Wildfire in Paradise | Paradise Lost with Lizzie Johnson | 5
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From Wondery, I'm Cassie DePeckel, and this is Against the Odds. If you drove up into the mountains above Chico, California on November 7th, 2018, you would have come to a town with a wooden welcome sign that read, May you find paradise to be all its name implies.

Population about 27,000. Paradise was a friendly town where you could go to church, catch a football game, and enjoy the smell of the pine trees around you. That is, until early on the morning of November 8th, when the Diablo winds whipped across the landscape and a hook on a Pacific Gas and Electric Utility Tower snapped, causing the Camp Fire. Fast-moving flames descended on Paradise and two other towns,

Thousands of desperate residents tried to evacuate. They got stuck in traffic jams or couldn't get out of their homes. More than 80 people died. In the aftermath, the world stared in disbelief at images of block after block of burned hellscape and wondered how such a thing could happen. My guest is Washington Post reporter Lizzie Johnson.

Lizzie worked for the San Francisco Chronicle when the Camp Fire broke out and ended up spending two years interviewing survivors, firefighters, and rescue crews as they dealt with the deadliest fire in California history. Her book is called Paradise, One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire. Lizzie Johnson, welcome to Against the Odds.

Thank you for having me. You were working as a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle in November of 2018. When did the fire in Paradise come onto your radar? Yeah, so I had been covering wildfires full-time for the San Francisco Chronicle for about a year and a half at that point.

And as part of that, you know, every summer, fall, when fire season rolls around, I get very used to getting calls from my boss at really odd times saying, you know, hey, there's a wildfire in Yolo County or Sonoma County. You need to go. And so on the morning of November 8th, 2018, something very similar had happened where he called me pretty early in the morning saying, I heard on the radio scanner that there is this fire that ignited in Polga just near Paradise.

And it sounds like it could be really bad. You should go. So I started driving north and really had no idea how bad it was going to be until I got there. When you got assigned to cover it, did you have a sense of what you were heading into? I had never been to Paradise before, to be honest. I hadn't really heard of it, didn't know it existed. And I

As I was driving there, it's about three hours northeast of San Francisco, so just past Sacramento, I was listening to the radio scanner, and the things that I was hearing firefighters and police officers saying was...

I mean, I remember so clearly there was this woman who had a high-risk pregnancy and she had gone into labor in her SUV in a gas station parking lot. I heard that they were evacuating the hospital, all of these patients who had really serious illnesses. I heard that there was gridlock traffic. You would hear firefighters over the radio saying that they were in really bad spots, that they needed help getting out. And so that was the first inkling that what was happening in this town was really bad.

Were you scared to go into the town at the time? I probably should have been, but I had a job to do. I think a lot of journalists would say that you sort of set your fear to the side because your job is to tell the story, not to be afraid. And the fear came later, I think. So as you drove closer and closer, what did you see? Was there like smoke in the air? What did the landscape look like? It was pretty clear up until I hit Sacramento. And from there, I

There was just this clear line in the sky, this like bright robin's egg blue sky, and then this black dividing line where the smoke started. And as I kept driving north, the blue disappeared until the sky became just entirely this like bruised black color. And in points it was like kind of a light orange. It looked very apocalyptic. I had never seen a sky disappear like that before.

And the fire was still raging at this point, right? This was about three hours after it started. Wow. In our fast-paced, screen-filled world, it can be all too easy to lose that sense of imagination and wonder. If you're looking for new ways to ignite your creativity and open your mind to fresh perspectives, then let Audible be your guide. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, or any genre you love...

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So put us in your shoes when you arrived on the scene. What were your first impressions? What did you feel, see, smell? So when things are happening that quickly, I always try to go to where the people are to get a sense of what they saw, what they were feeling, what was actually happening. Because it can be really hard to get information at first. Because all of the people who are supposed to give you those statements, that information, the firefighters, the police officers, they're still in the thick of it themselves.

So I went to an evacuation shelter first. And I remember so clearly there was this little girl standing on the roof of her family's pickup truck looking out at this huge column of smoke coming off in the distance. And, you know, she wasn't alone. There were so many other people in that parking lot who had just evacuated who had ran for their lives.

