And now her home was gone.
“My watch says we have to wait one minute before we start,” Mayor Jones said, watching the clock. “There we go. Talk now!”
Paradise Fire chief David Hawks spoke first. He held the microphone close to his mouth and gestured at a printed map of the fire perimeter, explaining that the blaze was still raging in the evergreen forests near Bloomer Hill. At 130,000 acres, the wildfire was 35 percent contained—a figure determined by how much of it was confined behind fire lines and backburns. Hawks knew that at least forty-eight people had died. (By that point, only about half of the total victims had been located.) The flames had gone cold near Chico, he added, and though a hotel on lower Clark Road had begun smoldering that afternoon, firefighters had quashed that threat within a half hour. “Obviously the fire swept through Paradise four days ago plus now, and there is very little to no fire activity in town,” Hawks said. “Very little to no remaining fuel left.” Fuel, in this case, meant houses.
Then there was a moment of silence. Everyone bowed their heads. Vice Mayor Greg Bolin broke the quiet to pray for families who had lost loved ones and needed solace, for first responders who had braved the fire, for those still fighting back the flames. “We love our town,” he said.
They took roll and began. The first item on their pre-fire agenda: passing a proclamation to recognize November as National Runaway Prevention Month. “There is some town business that the council needs to handle,” said Mayor Jones, “so I apologize for the mundane in the midst of tragedy.”
The next item, said the town clerk, was an update on road projects—but no one wanted to take time to hear a now outdated report. There were bigger issues to discuss, like how to move forward when the entire town was mostly leveled and its people still evacuated. How would teachers keep up with their classes? Where would people live while they rebuilt? When would the debris be cleared? It had only been five days, and no one had any answers. Maybe they could have another community meeting on Thursday? “We are going to post news on the town Facebook page. Could you spread the word?” decided Town Manager Lauren Gill, turning to a smattering of TV journalists in the corner. “We are also trying to put together another page, maybe called Paradise Recovers? Paradise Rebuilds? It might take me twenty-four hours to get that up and running. We’ll have all of our information there.”
She wanted to host a community vigil at First Christian Church in Chico, too, in memory of those who had passed. “None of us have had any time to mourn or even look at the gravity of the situation and what it has done to us, so this will be a good opportunity for us to do that,” Gill said of the vigil. “We’re also planning on—on a fun note, because we are fun—we are planning on a community Thanksgiving. I’m getting a lot of excitement on that. I’ll have more information soon. We’ll all have a place to go and be together. Just have a Thanksgiving dinner and be together.”
Seated behind the dais, Gill appeared stoic and calm, but inwardly she was struggling to process the disaster. The mayor, police chief, county supervisor, and five-member Town Council were homeless. So were sixty-five firefighters and eight police officers. Eight of the nine public schools in Paradise had sustained serious damage, as had two fire stations. Kmart, Safeway, McDonald’s, and the newly remodeled Jack in the Box were ruined. The wooden flumes crisscrossing the West Branch Feather River had been destroyed. The beloved ponderosa pine forest had been hollowed out. Everyone knew someone who had been affected.
While the homes of her two sisters and her brother hadn’t survived, Gill’s own home near Butte Creek Canyon was unscathed. Her tube of mascara, she would discover, was still on the white quartz countertop, right where she had left it. She felt guilty that it was her house still standing and almost wished it had burned down too.
The rising death toll also filled her with dread. She questioned her role in the evacuation. Assistant Town Manager Marc Mattox, nagged by his conscience, worried that they would be taken to court for bungling the CodeRed alerts.
The Town Council didn’t know any of this.
“Lauren, I just have to thank you for thinking so much about the community,” Jones said. Her fellow councilmembers applauded.
Now several officials, each wearing a jacket emblazoned with the acronym of a different federal agency, spoke into the chamber’s microphone. They assured the council that they were all on the same team. “This is a marathon, not a sprint,” said Kevin Hannes, a Federal Emergency Management Agency official. “This is about Paradise, this is about Butte County, this is about California, supported by the federal government. We are not here to take over. We are here to directly support Governor Brown. We are committed to being here with you.”
