The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

by Michio Kaku

  When she got to the corner of Pearson Road, a major east–west artery, she saw someone directing cars to take the right turn, where she and the fireman found they could accelerate even more, winding along S-curves through a wooded area that was almost entirely aflame. Fires speckled the slopes along Pearson so that, in the dark, the hillside looked like a lava flow. “It’s so hot,” Fisher said. “Keep going! Keep going!” But then, they shot around another curve and the fireman’s brake lights came on. They had hit a wall of cars, across both lanes.

  “No!” Fisher yowled. “What did I do?”

  She was silent for a moment. Then something started beeping. It was the low-fuel alert. She was almost out of gas, though it ultimately wouldn’t matter. Moments later, her car caught fire.

  * * *

  Afterward, you could feel your mind grinding against what happened, desperate to whittle it down into a simple explanation of what went wrong, who should be blamed, what could be learned. There were many credible answers, specific mistakes to call out. But it was easy to worry that, given the scale of this particular disaster, the principal takeaways might be only humility and terror.

  From the start, the Camp Fire was driven by an almost vengeful-seeming confluence of circumstances, many of which had been nudged into alignment by climate change. Paradise had prepared for disasters. But it had prepared merely for disasters, and this was something else. In a matter of hours, the town’s roads were swamped, its emergency plans outstripped. Nine of every ten homes were destroyed and at least eighty-five people were dead. Many were elderly, some were incinerated in their cars while trying to flee, and others apparently never made it that far.

  It was all more evidence that the natural world was warping, outpacing our capacity to prepare for, or even conceive of, the magnitude of disaster that such a disordered earth can produce. We live with an unspoken assumption that the planet is generally survivable, that its tantrums are infrequent and, while menacing, can be plotted along some hazy, existentially tolerable bell curve. But the stability that American society was built around for generations appears to be eroding. That stability was always an illusion; wherever you live, you live with risk—​just at some emotional and cognitive remove. Now, those risks are ratcheting up. Nature is increasingly finding a foothold in the unimaginable: what’s not just unprecedented but also hopelessly far beyond what we’ve seen. This is a realm beyond disaster, where catastrophes live. Fisher wasn’t just trapped in a fire; she was trapped in the twenty-first century.

  By way of analogy, Paradise’s emergency-operations coordinator, Jim Broshears, later described giving fire-safety tutorials at elementary schools, back when he was the town’s fire chief, teaching second- and third-graders that if there’s fire at their bedroom door, they should go out the window, and vice versa. “Inevitably,” Broshears told me, “there’s the kid who goes, ‘What if there’s fire at the door and the window?’” And no matter what alternative Broshears provided, the kid could always push the story line one step further.

  “At some point, they’ve painted you into a corner and, well, do I tell an eight-year-old kid, ‘In that case, you’re going to die?’ Do you tell a community, ‘If this particular scenario hits, a bunch of you are going to die?’ Is that appropriate? I don’t know the answer.” He added, “I think that people are going to conclude that now.”

  * * *

  Fisher saw the first flames skitter in the depression where her windshield met the hood. She opened her car door again and leaned her head out. Embers burned tiny holes in her leggings. She was yelling, asking if anyone had water. A contractor in a pickup behind her hollered: “You don’t need water. You need to get in my truck.” He beckoned her and all her animals over.

  Fisher wedged herself among the tools and paperwork scattered on the man’s front seat, two dogs on top of her and the largest at her feet. As they inched forward, she took a picture of her burning car and was crushed to realize that she had just abandoned the few possessions she’d managed to save, including the ashes of her big brother, Larry, who, ten years earlier, died suddenly in his sleep.

  “I’m Tamra,” she told the man driving.

  “I’m Larry,” he said.

  The coincidence was too much: Fisher started crying again.

