The departments within PG&E had also been extremely siloed, Ramsey found. The tower division oversaw maintenance of the transmission towers; the line division oversaw maintenance of the electrical lines. The hooks fell somewhere in between, succumbing to “wear and wear and wear with no one looking at them, until obviously disaster struck.” He compared it to buying a used car and failing to invest in its maintenance, driving it until it fell apart.
“It was the hook that took the lives, the hopes, the dreams, the health, the sanity, the wealth, the happiness of a community,” Ramsey said later in court. “But etched into the very soul of this community is a concern: What will happen next? Will this happen again?”
* * *
—
AT THE NORTH BUTTE County Courthouse in Chico, the main hearing room was bathed in the dim blue light of a projector. It was June 16, 2020, the day of PG&E’s sentencing. The meeting had been rescheduled multiple times as the pandemic known as Covid-19 spread across the nation, infecting and killing hundreds of thousands of people. Now, with the proper health and safety precautions in place, the legal fallout of the state’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire was finally reaching its long-awaited conclusion. The families of the dead were hoping for closure.
That week, PG&E’s $57.65 billion bankruptcy restructuring plan had been approved. Approximately $13.5 billion would be put into a trust to pay wildfire victims; another $25 billion would go to settlements with local governments, owners of insurance claims, and fire victims who had filed civil suits. The hedge funds, which owned not only most of the company’s stock but also investments in its debt and insurance claims, now stood to profit handsomely. (They had bought these claims from insurers who had paid for homes destroyed in the fire, some for as little as 30 cents on the dollar.)
There had been no state takeover, as Governor Newsom had threatened, and no vastly reimagined utility. Instead, PG&E had opted to split its operations into regional divisions. The board of directors would be overhauled again, and another new CEO installed. Plans were announced to sell the company’s century-old Beale Street headquarters; a move to nearby Oakland would offer a reduction in costs and a fresh start. Meanwhile, the California Public Utilities Commission had carved out a new safety enforcement process. If PG&E bungled it at any point during the coming wildfire season, it stood to lose its operating license—at which point the state could opt to take over the company’s electrical grid. (It was an empty threat. Preventing the company from operating at all would leave millions across the state powerless.)
At 9 a.m., court entered session. District Attorney Ramsey and his staff, as well as PG&E’s attorneys, wore homemade or surgical masks. Seating in the courtroom was limited, and chairs were mostly empty. Because of the virus, proceedings were being broadcast live online. Bill Johnson, the outgoing CEO of PG&E, stood behind a pale wood lectern. On this Tuesday morning, his interim replacement—Bill Smith, a PG&E board member and former AT&T executive—hadn’t joined him in court. Johnson’s mask hung around his neck so the audience could see his face. His hands were clasped in front of him and he shifted from foot to foot. Butte County Superior Court judge Michael Deems slowly read aloud the names of the victims, who had suffered gruesome, preventable deaths. The court projected their portraits on the wall. “How do you plead?” Judge Deems asked.
Johnson paused to take in the photo of each victim. Shirlee Teays, ninety, found inside her home on the Skyway, holding a framed photograph—of what, investigators couldn’t tell. Cheryl Brown, seventy-five, and her husband, Larry Brown, seventy-two, seated in their recliners. Don Shores, seventy, and his wife, Kathy Shores, sixty-five, seated in theirs. Teresa Ammons, eighty-two, outside her trailer with her purse. Ethel Riggs, ninety-six, unable to reach the manual release of her garage door. Lolene Rios, fifty-six, in her basement with her four dogs. Richard Brown, seventy-four, the father of nurse Chardonnay Telly, splayed under his truck. TK Huff, seventy-one, facedown in his garden, having crawled ten feet from his wheelchair in an attempt to escape the flames.
“Guilty, Your Honor.”