From talking to the evacuees, did you have a sense that something was different about this fire as opposed to the other ones that you had covered? The sheer scale of the fire and how fast it moved was really different. You know, back in 2017, we saw the Wine Country wildfires happen.

And that shocked the state and the rest of the country because it burned so quickly. It went through thousands of homes, incinerated these fabled historic vineyards. And that was sort of a wake-up call. But even compared to the wine country wildfires, the campfire was faster. It was bigger. It wasn't just a line of fire moving through the town. It was fast.

Thousands of sparks like flying, millions of sparks probably flying out of the sky and landing on people's homes and yards. Just a total onslaught of fire. It was very violent and it was very different. One of the first interviews that I did was with this woman who had lived in Concau, which is a small community outside of Paradise. And it was the first place that the fire really hit.

And it had come on so suddenly that she had had no warning. She woke up to flames outside of her RV and she ran and had to shelter in a creek. She was dunking water over her hair and over her clothing so it didn't light on fire. And she was there with about a dozen other people just trying to make it through.

And eventually she did. She survived. And as I was talking to her, she kept gesturing to her clothing, which was all damp. And she had ash caked on her face.

That was another first moment where it really hit me that this fire wasn't going to be like the ones that I had covered before. And I had covered some pretty serious ones and this just, you know, totally eclipsed them. Yeah. And they were trapped there too, right? I mean, when I was telling the story, I was just like, wow, I can't even imagine how intense that must be to feel so trapped.

And that was another piece of it in that it's this town that's tucked up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. There were only a few roads going into and out of town. So the path of escape was very limited. And like you were saying, people got stuck. Cars started lighting on fire. People had to get in other people's vehicles and just hope that they could get a ride out.

Around 27,000 people lived in Paradise before the campfire hit. Give us a sense of the types of people who lived there and what they were drawn to about the town. Paradise was this sort of everyman's town in a state like California where things were increasingly expensive. It was a place where people could go to carve out a life for themselves and

And people joked that Paradise was a place for the newlywed and the nearly dead. So there were a lot of people who were on the older side, and then there were a lot of new families that were moving in with their children, people who wanted a lower cost of living, who wanted to live among nature, whether that was for their children or to live out their final days. So it was very working class and very humble place.

The people who lived there really wanted to be there or simply couldn't live anywhere else because it was too expensive. This event instantly changed so many lives. When you talk to people as all this unfolded, what were some of the things they expressed to you around the time the fire was burning, like the chaos and the disbelief and the confusion? So the fire happened pretty late into the fire season. Keep in mind that it was just a few weeks before Thanksgiving.

And so a lot of people thought that the danger had passed, even though the winter rains hadn't arrived and the fire risk was really high that day. So people were just sort of going about their lives, getting ready for work, getting ready for school, and they weren't expecting something like this to happen. So you did a ride along into paradise with a police officer and also with a fire crew looking for bodies. I can't even imagine what that experience must have been like for you.

Yeah, I mean, I was just there to hold a mirror up to what was happening, to what all of these other people were experiencing. And for the police officer I was with who was patrolling a town that had burned down, a town where he lives, a town where his house hadn't even survived, I think it was much harder for him. And I just saw it as my job to make sure people saw that story and understood what these people were going through. Same with the search and rescue crews who were going out

Looking in the rubble, looking through homes, searching for answers for families who hadn't heard from their loved ones in a really long time. It was difficult to see, but it was really important work. Were you able to see the police officer as he saw his own house? I did. Yeah, he got a little teary-eyed.

I mean, that was his entire life. It was everything he had worked for. It was where he had raised his children. And it wasn't only just the loss of his home. If you keep in mind, it was everything else he knew, too. You know, his neighbors, his favorite restaurants. It's not just losing a physical place. It's also losing that sense of home. Mm-hmm.

Did you walk through the neighborhoods, through people's homes that had been reduced to rubble? Paint us a picture of some of the things that you saw. I spent a lot of time walking through Paradise and just looking. I had a lot of people who were reaching out to me over Twitter or sending me emails asking if I could go check on their house and see if it was still standing.