  Larry Laczko wore sleek, black-rimmed glasses and a San Francisco Giants cap and seemed, to Fisher, almost preternaturally subdued, speaking with the slow resignation of a man enduring ordinary traffic on an ordinary Thursday morning. Laczko and his wife lived on the Ridge for fifteen years, then migrated to Chico in 2010, after raising their two kids. For years, Laczko worked at Intel, managing sixty employees, traveling constantly. Then, one Saturday, his wife told him to clean the windows of their home in Paradise—​and to clean them well this time. Laczko did some research, geeked out a little, and wound up ordering a set of professional-grade tools from one of the oldest window-washing supply companies in the United States. His wife was pleased. Soon, he was washing windows every weekend, toddling around the Ridge with his tools, getting to know his neighbors and friends of friends. “I liked the work, the instant gratification of a dirty window turning clean,” Laczko explained, “but it was the interaction with people that I loved.” That was sixteen years ago. He quit his job and has run his own window-washing company ever since.

  Laczko was on Pearson Road by chance—​or because of his own stupidity. In retrospect, he conceded, either assessment was fair. His mother-in-law lived in Quail Trails Village, a nearby mobile-home and RV park. She was eighty-eight and used a walker. Laczko’s wife, who was nearby that morning, had already got her out. But Laczko wanted to be helpful. He recently installed an automatic lift chair for his mother-in-law and remembered how, after the 2008 evacuation, many people wound up displaced from the Ridge for days; it would be nice for his mother-in-law to have that chair. So he drove up the hill and cut across on Pearson, only to be turned around by police. Backtracking, he smacked into the traffic that had formed behind him: a blockade of cars, barely moving and every so often, as with Fisher’s Volkswagen, suddenly sprouting into flame.

  When Fisher climbed into Laczko’s truck, the seriousness of his predicament was only beginning to catch up with him. What sounded to Fisher like extraordinary calmness was actually extraordinary focus: he was scanning his surroundings, updating his map of everything that was on fire around him—​that tree; the plastic fender of that SUV—​while also taking a mental inventory of the back of his pickup, gauging how likely each item was to catch.

  “We’re getting out of here,” Laczko told Fisher. He projected enough confidence that he reassured himself, just slightly, as well.

  * * *

  But clearly he and Fisher were stuck. Thousands of people were, on choked roadways all over the Ridge, each sealed in his or her own saga of agony, terror, courage, or despair. It was like the 2008 evacuations, but far more serious—​the gridlock, cinched tighter; the danger, exponentially more acute—​and also harder to stomach, given all the focus on avoiding those problems in the ten years since.

  After the 2008 fires, the county created a fifth route off the Ridge, paving an old gravel road that wound through mountains to the north. Paradise vigorously revamped and expanded the emergency plans it had in place. The town was carved into fourteen evacuation zones; these were reorganized to better stagger the flow of cars. Paradise introduced the idea of “contraflow,” whereby traffic could be sent in a single direction across all lanes of a given street if necessary. Maps and instructions were mailed to residents regularly. There were evacuation drills, annual wildfire-preparedness events, and other, more meticulous layers of internal planning too. Paradise’s Wildland Fire Traffic Control Plan identified, for example, twelve “priority intersections” where problems might arise for drivers leaving each evacuation zone and stipulated how many orange cones or human flaggers would ideally be dispatched to each.

  “The more you study the Camp Fire,” says Thomas Cova, a Univers
ity of Utah geographer who has analyzed wildfire evacuations for twenty-five years, “the more you think: this could have been way worse. Way worse.” Cova called Paradise “one of the most prepared communities in the state.” A recent USA Today–California Network investigation found that only six of California’s twenty-seven communities at highest risk for fire had robust and publicly available evacuation plans.

  One architect of Paradise’s planning was Jim Broshears, who had spent the bulk of his forty-seven-year career as an emergency planner and firefighter struggling to mitigate his community’s idiosyncratically high risk of disaster. After the Camp Fire, Broshears confessed that, in his mind, the upper limit of harrowing scenarios against which he’d been defending Paradise was the 1991 Tunnel Fire in the Oakland hills—​a wildfire that consumed more than 2,900 structures and killed twenty-five people: “I’ll be honest,” he told me, “we simply didn’t see it being much worse than that.” Recently, Broshears showed me a copy of the Traffic Control Plan in a big, thick binder and said, with admirable directness, “It mostly didn’t work.” Then he clacked the binder shut and insisted, “That is still going to work 98 percent of the time, though.”