Everyone clapped again. Residents stepped up for public comment. They spoke because they needed someone to listen to what they had been through, even for three minutes. Like the man in the bright yellow jacket who oversaw the Paradise Community Guild. Or the woman in the baggy green hoodie who ran the Paradise Boys and Girls Club. She hadn’t planned on speaking, but a hundred of the children had shown up for a meeting in Chico that afternoon, and she wanted to share how joyful that had been.
Then there was Ward Habriel, seventy-two, who had lived on Pentz Road with his wife, Cheryl, seventy-one. He wore a green flannel shirt and a cerulean LOVE PARADISE hat embroidered with a red heart. “Do you still love Paradise?” Ward said. “I have a real easy [answer] for that. Of course. Paradise is not several thousand acres of charcoal—it’s about people. We have a certain spirit. I don’t think tonight’s a good night for complaints and gripes, moans and groans…. Maybe some of the buildings and roads you didn’t like. But guess what? We have a great community.” He reached for his wallet. He wanted to do something that was important to him, noting that the town had recently passed its Measure C sales tax, which now, obviously, wasn’t generating much money. He stacked $6.26 on the podium. “I have spent a little bit of money in Chico…. I’ve added how much I spent…and I would like to pay that tax now.”
“Woo, we’ll take it!” Jones cheered.
Others weren’t as supportive. Michael Orr, a local writer, shuffled to the podium, hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans. “I love this town,” he began—then clarified the statement, realizing he was standing in Chico. “Not this town, our town. I love the community, the spirit that’s still alive. The people are what our community is all about…. It’s much more challenging when you’re a town in exile, which is really what we are. We’re spread all over the state.” He thanked Gill for her leadership, along with the rest of the council, then directed his attention to the mayor. “I’ve been critical of you at times,” Orr said to Jones. “For lack of vision and economic things and other things. My criticism today is the same thing. Where are you? The people need you. We are not hearing a word from you.”
“I think I did twenty-five media interviews yesterday and at least the same amount today,” Jones interrupted.
“Well, thousands of people don’t own TVs,” Michael responded.
“I know, but it’s the job I’ve been given,” Jones snapped. “There are only so many minutes in the day.”
Michael continued: “You spent the last two months talking about how proud you were of your evacuation plan. Are you still as proud of it as you were then? Because most of the people coming down off that hill aren’t very proud of it. A bunch of them have asked me to come here and ask you to resign. So that’s what I’m doing today. Thank you.” He folded his hands over his belly and edged away from the podium. The room fell silent.
“Thanks for your comments, and I’d like to answer that question,” Jones said. “This is the same thing the media has asked me. I have said, ‘Yes, I am.’ Because we had an evacuation plan that was as robust as we did, because we had practiced it, because we had implemented it in the past.” She sighed. “It wasn’t perfect, but it actually worked. Without that plan, we wou
ld’ve had hundreds and hundreds more deaths in Paradise. Our people knew about the plan and they pretty much followed it. It was chaos, but it was sort of organized chaos, and I truly believe with all my heart that without that plan, many, many more people would have died.”
No town or city had the means to evacuate every person at the same time, she added. “You can’t build infrastructure big enough to do that, so I just want to say that again…. You can call the next speaker.”
Less than an hour later, Jones adjourned the session. There wasn’t much the council could do for a town that, at least for the moment, didn’t exist.
* * *
—
EAST OF CHICO, Betsy Ann Cowley arrived home in Pulga that week with a suitcase full of sundresses and bathing suits. She had cut short her family cruise in the Dominican Republic after hearing of the Camp Fire. Cal Fire had stationed private security guards near the Caribou-Palermo Line, which crossed her property, to prevent anyone from disturbing the area around the ignition point. The agency’s arson investigators had already climbed Camp Creek Road on November 8 to conduct a rigorous inspection. They had been concerned by the sight of a PG&E helicopter hovering above Tower 27/222. Now the investigators were having the tower dismantled. They had called in the help of an FBI Evidence Team to do metallurgical testing at its laboratory in Quantico, Virginia. Cal Fire and county officials hoped to prove that the equipment was the cause of the blaze.