David Young, sixty-nine, who crashed his minivan into a tree while evacuating, then burned alive along with two pets in its cargo area. Rose Farrell, ninety-nine, three months shy of her hundredth birthday, next to her wheelchair on her front porch. Evva Holt, eighty-five, in the backseat of a burning truck on Pearson Road. Marie Wehe, seventy-eight, in a burning truck on Windermere Lane. Julian Binstock, eighty-eight, in the shower with his border collie mix, Jack. Sara Magnuson, seventy-five, under a wet carpet in her bathtub, while on the phone with her neighbor, Cal Fire dispatcher Beth Bowersox. Three generations of Heffern women—Ishka, twenty, Christina, forty, and Matilde, sixty-eight—in their bathtub. Travis and Carole’s neighbor Paul Ernest, seventy-two, who had spent most of the past year in a hospital burn unit, holding on long enough to give his wife, Suzie, the will to live.
“Guilty, Your Honor.”
Herb Alderman, seventy-nine, home with a sprained ankle. Judith Sipher, sixty-eight, home with the flu. Andrew Downer, fifty-four, home in his wheelchair. Anna Hastings, sixty-seven, home with severe scoliosis. Rafaela Andrade, eighty-four, in the house her husband had built by hand for them. Gordon Dise, sixty-six, who returned home for something and never made it back out. Joseph Rabetoy, thirty-nine, without a car on Angel Drive. Barbara Carlson, seventy-one, and her sister Shirley Haley, sixty-seven, their arms wrapped around each other at their home on Heavenly Place.
“Guilty, Your Honor.”
A half hour later, after acknowledging PG&E’s guilt eighty-four times, Johnson read from a printed statement. He could never take away the pain felt by the many thousands of people who had been harmed by the Camp Fire, he said. PG&E was “deeply sorry” for the fire and its “tragic consequences.” To some, the words sounded awfully similar to those uttered by a former CEO after the 2010 San Bruno explosion. “On behalf of PG&E, I apologize, and I apologize personally for the pain that was caused here,” Johnson said. “I make this plea with great sadness and regret, and with eyes wide open to what happened and to what must never happen again.”
Later that afternoon in his Oroville office, Ramsey became emotional as he ran through a list of all that had been lost in the Camp Fire. “PG&E destroyed not just these people, but an entire community,” he said. “It killed a town.” Before him, pieces of Tower 27/222 had been dismembered and arranged on a long table for public viewing. “We hope that, as Mr. Johnson said today, this [verdict] will live on. Safety must come first—not a matrix of risk analysis versus profit. PG&E must do this or, like these victims, die.”
THE FIRE: LIGHTNING SIEGE OF 2020
Storm clouds churned. Electrons rubbed and fizzed as the purple summer storm gathered strength above the Pacific Ocean, then whirled toward California and kissed the shoreline. Soon the energy exploded. Thunderclaps reverberated, though no rain followed. More than twelve thousand lightning strikes—at 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, about five times hotter than the surface of the sun—slapped the parched ground. There had been no appreciable rainfall for months, no reprieve from the changing of the climate, no answer to the man-made—and man-ignored—warming. As lightning struck in California, hurricanes were boiling in the Caribbean Sea, so many on the horizon that researchers turned to the Greek alphabet for new names. The hottest temperature on earth was recorded at Furnace Creek in Death Valley: 130 degrees Fahrenheit. A respiratory pandemic raged on and on and on, and record heat waves caused rolling blackouts.
From the historic lightning siege, more than 560 uncontrollable wildfires ignited. During the late summer of 2020, they leaped and roared across California, devouring everything in their paths. More than 3 million acres scorched, hundreds of thousands of fire refugees fleeing from their homes, fire tornadoes pummeling the ground. Birds fell from the jaundiced sky, their feathers singed charcoal black. The Joshua trees burned, never to repopulate that stretc
h of Southern California desert. The redwood trees—many older than the first European settlers to colonize North America, some older than Christ—burned too, along with homes and neighborhoods tucked deep within the forests. Licking and spitting sparks, the flames zipped through the isolated gullies and ravines and coughed into the sky, regaining their proper place on the land. Fire would always prevail.