So after I would finish my reporting for the day and file my story, I would spend an hour or two doing that, sending people pictures of what was left, if there was anything left. You know, it's funny the way fire moves. It'll go down a block and burn every single home, but skip a single house, which somehow is just left standing, totally untouched, like nothing had ever happened before.

I remember there was one house that was totally burned down, but on the front steps there was a jack-o'-lantern just perfectly sitting there, untouched, as if nothing had happened. Thinking about fire and the way it burns to give you a sense of how hot it was, the electrical poles, the distribution lines had burned from the bottom up, and the wooden poles were just dangling, swaying in the wind like wind chimes.

There were trash cans that had totally liquefied, and you would walk up to the curb and just see a brown splotch or a green splotch on the drive. And the only thing that indicated that that was a trash can was, you know, the beer cans or the soup cans scorched on the curb. Birds just sort of fell out of the sky, and you would see them lying around, too, their little feathers and wings scorched black. I mean, it looked like the apocalypse, like something out of the Old Testament. ♪

Oh my god. I'm just imagining that. It sounds super scary, like a nightmare. And then there was the air. It was like kind of thick and acidic and it almost felt like breathing soup and it would burn in your throat and in your chest. Was there still like ashes floating around the air at that time or had it all kind of been over at that point?

So the fire burned almost to Thanksgiving. I think that was when the winter rains arrived and put it out. So it was really, really smoky in Paradise and in the surrounding areas for weeks afterwards.

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Head over to Symbiotica.com and use code ODDS for 20% off and free shipping on your subscription order. Let's go back in time to the early morning of November 8th, 2018. What was the weather like that day and the condition of the landscape? It was very dry. It hadn't rained in a really long time up in that area. The moisture in the plants and in the trees was getting sucked out into the atmosphere. So the landscape was just kindling.

And that was really bad news because the winds were also blowing. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem because the rain should arrive before early November, but it hadn't. And so the landscape was really dry and the fire risk was really great. So all it would have taken to set off disaster is a spark and a PG&E electrical line provided that.

In the windy weather, a seahook on an electrical tower broke and a power line fell, starting a fire. Were they previously identified as something to be replaced? So the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, for those who don't know, is California's largest power provider and one of the largest power providers in the country. And they had a lot of electrical infrastructure up in the area near Paradise that had not been maintained in a really long time.

the company had embraced an approach called run to failure, which is essentially like getting a car and driving it into the ground without doing any sort of maintenance, like changing the oil or changing the tires and just expecting the car to run smoothly, right? So company executives had known that this line specifically had issues, but they didn't do detailed inspections and they didn't replace it or maintain it. So...

All of it could have been averted if the company had swapped out that one hook, but they didn't. And a town burned down because of it. Wow, that's insane. How old was that tower and hook? Like, World War I era? Yeah, it was about a century old. It had long outlived all of the men who put it up. What was different about this fire?

I know it sounds cliched, but it really was the perfect storm of conditions. The landscape was so dry that it burned really fast, and the wind was pushing it over the landscape.

There were videos that I saw from firefighters who were among the first on the scene, and you could just see the wind like it was a physical force whipping the grass all the way down to the ground, whipping the tree boughs around and pushing that fire first into Kong Hao and then into Paradise. The wind was picking up all of these embers, essentially matchsticks, and raining them down on people's homes. So it was like a blizzard of fire descending on this town.

People began their day going about their lives as usual. Let's talk about Rochelle Sanders, whose story we told in the series. Remind us what was going on in her life on November 8th, 2018. Rochelle had just had a baby boy by C-section about 12 hours before the fire started. And on the morning of November 8th, she woke up at Feather River Hospital.

and was soon evacuated. She sent her husband back to their home. His mom had come into town to see the baby, and he wanted to make sure that, you know, she woke up and escaped too, which meant that Rochelle was on her own. So hospital staff put her into a stranger's car, someone she had never met before. Her C-section was so fresh she couldn't even buckle her seatbelt, and she had to hang her IV bag over the rearview mirror in the car.

