There were seven others with Mullin, including the hospital’s groundskeeper, an infection control nurse, the biomedical director, and the volunteer director, who had also brought her school-aged son. It was the groundskeeper’s last day on the job after forty years; an iced sheet cake that had been ordered to celebrate his retirement was still sitting untouched in a break room refrigerator upstairs. He and the others had been desperate to find a refuge. Mullin had promised that the tunnel was that place. “We can’t go out like this,” he told them, trying not to think of his sons, five and seven, who were with his wife.
Mullin grabbed two filtration masks—standard hospital equipment—from a cart, plopping one on the young boy’s head. The mask, resembling a hockey helmet, could trap 99.7 percent of the smallest particulate matter in the smoke. The boy’s head bobbed under its weight. Everyone else nabbed bottled water, fire extinguishers to douse spot fires, and electric camping lanterns by which to see. Rolling an office chair to the mouth of the tunnel, Mullin instructed someone to sit by the door and keep a lookout for fire engines. If firefighters came, they would presumably be able to evacuate everyone.
In moments of stress, Mullin’s mind always went to a checklist: making a plan, then a backup plan. It was ingrained in him after fourteen years as a hospital staffer, many of them as a respiratory therapist on the night shift. Through the cracked door, Mullin saw that a green kitchen dumpster in the parking lot had caught fire. Then a transport van ignited, two cars down from his Volkswagen. A generator box sparked. Even the sign for Feather River hospital on Pentz Road was aflame. Mullin sent a colleague outdoors to douse some of the smaller fires.
Still no sign of help.
Smoke began to billow down the tunnel from the HVAC unit. Mullin walked back to the housekeeping office. He had already wheeled a few cylinders of medical oxygen into the room. Now he unscrewed the tanks. Fresh air filled the space, blowing out the stuffy smog that had begun to gather along the ceiling. The office, he offered, was now a “clean air respite.” When the smoke in the tunnel became overpowering, he and his colleagues could gather here and breathe actual air. One task complete, Mullin began hashing out another backup plan. What would they do if the hospital burned and escape wasn’t possible? Only his wife, Emily, and a few other colleagues’ spouses knew they were hidden in the tunnel. They had called 911, but the dispatcher said resources weren’t available to help.
“I would hate for us to burn up and be conscious of it,” Mullin said, turning to the forty-six-year-old respiratory supervisor.
He pointed to the tanks of helium. If it came to it, they could build a tent with bedsheets and crack the canister of inert gas. Breathing pure helium would make them drowsy, Mullin explained, because it displaced the oxygen in the air. Within a minute, they would black out. A few minutes after that, their oxygen levels would plummet to fatal levels. Asphyxiation would be quick and painless. His colleague nodded slowly. They wouldn’t share the plan unless they had to.
Meanwhile, twenty feet above their heads, unaware of their plight, firefighters were working on the hospital roof.
CHAPTER 7
A BLIZZARD OF EMBERS
Paradise Fire chief David Hawks rolled to a stop in Chloe Court. The cul-de-sac, lined with a crop of cookie-cutter homes, was located on the eastern edge of Paradise. The chief’s cellphone pinged with text messages, rolling in all at once, all time-stamped 9:05 a.m. He unfolded his hands from the steering wheel. Finally, some cell service. He paused to reply to the slew of text messages and listen to Cal Fire’s radio traffic, which was becoming increasingly frantic.
Over the radio, he heard that embers were landing, or “spotting,” in the Butte Creek Canyon, threatening the historic Honey Run Covered Bridge. The Pratt-style truss bridge had been constructed in 1886, for the then hefty price tag of $4,300, as a way of connecting the Ridge to the rest of Butte County. In 1965, when the Butte County Board of Supervisors threatened to tear the deteriorating bridge down, Dr. Merritt Horning—a doctor and co-founder of Feather River hospital—and another local resident had donated money to preserve it, as well as to carve out an adjacent park. It was the only remaining bridge of its style in the United States. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it had been closed to traffic for decades, becoming instead a popular spot for rustic-themed weddings featuring twinkle lights and wildflowers in mason jars.