A few Union Pacific Railroad workers who had befriended Cowley in recent years had noticed that her house and a scattering of cabins were among the wildfire’s casualties. The rugged workers tried to anticipate what she might need upon her return to Pulga—her “Ladytown.” They left containers of gasoline and potable water, along with several packets of cotton underwear they had carefully selected at Walmart. Though the granny panties were about two sizes too large, Cowley was touched by the gesture. She set her luggage down.
* * *
—
FIVE DAYS LATER, on Saturday, November 17, President Donald Trump landed at Chico Municipal Airport under a leaden sky. He was scheduled to meet with California governor Jerry Brown and governor-elect Gavin Newsom that morning. He stepped off Air Force One onto a runway littered with orange and white firefighting aircraft. Smoke obscured the morning light, and the air smelled of a wood fire. Trump wore a white shirt and a dark windbreaker with a camouflage baseball cap that read USA.
Mayor Jones had driven to the airport to greet him. She had received word of his visit the previous afternoon, while out at lunch with her husband in downtown Chico. The caller ID rang through as “White House.” She had thought the caller might be a telemarketer but answered anyway. The official on the line asked if Jones wanted to meet the president. She inquired if the vice mayor might accompany her, but the official said no. If she told anyone, security concerns would force the White House to cancel the trip. Jones was on her own.
There was one problem: Her entire wardrobe had been consumed by flames. She had no clothing other than a handful of blue jeans and T-shirts she’d bought at a discount warehouse since evacuating. At the restaurant, her husband pointed out a boutique across the street. The owner outfitted Jones in twenty minutes, dressing her in a green cashmere sweater, black slacks, and a soft gray coat. Jones had twirled in the mirror. She looked good. As she left, she’d made sure to emphasize that the new outfit was for a big media interview, nothing more.
Now Jones waited in her silver Volvo. German shepherds had thoroughly sniffed the vehicle before she was allowed to drive onto the tarmac. She hoped the president would offer to let her ride with him. The official had mentioned Trump might propose such a thing.
Only a tragedy as big as the Camp Fire would have brought a sitting president to a town as small as Paradise. Even then, Trump struggled to remember the community’s name. At several points throughout the day, he misspoke, calling Paradise “the town of Pleasure.” Later that afternoon, at a press conference in Malibu, state officials would finally be forced to correct him. “And you’re watching from New York, or you’re watching from Washington, D.C., and you don’t really see the gravity of it. I mean, as big as they look on the tube, you don’t see what’s going on until you come here. And what we saw at Pleasure—what a name, Pleasure—right now. What we just saw, we just left Pleasure…” Listening, Governor Brown trained his eyes on the ground, looking pained, until another official intervened and the president corrected himself: “Oh, Paradise. What we just saw at Paradise is just, you know, it’s just not acceptable.”
But before arriving in Malibu to survey the damage wrought by the Woolsey Fire, Trump would see Paradise for himself. Jones was the first to greet him on the tarmac, firmly shaking his hand and looking him straight in the eyes. She wasn’t nervous. Trump had been briefed and knew who she was, calling her by her first name—not her title. He didn’t offer a ride after all, so she drove in her Volvo near the back of his motorcade.
They wheeled across Chico toward the Skyway. Hundreds of people wearing N95 respirator masks lined the college town’s streets, filming the president’s passing on their cellphones. Some waved American flags or hefted campaign signs in the air to welcome him to their once bucolic corner of the Golden State. A smaller group held banners that read CLIMATE CHANGE!, MORON, WE ARE IN A DROUGHT!, and THE APOCALYPSE.
