Paradise : one town's struggle to survive an American wildfire /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The definitive firsthand account of California's Camp Fire, the nation's deadliest wildfire in a century, Paradise is a riveting examination of what went wrong and how to avert future tragedies as the climate crisis unfolds.

"A tour de force story of wildfire and a terrifying look at what lies ahead."-- San Francisco Chronicle (Best Books of the Year)

On November 8, 2018, the people of Paradise, California, awoke to a mottled gray sky and gusty winds. Soon the Camp Fire was upon them, gobbling an acre a second. Less than two hours after the fire ignited, the town was engulfed in flames, the residents trapped in their homes and cars. By the next morning, eighty-five people were dead.

As a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle , Lizzie Johnson was there as the town of Paradise burned. She saw the smoldering rubble of a historic covered bridge and the beloved Black Bear Diner and she stayed long afterward, visiting shelters, hotels, and makeshift camps. Drawing on years of on-the-ground reporting and reams of public records, including 911 calls and testimony from a grand jury investigation, Johnson provides a minute-by-minute account of the Camp Fire, following residents and first responders as they fight to save themselves and their town. We see a young mother fleeing with her newborn; a school bus full of children in search of an escape route; and a group of paramedics, patients, and nurses trapped in a cul-de-sac, fending off the fire with rakes and hoses.