At 9:07 a.m., Hawks listened as a Cal Fire dispatcher told a female caller that no one could come to her aid. The woman was stuck on the basketball court of Ponderosa Elementary with five other drivers; they had driven onto the school grounds when flames sheeted across the only access road. Now they were trapped behind a chain-link fence. The dispatcher instructed her to drive through it if necessary. There were no firefighters available to help; they were across town trying to free other trapped residents. Hawks could hear their reports of using bolt cutters to snip fallen electrical lines. He knew that that was a huge risk: First responders were taught never to touch live wires, since they didn’t have the training to know which ones might electrocute them. But representatives from PG&E had assured Cal Fire’s Emergency Command Center that the electricity was officially offline. (Records would later show that power had in fact remained on in parts of the downtown grid through 12:30 p.m., when the backup generators rumbled to life.)
Hawks had several missed calls from Town Manager Gill. After speaking earlier that morning, when he was off duty and the wildfire was still threatening Pulga, they had struggled to connect. This time he got through. He repeated what little he knew from listening to the radio. The latest updates worried him. The last time he had seen a conflagration spread this rapidly was in 2017, when the Tubbs Fire had roared twelve miles across Sonoma County in about three hours. Before that, the Cedar Fire had outpaced firefighters in 2003, running thirteen miles in sixteen hours. But this Camp Fire defied the facts on the “rate of spread” card that Cal Fire laminated and handed out to its employees. It was the size of a business card, and Hawks kept his tucked in his wallet. The card defined a “critical” blaze as anything faster than 3 mph. According to Hawks’s calculations, the Camp Fire was moving at twice that speed.
Hawks was a kind-faced man with wire-rimmed glasses and a thick shock of white hair. At fifty-two years old, he carried the experience of thirty-one fire seasons and the patience that came with parenting two teenage girls. In addition to serving as the fire chief in Paradise, where he had grown up, Hawks oversaw the northern half of Butte County as a Cal Fire division chief. Summer after summer, he had warned his town’s people of the mounting fire risk. He had helped sponsor an annual forum called “Fire on the Ridge” at Paradise Alliance Church, one of the town’s designated evacuation centers. In 2017, Cal Fire and the Butte County Fire Safe Council had mailed a postcard invitation to all 26,500 residents of Paradise. Only two hundred people showed up—including the presenters.
In August 2018, Hawks had hoped to shake this complacency with a carefully designed slideshow, which he presented at a Town Council meeting. That Tuesday evening, Hawks had opened by calling for a moment of silence for eight people who had recently died in the Carr Fire. They had perished in an unusual way, caught in a fire tornado that uprooted trees and crumpled electrical towers, flames soaring 400 feet in the air and stripping the earth bare. Fire scientists were still trying to make sense of the freakish meteorological event. After several minutes of silence, everyone’s head bowed, Hawks had launched into his presentation with a sense of urgency.
“All right,” he said. “I will tell you one thing that I see a lot around town, and it really concerns me. You can’t drive a block and not see leaves and needles stacked up in gutters and roof valleys and along the edges of homes. Those are all ember capturers.” He pantomimed a small fire exploding, steepling his fingers and ripping them apart. He emphasized the importance of defensible space, then gave an update on another wildfire that was
burning to the southwest, in Mendocino County. It had cannibalized a smaller blaze and covered more than 459,000 acres—twice the land area of New York City. The Mendocino Complex had earned the title of largest wildfire in state history, toppling the record held for only eight months by the 281,893-acre Thomas Fire of December 2017.
“Anyone have any burning questions?” Mayor Jones had asked when he was done, commencing public comment with a bad pun. Two nameplates were propped in front of her computer monitor—the first with her name on it, the second with her title. It was another small way the town saved money, by swapping nameplates as people were promoted. Jones had been appointed the year before, having left the Sacramento area in 2014 and moved to Paradise for her husband, who ran a local Farmers Insurance agency. She had entered local politics that same year, winning a seat on the Town Council. Candidates usually ran on their love for the community, not necessarily on their qualifications, but Jones, who had previously served as a district director for the California Department of Transportation for thirteen years, had more experience than most: She had overseen the development of $1 billion worth of new road projects in eleven counties. Her duties as mayor were largely ceremonial: attending ribbon cuttings, giving speeches and interviews, and presiding over meetings like this one.