The smog thickened as the motorcade gained elevation, the city blocks of onlookers giving way to charred earth and matchstick trees so brittle that a puff of air could topple them. In yard after yard, homes had been leveled. Here and there a carved pumpkin rotted on concrete front steps, pardoned by the flames. A decorative skeleton lounged on one bench, arm resting on the seatback. An untouched ceramic nativity set perched atop the roof of a gutted hatchback. Chimneys stood guard over the devastation, as tall and even as gravestones. A local artist was planning to spray-paint portraits on some of them in honor of the victims. The motorcade passed a used car sales lot. One sedan had been whittled to its frame; the rest were untouched. Soot caked their windshields.
WEAR MASKS, an LED road sign cautioned. Construction crews and first responders were sifting through the wreckage, their faces hidden. Trump and the other elected officials did not wear masks.
Around 11:30 a.m., the motorcade pulled in to the Skyway Villa Mobile Home and RV Park. Trump began his walking tour at one of the burnt-out homes. A tattered American flag was draped over one ruined wall. Scraps of blue-and-white-starred fabric stippled the ground. The president navigated past a downed streetlamp, rusted ovens, and a metal shelf strewn with brittle terra-cotta pots. Jones and FEMA director Brock Long—who said he had never seen a worse disaster in his career—followed behind, along with Brown and Newsom. The pair of politicians stuck together, chatting minimally with the president. Jones, a registered Republican, was just happy that the three men appeared to be getting along. The president and the governor, who was about to pass the reins to Newsom, always seemed to be clashing with Trump over something. Now, though, they were friendly enough for Trump to slap Brown on the back.
Just two days after the Camp Fire, Trump had tweeted about the catastrophe, threatening to withhold disaster money from California. “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” he typed. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!” Immediately, the head of the thirty-thousand-member California Professional Firefighters organization had issued a blistering response, calling the tweet “ill-informed, ill-timed and demeaning to victims and to our firefighters on the front lines.” Newsom had added his bit: “Lives have been lost. Entire towns have been burned to the ground. Cars abandoned on the side of the road. People are being forced to flee their homes. This is not a time for partisanship. This is a time for coordinating relief and response and lifting those
in need up.”
Trump had in fact been incorrect. The federal government owned 57 percent of California’s 33 million acres of forestland. Another 40 percent was owned by private landowners that included families, corporations, and Native American tribes. State and local agencies, including Cal Fire, were in charge of only about 3 percent. “Managing all the forests everywhere we can does not stop climate change—and those that deny that are definitely contributing to the tragedy,” said Governor Brown to reporters at the state operations center in Sacramento after his quick return from Chicago. “The chickens are coming home to roost. This is real here.”
Now, standing amid the wreckage, the president appeared visibly moved by the devastation. He kept commenting to Jones how unbelievable it all was, how it looked like bombs had gone off. He addressed Paradisians as “my people,” which Jones took as a hopeful sign—it seemed they were deserving of federal aid after all. When Trump turned to face the press gaggle, he thanked the law enforcement officers and elected officials in attendance, including House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Representative Doug LaMalfa, who represented Paradise and much of Northern California in the nation’s capital. Neither congressman believed in climate change.
“We do have to do management and maintenance,” Trump said. “I think everybody’s seen the light. I don’t think we’ll have this again to this extent. Hopefully this is going to be the last of these because this was a really, really bad one.” Then he brought up Finland, a “forest nation,” mentioning how “they spend a lot of time raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem. I know everybody’s looking at that.”
He had touched on an important topic. Many of California’s forests were diseased and overgrown, weakened by the practice of putting out fires immediately. California’s woodlands had once been so healthy that a horseback rider could trot through the forest with outstretched arms and never hit a single trunk or branch. Such a feat was no longer possible—the foothills had become too tangled. In truth, forests could benefit from controlled burns. Firefighters sometimes kindled these “good fires”—formally known as prescribed burns—when the weather was accommodating, ridding the forest of fuels that might later stoke a blaze into a runaway conflagration. By some estimates, nearly 20 million acres in California needed to burn in this way to overcome a century of misguided fire suppression. (These preventive burns were not without risk, though. In 2000, firefighters in New Mexico lost control of a prescribed burn and it ended up destroying 435 homes.)
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