set aside for daily medical emergencies and automobile accidents. The battalion chief was asking for more engines than the county owned.

  “Yes!” he said, practically shouting. “I’m serious!”

  Lawrie stared at him, taking a moment to think. The news coming in on his radio was not good. A power line had tumbled onto the Skyway and trapped a school bus. A sheriff’s deputy was trying to rescue residents from the Concow subdivision of Camelot Park, which was advertised as a gated mobile home community—though it actually lacked a gate, which residents had always thought was fitting for Butte County. (What sounded glamorous was in reality often far from it.) A half hour had passed since Lawrie assumed the role of incident commander. At the ECC, Bowersox was struggling to determine the fire’s perimeter. She eyed footage from the high-definition cameras on local mountaintops. The lenses bruised with smoke, then went dark as the infrastructure connecting them melted. Lawrie still hadn’t requested a mandatory evacuation for Concow, so Bowersox did it for him.

  Meanwhile, a Cal Fire captain was corkscrewing along a ridgeline above Concow, tailed by a second engine. They had been dispatched to “Camp B” in order to catch the wildfire and douse it, fast. Firefighting depended on drawing a perimeter and keeping flames within it to “box in” a conflagration. But that method didn’t work in an ember-driven wildfire, which spewed spot fires and defied every attempt at containment. The Camp Fire had already coughed a flurry of orange coals past Concow. Now the fire’s leading edge was racing downhill toward the town, about to overtake the smaller wildfire on Rim Road. “It’s just above the town of Pulga right now,” the captain said over the radio. “It’s headed toward Concow Lake.”

  “We need to move now!” the battalion chief said to Lawrie, his voice rising.

  The restaurant parking lot would not be able to accommodate the number of engines now bound for Jarbo Gap. Bowersox had already anticipated the need for help and requested engines from nearby counties. Calling for mutual aid was like throwing a rock into a pond. The appeal rippled outward, with neighboring cities and counties responding first, followed by departments from the Bay Area, the Central Valley, and Southern California, then from border states like Oregon and Arizona, and sometimes from countries as far away as New Zealand and Australia, which had similar Mediterranean climates and firefighting strategies. Their fire season was flip-flopped, meaning the region could send people during its own rainy off-season—though recently global wildfires had begun to overlap, exhausting firefighting resources worldwide.

  Lawrie knew his fellow battalion chief was right. At 7:32 a.m., he requested a warning for the western side of Pentz Road in Paradise. Afterward, he sent the battalion chief down to Concow. Then, to make space for all the equipment heading their way, Lawrie instructed the command post to follow him a few minutes south to Pines Yankee Hill Hardware. The business, owned by a Tea Party supporter, had a massive gravel parking lot and served a community of 330 people. Posters for Recipe 420 potting soil and Valspar paint were nailed above the front door, next to the green-and-yellow flag of the State of Jefferson, an underground movement that called for conservative Northern California and Southern Oregon to secede from their respective states and form a new one. Signs clipped to the shop’s barbed wire fence announced it as a wildfire safety zone—a place for people to gather when their homes were threatened. It was the perfect spot for a command post.

  Lawrie parked in the unpaved lot at 7:40 a.m. On average, wildfires moved 1.4 to 1.9 miles per hour. In 2008, it had taken five weeks for the Butte Lightning Complex to reach the Feather River Canyon before sputtering out. Somehow, within an hour, the Camp Fire had already hit Concow. Like the battalion chief, Lawrie was increasingly anxious about his family’s safety. He struggled to focus on the task at hand. His sixteen-year-old daughter was at Paradise High for a before-school meeting. His wife was getting breakfast on the table for their eighteen-year-old son and twelve-year-old daughter and planning a dinner to celebrate Lawrie’s birthday. He was turning fifty-one the next day. “Get the animals and get out,” he texted her, his hands trembling. “This is real.”

  Lawrie’s radio crackled with another update from Bowersox. At the ECC, 911 calls continued to roll in. Extra dispatchers had reported to work in order to help handle the influx. At 7:41 a.m., a captain answered a call from the county’s emergency services officer, who wanted to know whether there was going to be an evacuation. “I’d say there is going to be a large-scale evacuation order,” the captain said. He couldn’t say when the order would come—that depended on the incident commander, who still didn’t have a coherent picture of what was happening.

  Lawrie was distracted. He juggled the radio and his cellphone, trying to find out if his family was okay. His calls weren’t going through. Beneath the pall of smoke, important infrastructure was melting. By the day’s end, fifty-one cell sites and seventeen towers would go offline, either damaged in key sections or entirely incinerated. Made of glass strands as thin as human hair, fiber optic cables had revolutionized long-distance communications—but they were also extremely vulnerable to fire damage. Already the shoddy coverage in Jarbo Gap had become even more limited.