In Paradise, Johnson documents the unfolding tragedy with empathy and nuance. But she also investigates the root causes, from runaway climate change to a deeply flawed alert system to Pacific Gas and Electric's decades-long neglect of critical infrastructure. A cautionary tale for a new era of megafires, Paradise is the gripping story of a town wiped off the map and the determination of its people to rise again.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Author's Note (p. xi)
• Part I Kindling
• Chapter 1 Dawn at Jarbo Gap (p. 9)
• Chapter 2 All Its Name Implies (p. 18)
• Chapter 3 Red Flag over Paradise (p. 41)
• Part II Spark
• Chapter 4 Code Red (p. 67)
• Chapter 5 The Iron Maiden (p. 93)
• Part III Conflagration
• Chapter 6 Abandoning the Hospital (p. 123)
• Chapter 7 A Blizzard of Embers (p. 137)
• Chapter 8 Saving Tezzrah (p. 146)
• Chapter 9 The Lost Bus (p. 157)
• Chapter 10 The Best Spot to Die (p. 167)
• Chapter 11 "The Safety of Our Communities" (p. 180)
• Part IV Containment
• Chapter 12 The Longest Drive (p. 195)
• Chapter 13 No Atheists in Foxholes (p. 207)
• Chapter 14 Paradise Ablaze (p. 227)
• Chapter 15 Promise (p. 241)
• Part V Ash
• Chapter 16 Unconfirmed Deaths (p. 263)
• Chapter 17 Mayor of Nowhere (p. 276)
• Chapter 18 Secondary Burns (p. 297)
• Chapter 19 Rebirth (p. 309)
• Chapter 20 Reckoning (p. 328)
• Epilogue: Reburn (p. 339)
• Acknowledgments (p. 347)
• Notes (p. 355)
• In Memory of Those Who Died (p. 405)
• Index (p. 407)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Chapter 1 Dawn at Jarbo Gap For weeks, Captain Matt McKenzie had longed for rain. It would signal the end of wildfire season, which should have concluded by now, but November had brought only a parched wind. The jet stream was sluggish, failing to push rainclouds up and over the Sierra Nevada into Northern California. Since May 1, 2018, Butte County--­150 miles northeast of San Francisco and 80 miles north of Sacramento--­had received only 0.88 inches of precipitation. The low rainfall broke local records. It was now November 8, and with three weeks to go until Thanksgiving, the sky remained a stubborn, unbroken blue. Plants withered and died, their precious moisture sucked into the atmosphere. Oak and madrone shook off their brittle leaves. Ponderosa pine needles fell like the raindrops that refused to come, pinging against the fire station's tin roof and waking ­McKenzie from a deep sleep around 5:30 a.m. A pinecone landed with a thud. He curled up on the twin bed in his station bedroom, feet poking from under the thin comforter, and oriented himself in the darkness. He didn't feel ready for the day to begin. Blackness edged the only window. Outside, gale force winds wailed through the hallway. He pulled aside the window blinds for confirmation: no rain. The sliver of a waxing moon and winking stars pricked the sky's endless dark. In an hour, the sun would rise. After more than two decades of firefighting, McKenzie, forty-­two, possessed a certain clairvoyance. He had dedicated half his life to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, helping to battle conflagrations that sprouted in the vastness of California during its fire season. In such a huge state, urban departments could cover only so much ground; there had to be a larger force to stop fires before they burned too far or too fast in the wilderness bordering cities and towns. Known as Cal Fire, the state agency was one of the largest dedicated wildland firefighting forces in the world. McKenzie had learned to read the agency's weather reports like tea leaves. When conditions were right, all it took was a spark to ignite an inferno. McKenzie and his crew were trained to anticipate and react aggressively, jumping into action while the fires were still small and easily contained. Nothing was left to chance. They did this the old-­fashioned way, by digging dirt firebreaks and spraying water from their engines. The method was effective: Only 2 to 3 percent of the wildfires they tackled ever escaped their control. But fires broke out all over California every year, and members of his outpost, Station 36, were called upon to help quench the most destructive ones as part of the state's mutual aid agreement, by which jurisdictions pledged to help each other out during emergencies. The crew spent the year crisscrossing the state, from barren Siskiyou to coastal San Diego. Innocuous mishaps--­a golf club or lawn mower striking a rock, a malfunctioning electric livestock fence, a trailer dragging against the asphalt, a catalytic converter spewing hot carbon--­could beget a blaze. More often, though, fires were started by downed electrical lines. They would snap and spark in high winds, showering embers and grief across entire communities. Lately, the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, the largest power provider in California, was experimenting with shutting off power when high fire risk was forecast. In a remotely operated weather site near McKenzie's fire station, an anemometer was whirring, generating the next forecast. Surrounded by chain-­link fencing, the instrument thrummed atop a slender tripod 20 feet tall, its three cupped hands circling faster and faster. It registered winds blowing at 32 mph, with gusts up to 52 mph. That November morning, wind wasn't the only problem. Relative humidity plummeted to 23 percent and continued dropping. By noon, it was forecast to hit 5 percent--­drier than the Sahara Desert. McKenzie ran a hand through his silvered hair and swung his feet to the tile floor, trudging to the bathroom with a towel slung over one arm. Standing six foot one, he was tall and slim, with deep dimples and piercing blue-­gray eyes. He had led Station 36 for four years and treasured its cowboy grit and strong camaraderie with the community, mostly