But in the first early hours of a mid-August day—when all was still calm and the future was inconceivable, when the warming of the globe seemed deniable, when a wildfire was a worthy and beatable foe, forever the “new normal”—there was only darkness and potential.
Above Butte County, lightning roiled and struck ground.
And then: the first crackle of red flame.
KONKOW LEGEND
With the next sun they started; the young men first to clear the way and frighten the wild beasts, and the women, the young maidens, and the little children, with Peuchano and Umwanata in their midst, in the middle of a long line, with the old men bringing up the rear. For many days they journeyed thus over the mountains and across streams, always making the kakanecomes first before they slept at night—until, one evening, they saw away off in the distance a green valley, with the setting sun shining upon it. They halted, and Peuchano and Umwanata were brought to the front.
Shading their old eyes with their feeble hands, anxious and silent, they gazed long and trembling upon it, until one by one the tears chased each other down their old wrinkled faces, and falling upon their knees they looked upward, and with clasped hands and sobbing voices, cried, “Welluda, welluda, once more!” And the young men took up the glad cry, stronger and stronger, as it went: “Welluda, welluda, our home!” And above it all, rising sweet and solemn above the grand old pines, the songs of praise of the young maidens to Wahnonopem, the Great Spirit, who had brought them safely through so many dangers to welluda, their old home. And in the long, long years—as many as the stars above—around the campfires of the tribe at night the story was told by the old to the young; and I tell it to you, as it came down to me.
EPILOGUE
REBURN
Nearly two years after the Camp Fire, a lightning-sparked wildfire in Plumas County raced into Butte County, pushed on by the Jarbo Winds. The North Complex Fire, as it was called, broke the ranks of the state’s largest wildfires, and Butte County found itself atop the leaderboard of misery once again. The firestorm of September 2020 killed sixteen people and leveled the hamlets of Berry Creek and Feather Falls. An hour’s drive from Paradise, the communities were tucked in the foothills near Lake Oroville, directly on the other side of the Feather River Canyon. As the fire leaped toward Paradise, evacuation warnings again went out for the town.
Captain Matt McKenzie, now forty-four, propelled himself into the middle of the firestorm. Many things had changed for him since the Camp Fire—most notably, his home station. He had departed Jarbo Gap the previous year for a new post in Paradise. Working at Station 36 had left him with a lingering sense of grief, particularly on the first anniversary of the Camp Fire. He had imagined that November as a fresh start. “I don’t know why I thought it was going to be some huge weight lifted off my shoulders,” McKenzie had said at the time. “It’s just time. It’s three hundred sixty-five days—not some miracle number. I had it set in my mind that after a year, we would be able to move on.” Back then, at least, he had been grateful that the county had made it another year without a major wildfire, though he knew conditions hadn’t changed. This year, they hadn’t been so lucky. But McKenzie had ruptured his ACL earlier that summer and was on light duty until he could get surgery. Still, ever the softhearted one, he was intent on helping a friend evacuate his animals. McKenzie couldn’t stand to think they might burn alive. He wedged his truck through the flames and sped into another disaster.
At the same time, Sean Norman, who had been promoted to battalion chief, was trapped with a handful of residents at the local fire station in Berry Creek. One person was so badly burned that in order to start an intravenous line, a paramedic had to drill the needle into his bone marrow. Norman, now forty-nine, felt a weary sense of déjà vu. “At some point next week, a bunch of people are going to come home,” he said later. “A wife like my wife and kids like my kids. They’re going to sift to find two or three things that didn’t melt. I could have never imagined the things and the places where this job has taken me…. I’m just tired. I’m tired of seeing dead animals. I’m tired of seeing dead people. I’m tired of seeing destroyed communities. I just don’t want to see it anymore.” Yet one image offered him hope: the look on his daughter’s face when she heard a whinny from the barn. She had finally persuaded her parents to buy her a horse, whom she named Sparkles.