From the back of the chambers, a man in a gray collared shirt and black pants approached the microphone and introduced himself. “I was just wondering,” he said. “In the event of a fire in Paradise, how long does it take to evacuate the town?”
It had been a simple question, but Hawks had not answered it directly, saying that he was “very confident” that Paradise was “very prepared.” He had even suggested that the man’s question was pointless, saying he couldn’t ever imagine that the entire town would ever need to be evacuated at once. He would discourage people who hadn’t received an alert from evacuating prematurely, he added.
Now, sitting in the cul-de-sac and listening to the Cal Fire chatter, Hawks thought back to his answer. Oh, how misguided he had been. The reality was that the town couldn’t handle the crush of a mass exodus. The town’s Public Works department had anticipated the pileup of cars as early as 2002, writing in a memo that only 3,700 vehicles an hour could evacuate on the four main routes. And that was under blue-sky conditions. “We can anticipate that during most fires, at least one of the main roadways will be closed (at least temporarily due to fire, smoke and fire suppression efforts),” wrote the Public Works director. Hawks shook his head. The real-time consequences of the town’s poor urban planning were overwhelming.
He looked up from his cellphone to see two ambulances from Feather River hospital veer off Pentz Road. One rolled to a stop in the crisp grass and promptly burst into flames. The second pulled past a white mailbox reading 1830 Chloe Court and parked in the driveway. Nurses swung open the back doors, revealing the hospital’s most vulnerable patients.
Tammy Ferguson leaped out of the second ambulance with them. Her long blond hair lashed around her head in the wind. She and her colleagues gathered outside the vehicle, lightly touching one another’s arms and discussing what to do next. Tammy, forty-two, had bright blue eyes and was dressed in the fuchsia scrubs of a labor and delivery nurse. She emanated a warmth and steadiness cultivated during a long career of coaching terrified women through complicated deliveries. A mother of five herself, she thrived on the adrenaline and the connection with the new mothers and their new babies.
Her first checkup of the day—the beginning of her last twelve-hour shift of the week—had occurred minutes before the hospital ordered its staff to evacuate. Tammy had checked Rachelle’s vital signs and made sure her baby was latching as he nursed. She had taken an immediate liking to Rachelle, who was direct and outspoken, unafraid to advocate for herself. Her son was premature, as delicate as a porcelain doll. Tammy thought he was unbearably cute. She didn’t feel this way about all babies.
After the evacuation order, Tammy had chosen to stay and help her patients. Jumping into the ambulance next to the woman with the fresh C-section, Tammy had felt a kinship with the patients—all of them longtime residents of Paradise, just like her. When she was thirteen years old and living in Los Angeles, her parents had blindfolded Tammy and her two siblings, spread a map on the kitchen table, and told them to point to a spot. Their fingers found Paradise. It was that easy. Tammy started her freshman year at Paradise High and had lived in town until the fall of 2018, when the four-bedroom house that she rented on Pearl Drive for $1,500 a month had been put on the market. With five children to care for, Tammy couldn’t afford to purchase the place and opted for a move to Chico.
Now Tammy watched in disbelief as a paramedic sprayed the flaming hood of the first ambulance with a fire extinguisher. Bits of foam flecked the grass. A second paramedic assessed patients. Chardonnay Telly, an emergency room nurse in black scrubs, tried to call her father. He was seventy-four and lived in a log cabin in Concow; she hadn’t heard from him since the Camp Fire ignited. The sky was a blizzard of embers. Millions of lit matches fluttered from the heavens, and about 90 percent were causing new fires when they struck the ground. The gutters of the house at 1830 Chloe Court smoked from the onslaught. The open concrete cul-de-sac gave the ambulance crews a fair chance of survival, because it wouldn’t burn. But nothing was guaranteed. Tammy saw dread flush the face of her colleague Crissy Foster, who had forgotten to kiss her toddler goodbye that morning.