retirees, loggers, off-­the-­gridders, and marijuana growers. McKenzie was now in the middle of a seventy-­two-­hour shift overseeing the station, one of the oldest and most fire-­prone posts in Butte County. Covering 1,636 square miles in far Northern California, the county was nearer to the Oregon border than to Los Angeles, its small valley cities and hideaway mountain towns scattered along the leeward side of the Sierra Nevada. In the past twenty-­five years, flames had ravaged the foothills 103 times. The worst of them--­the Poe Fire, in 2001, and the Butte Lightning Complex and Humboldt fires, both in 2008--­had devastated the county's rural communities, including those near McKenzie's station. His outpost was perched on a knob of land off State Highway 70, the last stop before motorists entered U.S. Forest Service jurisdiction. At an elevation of 2,200 feet, the station overlooked the Feather River Canyon and abutted the western edge of Plumas National Forest. McKenzie joked that it was built on "the road to nowhere." A long driveway unspooled to a compound of squat tan buildings: a large garage for the fire engines, an office, and a twelve-­bed barracks. Two captains--he was one of them--­had rotating shifts and shared a private bedroom behind the kitchen. Everyone else slept in the dorm. At least six firefighters stayed on duty at all times, tasked with putting out house fires and responding to vehicle accidents or medical emergencies. The men at Station 36 spent a lot of time together, much of it trying to impress McKenzie, whom they admired. They competed to hike the fastest or do the most push-­ups, growing close through the friendly rivalry. On slow afternoons, they would pull weeds from the station's vegetable garden, tend its fruit trees, and play elaborate games of darts in the garage, storing their personalized game pieces in metal lockers labeled with tape. They would jam the living room armchairs against the wall and crank up the heater for floor exercises, sweating so profusely that the photos on the wall curled in their frames. When they had a break, sometimes McKenzie and his crew would head to Scooters Café, a family-owned restaurant that--­other than a hardware store, a stone lodge turned into a diner, and a market with two gas pumps--­was the nearest business around. Motorcyclists choked its parking lot, waiting in a long line for Fatboy burgers--­named after the Harley-­Davidson motorcycle--­or $2.00 beef tacos on Tuesdays. The owner of the red-­walled café was a mild-­mannered man who never called 911 or allowed his patrons to drive drunk. He served beer and "Scooteritas," but no wine, and he often dropped glazed doughnuts off for the firefighters. Sometimes he scheduled karaoke nights, hosted car shows, or booked concerts. McKenzie and his crew would sit on the station lawn and listen, the music echoing uphill in the summer air. Station 36 was a quiet place, its stillness punctuated by the occasional grumble of highway traffic and the whoosh of wind. As one week in November turned to another, still with no rain, the crew hiked to a long-­ago-­burned home, its gardens lush with unkempt fig trees and wild blackberry thickets, and foraged for fruit to bake a cobbler. They responded to accidents at Sandy Beach, where swimmers like to launch themselves into the Feather River with a rope swing and sometimes get stuck in the currents. They scanned the canyon for smoke. The Feather River Canyon had a long history of wind-­driven wildfires. Station 36 existed in part because of its proximity to this yawning crack in the earth. The sixty-­mile chasm snaked across Butte County, from Lassen National Forest to Lake Oroville; it trapped seasonal winds as they spun clockwise over the Sierra Nevada and pushed them toward the low-­pressure coast. The winds blew day and night, billowing up the canyon walls as sunshine warmed the air and down as temperatures cooled, clocking speeds upwards of 100 mph and blasting the towns of Magalia, Concow, and Paradise. They pelted homes and windshields with pine needles like obnoxious confetti. When there was a fire, the Feather River Canyon also funneled smoke south, directly to the hallway outside McKenzie's bedroom. The scent was always a swirling, ghostly harbinger of terrible things to come. Excerpted from Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by Lizzie Johnson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Johnson has written a gripping, shocking, and intimate minute-by-minute account of the deadly Camp Fire that ravaged the Northern California towns of Paradise, Concow, and Magalia in November 2018; it is nearly as tough to read as it is important. This is no insult to debut author Johnson, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her writing is eloquent, her storytelling is compelling, and her research and reporting are thorough, as is her empathy. The story she tells, though, is horrific and heartbreaking. She relates in keen detail the chaotic, harrowing evacuation of Paradise--residents on foot and in vehicles, inching out of town through flames--from multiple perspectives: community leaders; medical personnel; a recent retiree trying to rescue two friends as fire descends upon them; a mother evacuating with her newborn son in the car of a stranger whose last name she never learned. Johnson writes about the culpability of Pacific Gas & Electric and its outdated, failing infrastructure. Near the end, Johnson reprints her article about PG&E's June 2020 sentencing; she weaves into it a list of the fire's victims, their ages, and where their bodies were found. It is crushing. VERDICT The definitive story of an American tragedy and a notable cautionary tale of climate change, corporate negligence, and insufficient planning. Highly recommended.--Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus

Publishers Weekly Review

Journalist Johnson debuts with a brutal account of the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history. Drawing on firsthand accounts and 911 dispatch reports, Johnson follows a cast of residents, officials, and fire department workers as the fire ravaged their town and their lives changed. Outlining the factors that set the stage for the blaze, Johnson notes that fire management practices are not as straightforward as they seem: by the time the Camp Fire broke out, "a century's worth of colonial fire suppression policies... had allowed the woods to become diseased and overgrown," compared to Indigenous practices that historically cleared out debris with low-intensity burns. This, coupled with neglect on the part of the Pacific Gas and Electric company, whose equipment sparked the inferno, primed Paradise for disaster. Johnson's attention to grisly detail can be overwhelming (the list of victims, along with how they were found, for instance)--but she balances the horror with compassion: "Maybe someday the town she had known would... rise strong and whole again under the tall pines." This devastating history may be tough to read at times, but those who stay the course will find it crucial, comprehensive, and moving. Agent: Larry Weissman, Larry Weissman Literary. (Aug.)

Booklist Review

San Francisco Chronicle reporter Johnson covered California's 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in state history, which devastated the town of Paradise and surrounding communities in the Sierra Nevada foothills 175 miles northeast of San Francisco--85 people killed, 18,800 structures destroyed, 153,00 acres of forest burned. She expands her coverage here to deliver a viscerally harrowing, almost minute-by-minute narrative of the events leading to that conflagration, the dawning realization that a massively fatal wildfire was descending on the region, the perilous escapes of Paradise townspeople, and the heartbreaking aftermath, including the legal reckoning of energy supplier and chief culprit PG & E. She humanizes the book with detailed, sensitively told stories of many of the townspeople, from the driver who ferried a busload of schoolkids out of the inferno to the tough but compassionate dispatcher who might have saved hundreds of lives by overriding a non-evacuation order. A cautionary tale in this age of climate change.

Kirkus Book Review

A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle gives a masterly account of the 2018 Camp Fire, which devastated the town of Paradise, California. In her first book, Johnson does for California's deadliest wildfire what Sheri Fink did for Hurricane Katrina in Five Days at Memorial. With stellar reporting, she tells the moment-by-moment story of an unfolding disaster, showing its human dramas as well as the broader corporate and governmental missteps that fueled it. The author draws on more than 500 interviews as she follows residents ranging from the Paradise fire chief and town manager to a mother who gave birth to a premature infant the night before her hospital was evacuated--and was then stranded for hours in a car on a gridlocked exit route with a baby who needed a neonatal intensive care unit. A state investigation blamed faulty Pacific Gas & Electric electrical equipment for the blaze--and the utility pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter for the deaths that resulted--but Johnson evenhandedly shows other factors that contributed to the tragedies. A drought had turned wooded areas into dry, overgrown tinderboxes. Authorities waited too long to issue mandatory evacuation alerts, and with the telecommunications system overloaded, 82% of residents didn't receive one. The official evacuation routes proved dangerously inadequate. Johnson's account of the crisis lacks the polish of disaster narratives by authors such as Sebastian Junger and Jon Krakauer. Although she has a jeweler's eye for gemlike details, some aren't for the faint of heart; the fire destroyed so many dental records that a coroner hoped "any steel hardware with serial numbers--artificial hips, knees, shoulders" might help to identify bodies. Though the storytelling isn't flawless, the book is unmatched for the depth, breadth, and quality of its reporting on a major 21st-century wildfire, and it's likely to become the definitive account of the catastrophe in Paradise. An urgent, harrowing report on one of the country's worst wildfires. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Lizzie Johnson is a staff writer at the Washington Post . Previously, she worked at the San Francisco Chronicle , where she reported on fifteen of the deadliest, largest, and most destructive blazes in modern California history, and covered over thirty communities impacted by wildfires. Originally from Nebraska, she lived part-time in Paradise while reporting this book and currently lives in Washington, DC.