As fires continued to ravage California, the top ranks of the Butte County unit shifted again and again. Darren Read retired, and David Hawks took his spot. When Hawks retired in 2019, John Messina, now forty-seven, was propelled to the top of the pecking order. He had taken over supervision of a county that had seen more than 30 percent of its land burn in the last decade—and would probably see even more soon. “I gotta be honest with you, it’s tough to watch another part of the county be destroyed by fire,” Messina said. “It’s tough to watch another rural community devastated, because we know how hard that recovery process is. It hangs over your head.” But Messina had kept one memento from the Camp Fire. On his new desk, he displayed the soup-can-sized rock that he had used to anchor his map. Someday he planned to get it engraved.
Meanwhile, dispatcher Beth Bowersox was struggling to move on. In the past two years, she had battled post-traumatic stress disorder, brought on by the 911 calls she had answered on that fateful morning. In 2019, Bowersox had finally worked up the courage to attend a work-sponsored retreat for the disorder in Boise—but while she was there, a freak tornado had ripped across campus and torn off the roof of the building she was in. Still, Bowersox had found the workshop helpful, even posting publicly about the experience on Facebook: “Going to the retreat didn’t fix me…it doesn’t work that way. But it has given me hope (something I was in drastically short supply of) and tools to keep moving forward to heal and become my true self.” After taking a three-month medical leave of absence earlier that summer, Bowersox found herself at her workstation again as the North Complex Fire roared. She fielded a potential evacuation order for herself, along with more frantic 911 calls—and Bowersox wasn’t sure how much longer she could hold it together.
Up the Skyway in Paradise, the recovery process remained slow and arduous. The town was rebuilding without any major changes to its transportation system—despite the evacuation issues made apparent during the Camp Fire. Only 298 homes had been rebuilt, while another 1,149 permits had been issued. Community leaders, including the schools superintendent, the high school principal, the keeper of Paradise Lake, and the fire chief, had retired or moved away, further destabilizing the community that remained. Others took their places: Steve “Woody” Culleton was running for the Town Council again, as was Luke Bellefeuille, the PG&E worker who had left the company to help rebuild his hometown and now channeled his civic-mindedness in a new direction. Marc Mattox, the former assistant town manager, had recently returned to Town Hall to head up the Public Works Department. He had relocated to Chico the previous year for a job as an engineer with the city—but he returned to work in Paradise a few months later. He knew his heart would always be on the Ridge.
One key person, though, wasn’t sticking around. As the North Complex Fire threatened to sweep into Paradise, Town Manager Lauren Gill, now sixty-two, was packing up her office. Her five-year contract with the town had ended. Though more than ninety people had applied for her job, Kevin Phillips, who had overseen the Paradise Irrigation District, had beaten out the competition. Gill was relieved to be leaving. She had gotten married in May and wasn’t sure whether she and her new husband would stay in Paradise. “Some days, I think the only way t
o clear my mind is to go somewhere else and change this scenery,” she said. “But you also can’t just run away from something or leave it behind. You have to deal with it. I’m not going to let this fire defeat me.” In January 2021, though, the town would release an after-action report calling out the “lack of coordination” at Town Hall on the morning of the Camp Fire, which had led to a delay in alerts that “could have caused major confusion and further compromised the safety of Paradise residents.”
As Gill said her socially distanced goodbyes at Town Hall, Travis Wright was preparing to defend his bungalow on Edgewood Lane from flames yet again. This time Carole was with him; she had asked for the day off from work. Not knowing whether her husband had survived the Camp Fire had left an indelible imprint on her psyche. She wasn’t going to leave him this time. The couple was still living with Travis’s sister in Chico until they could finish repairing the damage to their home: The Camp Fire had burned holes in their roof and scorched some walls. Finding a contractor was difficult; there was more money to be made in new construction. Travis and Carole were also waiting for a settlement from the class action lawsuit they had joined against PG&E in 2018. Travis knew, though, that the cash would amount to little compared to what he had lost.
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