  The Los Angeles Times and other newspapers would later dig up many city planning mistakes and communication failures that appeared to compound the devastation on the morning of November 8. The core of the problem was that there just wasn’t any time. The fire was moving so astonishingly fast that, only a few minutes after Paradise started evacuating its first zones, it was obvious the entire community would have to be cleared.

  There was no plan for evacuating all 27,000 residents of Paradise at once. “I don’t think it’s physically possible,” Paradise’s mayor, Jody Jones, told me. For a town that size to build enough additional lanes of roadway to make it possible, she added, would have seemed preposterous and like a waste of taxpayer money had anyone proposed it. Our communities, as they currently exist, were planned and built primarily to be lived in, not escaped. Fully prioritizing evacuation could mean ripping them apart.

  Paradise evolved without any genuine planning at all: three adjacent communities just kept expanding until they merged. This produced a town of tangled side streets and poorly connected neighborhoods, often with a single outlet and many dead ends. “In towns all up and down the Sierra, we’ve got the same pattern,” says Zeke Lunder of Deer Creek Resources, which often contracts with the state on wildfire-mapping projects. “I think it’s inevitable that this will happen again.”

  That morning in Paradise, streets were blocked by fallen trees, disabled cars, or even fire blowing crosswise across them. Flaming roadside vegetation slowed or halted traffic on major evacuation routes like Skyway so that many of the cross streets that fed them, like Pearson, backed up, penning other drivers defenselessly into the side streets that fed them.

  Just ahead of Fisher and Laczko, a woman named Lorena Rodriguez watched flames absorb the space around her car. She reached for her phone to tell her children goodbye, but then she reconsidered, worried the memory of her frightened voice would permit her kids to more vividly imagine her burning alive and keep imagining it for the rest of their lives. This enraged Rodriguez—​that she had been put in a position to have such a thought. So she decided to run, sprinting in a pair of Danskos, threading the lanes of idling vehicles and moving faster on foot than all of them. She kept expecting to find some obstacle blocking the road, a reason for the traffic, but all she saw was more cars.

  Rodriguez ran for two and a half miles, all the way west on Pearson until she reached Skyway. She says the street was bumper to bumper most of the way, the vehicles alongside her perfectly still. It was as if time had stopped for everyone but her.

  * * *

  Fisher was thinking about her father, a former fire captain who was protective to the point of pitilessness. To teach his little girls not to play with matches, he showed them gruesome photographs of bodies extracted from houses that burned down.

  Those pictures had been flashing through Fisher’s mind all morning. Now, on Pearson Road, she sensed she was inside one. She knew there had to be people dying around her and Laczko: good people who wanted to live just as much as she did—​surely, who wanted it more.

  Fisher inhaled deeply to rein in her crying and told Laczko: “I gotta say something. I’ve tried to kill myself multiple times, and now, I’m scared.” It was true. She felt guilty about it. She also knew, in that moment, that she wanted to live.

  It had been all of ten minutes since Laczko waved Fisher into his truck. While some people might have recoiled from a stranger making this kind of admission, Laczko didn’t pass judgment or see Fisher as a burden. As a kid, he went to parochial school, though the faith never took; he asked too many questions. Still, he liked the way his wife talked about spirituality, not God so much as a form of godliness that arises whenever two human beings connect. In that moment, he told me, his only thought was, This person needs to talk, and I can certainly listen.

  After getting turned around on Pearson, Laczko instantly felt deflated—​and then, a little foolish too. He was starting to reprimand himself for driving into a fire. For what? A chair?