  Lawrie had never witnessed a blaze like the Camp Fire in all his years of firefighting. Wildfires burned aggressively in the heat of the afternoon—rarely in the morning, when the hillsides were typically damp with dew. No amount of training or experience could have prepared him for this moment. There was no precedent. Now he stood to lose more than colleagues who lived in other places. His entire family and community lay in the path of the wildfire.

  John Messina, forty-six, a Cal Fire division chief who had just arrived, saw the worry deepen on Lawrie’s brow and offered to take over as incident commander. He preferred to let lower-ranking colleagues like Lawrie serve in that role, because it gave them valuable experience, but he could tell that Lawrie wasn’t mentally present. Lawrie accepted Messina’s offer with relief and dropped down to lead operations, gathering intelligence from other firefighters over the radio.

  Messina wore a navy Cal Fire baseball cap over his close-cropped hair and a clean yellow fire suit. His wide smile revealed a gap in his front teeth. He was personable and well liked, with twenty-eight years of firefighting experience and an earnest demeanor. These days he spent a lot of time doing paperwork, but he loved his job. Colleagues described Messina as their Rain Man, after the film character, for his photographic memory. Raised by small-town grocers, he had grown up in Alturas in northeastern California and attended college in San Diego. It wasn’t happenstance—he had purposefully moved as far away from his hometown as possible. He took off entire semesters to work as a firefighter, banking the salary to pay tuition. After graduation, a job with Cal Fire had kept him in Butte County. His wife and two children, eleven and fourteen, were safe in their orchard-screened home in the farming community of Durham, where tractors often slowed down traffic. He couldn’t imagine how worried Lawrie must be, not knowing whether his family was in harm’s way.

  Messina asked for all aircraft capable of dousing wildfires in Northern California—ten air tankers—to be dispatched as soon as possible. At the same time, he also prodded the ECC to order a regional incident management team, essentially a group of experts drawn from across the state. Such teams were usually not requested until twenty-four hours after a wildfire had ignited. And only when local authorities were completely overwhelmed.

  * * *

  —

  OVER THE RADIO, Messina and Bowersox heard their colleagues descending into the belly of the Camp Fire. The flaming front blasted through Concow, past gravel roads and marijuana patches, past NO TRESPASSING and WELCOME, JOE DIRT signs, past scalloped barbed wire that laced
the wooded hillsides. Residents scrambled to evacuate in their cars, still in pajamas, hair uncombed and teeth unbrushed. An ominous fog descended, forcing them to crack their vehicle doors as they drove just to make sure they were still on the road. The landscape blurred, the spot fires on the other side of Concow Reservoir ballooning in size to 30 or 40 acres each, puffing with gunmetal-colored smoke. The wildfire stoked its own weather, superheating the air and causing it to rise as cool air rushed into the vacuum, spawning delicate fire whirls. Wind speeds topped 90 mph, ramming through Camelot Park and funneling up Cirby Creek, stripping the trees bare.

  Firefighters treated several victims with severe burn injuries. One woman—a mother of five—had been found beneath a truck, where she had depressed the tire’s valve stem with a nail for air to breathe. She was laid in the back of a fire engine, then transferred to an ambulance. On the engine’s bench seat, she left a delicate sheet of molten skin. By now, Messina knew that the situation in Concow had become dire—but he still didn’t expect flames to reach Paradise. A few minutes later, though, flames were spotted near the Feather River Canyon.

  Just before 7:50 a.m., a woman who lived on Drayer Drive near Feather River hospital reported spot fires all over Sawmill Peak. She could see them from her bedroom window. “The wind is blowing like hell, and nobody notified us or anything,” the woman said. “That’s ’cause there’s no evacuations at this point,” the police dispatcher replied.

  Bowersox called Messina and Lawrie on the radio, informing the men that fires were lapping the mountain northeast of Paradise. Messina had already sketched a box around the Camp Fire on his whiteboard, hoping to keep it within the marker-drawn square. Pulga was the western boundary, and Pentz Road was the eastern boundary. Bowersox’s news stunned him—Sawmill Peak was outside his box. The blaze had blitzed seven miles. Realizing it was about to reach the eastern edge of Paradise, Messina asked the Butte County Sheriff’s sergeant to call in a mandatory evacuation for everything north of Highway 70, as well as three zones along Pentz Road. He reiterated the same request to Bowersox, so that everyone was on the same page. In the fear and chaos, civilians needed evacuation orders for a clear understanding of when to leave their homes and which roads they should use to safely get out of danger. He limited the order to a portion of Paradise, hoping to leave roads accessible for the four thousand people in those zones urgently needing to escape.