The wildfire moved across the landscape unevenly. Pushed by the wind, it funneled up dry creek beds and whipped down narrow ridges, sparing some homes on the western edge of town, including some in Town Manager Gill’s neighborhood. Houses on Pentz Road weren’t so lucky. The flaming front was more than five miles wide as it leaped out of the overgrown Feather River Canyon, which hadn’t burned once in recorded history. In the cul-de-sac, the air was so hot that the nearby trees were torching. It was quickly becoming one of the town’s most intense fire zones.
Ash flecked Tammy’s blond hair like fat snowflakes in a winter storm. Each breath was arduous, drying her mouth and stinging her lungs. For a moment, she allowed terror to overtake logic. Should she hide in the surviving ambulance, where there was medical air to breathe? What if the tanks exploded? Should she hide in one of the houses? Or was hiding, in general, a bad idea? She could sprint across town, dodging the flames, until the fire overtook her, but she had never been much of a jogger.
She watched a female EMT crawl through the doggie door of the cream-colored house and click open the garage door. A male paramedic dragged patients inside on their gurneys. The woman with the brain bleed, slung over another paramedic’s back, moaned in pain. A man suffering from dementia continued to smile, as if he was enjoying the sky’s unusual colors. The first ambulance was now completely engulfed in flames.
The houses across Pentz Road crumpled, the electrical transformers popping. How quickly the work of a lifetime can disappear, Tammy thought. She clutched her cellphone, trying to decide what to do next. Like most medical professionals tasked with saving patients under harrowing circumstances, she had an essential pragmatism. She steeled herself against the encroaching fear—something she was well practiced at after years of tough decisions. At seventeen, when she had unexpectedly gotten pregnant, she had peed on a pregnancy test in the bathroom of the Mexican restaurant where she waitressed part time. She hadn’t been able to bear the thought of going an hour longer without knowing—acknowledging the crisis brought relief.
She had always been a doer. Against all odds, she’d graduated from Paradise High with a “4.0 and a four-month-old,” as she liked to say—and a year of college credits to boot. Most important, the birth of that daughter, Clarissa, had set Tammy on the path to becoming a labor and delivery nurse, just like the woman who coaxed her through labor without judgment or condemnation. She had put herself through nursing school while working full time. Tammy had never given up—and she wasn’t going to now.
But first she had some phone calls to make.
THE FIRE: LEAPING THE WEST BRANCH
Flames hadn’t crossed the West Branch Feather River in more than a century. The canyon was so steep and twisted that it tended to trap firestorms before they reached Paradise. But the wind on this day was powerful. Embers soared atop 90 mph gales like kamikazes bound for a distant land.
Tongues of flame lapped the western slope of Sawmill Peak, zigzagging across the Feather River by dancing on the wooden flumes used long ago by gold miners and more recently by hikers, who trod on them like catwalks. Meanwhile, embers descended on the northeastern tip of Paradise, landing on the tapered roads and snug rows of houses. The structures were ideal kindling, offering landscaping materials, mulch and brittle grass, gutters clogged with debris, unscreened attic vents, open windows and broken windows, even cheap single-pane windows, and bald roofing with missing shingles. Millions of embers tested each point of entry. They needled through the attic vents that allowed a house to breathe and gathered in the rainwater drains where mosquito larvae hatched in the summertime.
This was how the fire spread so quickly: It wasn’t a single unbroken front but a hail of embers. Alone, the sparks were too weak to do much damage. A single one could smolder for hours, and they were miles ahead of the mother conflagration. But if two dozen embers accumulated in a crevice or piled up on a clump of pine needles, the potential for fire skyrocketed. A small pile of firebrands could generate forty times more heat than a languid August afternoon of relentless sun. The superheated air started a chain reaction, broiling so hot that sheer curtains behind a single-pane window in a nearby home could catch fire and ignite the building from within. Windowpanes shattered with the temperature rise, the hot air rushing indoors to embrace the relatively cool interior. Hundreds of flaming matchsticks swirled over the furniture, fingering framed family photos like looters, then incinerating the entire place within minutes.
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