  Fisher, meanwhile, was exhausted, having so far shouldered the responsibility for her survival alone all morning. “I just wanted to be with somebody,” she explained.

  For Laczko, “Something clicked—​now I had someone to be responsible for.”

  They were together now, but still trapped, and the windows of Laczko’s truck were getting hotter. Until then, the fires blooming erratically around Paradise were spot fires, birthed from embers that the wildfire sprayed ahead of itself as it grew. Now an impregnable riot of heat and flame was cresting the hillside under Pearson Road. This was the fire itself.

  * * *

  There’s a dismaying randomness to how a megafire can start: the tire on a trailer goes flat and scrapes against the pavement, producing sparks; the DIY wiring job on someone’s hot tub melts. (These were the causes of the 2018 Carr and 2015 Valley Fires, respectively. More than 300,000 acres burned, combined.) But by now, there is also a feeling of predictability: in 2017, for example, seventeen of twenty-one major fires in California were started accidentally by equipment owned by Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), which, as California’s largest electrical utility, is in the precarious business of shooting electricity through 175,000 miles of live wire, stitched across an increasingly flammable state. Under state law, the company may be liable for damage from those fires, whether or not the initial spark resulted from its negligence. And so, PG&E found itself looking for ways to adapt.

  Two days before the Camp Fire, as horrendously blustery and dry conditions began settling on the Ridge and the risk of fire turned severe, PG&E began warning 70,000 of its electricity customers in the area, including the entire town of Paradise, that it might shut off their power as a precaution. This was one of the new tactics that the company had adopted—​a “last resort,” PG&E called it: in periods of extreme fire danger, if weather conditions aligned to make any accidental spark potentially calamitous, PG&E was prepared to flip the switch, preventively cutting the electricity from its lines. Life would go dark, maybe for days—​whatever it took. It was clear that the unforgiving environment in which PG&E had been operating for the last few years was, as the company put it, California’s “new normal.”

  Wildfires have always remade California’s landscape. Historically, they were sparked by lightning, switching on haphazardly to sweep forests of their dead and declining vegetation and prime them for new, healthier growth. Noticing this cycle—​the natural “fire regimes” at work—​Native Americans mimicked it, lighting targeted fires to engineer areas for better foraging and hunting. But white settlers were oblivious to nature’s fire regimes; when blazes sprung up around their towns, they stamped them out.

  Those towns grew into cities; the land around them, suburbs. More than a century of fire suppression left the ecosystems abutting them misshape
n and dysfunctional. To set things right, the maintenance once performed naturally by fire would have to be conducted by state and federal bureaucracies, timber companies, private citizens, and all the other entities through whose jurisdictions that land splinters. The approach has been feeble and piecemeal, says William Stewart, a co-director of Berkeley Forests at the University of California, Berkeley: “Little pinpricks of fuel reduction on the landscape.” We effectively turned nature into another colossal infrastructure project and endlessly deferred its maintenance.

  Then came climate change. Summers in Northern California are now 2.5 degrees hotter than they were in the early 1970s, speeding up evaporation and baking the forests dry. Nine of the ten largest fires in state history, since record-keeping started in 1932, have happened in the last sixteen years. Ten of the twenty most destructive fires occurred in the last four; eight in the last two. California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire, expects that these trends will only get worse. It’s possible that we’ve entered an era of “megafires” and “megadisturbances,” the agency noted in its 2018 Strategic Fire Plan. And these fires are no longer restricted to the summer and early fall: “Climate change has rendered the term ‘fire season’ obsolete.”

  Even deep into last fall, much of the landscape still seemed restless, eager to burn. A bout of heavy rains that spring produced a record growth of grasses around the Ridge—​the fastest-burning fuels in a landscape. But then the rain stopped. By the time of the Camp Fire, in November, there hadn’t been any significant precipitation since late May, and July had been California’s hottest month on record: all that vegetation dried out. “Everything is here,” explained a veteran wild-land firefighter named Jon Paul. “All you need is ignition.”