And they drove off into the fire together. There was a particularly difficult moment that no parent would ever want to be in. What happened? Yeah, so Rochelle and the man she's in the car with are stuck in gridlock traffic. The fire's coming up and Rochelle starts thinking about what is going to happen if they get overtaken by flames. She's holding this little baby boy in her lap and sort of pressing her hospital gown down.

against his face so that he isn't breathing too much smoke. And she has this very difficult conversation with the driver of the car and asks him,

You know, if the fire comes up and we have to run, like, I'm not going to make it. I can't walk. So I need you to take the baby and leave me behind. I remember reading that from the script and it was just heartbreaking. What ended up happening to Rochelle and her baby? Luckily, they made it out. Everyone survived. Rochelle had two older children, so she had been remarried and they were with their father that day, too. And luckily, everyone made it out. But I...

You know, I still think about her all the time and what that must have been like to be stuck in this car, not knowing where your two other children were, not knowing where your husband was, trying to make this decision about your newborn baby. Yeah. Why was it so hard to get out? How did people find themselves so close to the flames? The town of Paradise was built during the gold rush. All of these roads that existed in the current day's

began as, you know, cow paths and wagon routes. And so as the town got built up over the years, there was never any real infrastructure put in place that would help people evacuate in case of a disaster. So picture all of these tiny little two-lane roads dead-ending on ridges or wildernesses

And there were only a few thoroughfares that actually went out of town. And the biggest one was this route named the Skyway. So it had two lanes that went uphill, two lanes that went downhill, and it was the fastest moving thoroughfare.

But it didn't get converted into four-way traffic going downhill until the fire was well underway. So basically, you had all of these people trying to get out on just a few roads that quickly became jammed. And that's why people couldn't escape. They were stuck. There was nowhere to go. Traffic wasn't moving. And some people just, to be frank, didn't make it out because of that. There were these horrifying stories of people who got caught in cars that got caught on fire and they just didn't make it out.

You also follow firefighters like CAL FIRE Captain Matt McKenzie from Fire Station 36 near Paradise. Tell us a bit about him. What kind of experience did he have fighting fires?

Captain McKenzie was a really well-respected fire captain in CAL FIRE, which is the statewide firefighting agency. California has its own firefighting apparatus, so when wildfires happen, it's not just cities that respond. And so he was part of that, stationed at this very rural outpost near a geographical feature called Jarbo Gap. He was the one that responded when the campfire ignited early on the morning of November 8th.

And he had seen really difficult fires before. There was one fire a few years before this where the fire burned so hot that the hose on the back of their fire engine literally melted off. So this was a guy who knew what he was doing. But when he first saw the fire, he realized they had no shot at putting it out. It was really, really deep.

into the landscape, it would have required them to drive up this road, this gravel road that hugged the cliffside and one wrong turn and they would have toppled off into the ravine.

And he was the first one that really reckoned with the fact that it was going to be big. And as a firefighter, they couldn't fight it. They couldn't do their job. The only job they could do was to help people get out alive. CAL FIRE sets up base camps to rotate crews of firefighters from all over California and the West onto and off the front lines. The public doesn't generally get to see these camps up close. What are they like?

They're so insane. They're like these sprawling mini cities that get popped up overnight. So you walk in and there's a laundromat, there's sleeper bunks, there's a catering tent where people can pick up snacks and bags of food. There's a trailer that prints maps and daily reports. Every fire has its own weather meteorologist to help understand what fire behavior might look like.

And then there are just dozens, if not hundreds, of fire trucks that roll up every night at the end of their shift or in the morning. And truly just like a bustling mini city. Everyone has a job and, you know, you could get lost in there. 85 people died in the fire that day. Is there one person's story in particular that stands out to you? I will never forget Ellen Walker.

She lived in Conkow with her husband, Lonnie. He was away at work that day. Ellen had fibromyalgia and lived, you know, a very isolated, quiet life with her husband. And so when the fire rolled on so suddenly, there was really no one to help her. And she died in her house. There was another person found with her. No one ever figured out who this person was.

They think that maybe it was someone working at a nearby marijuana farm who had known that she was home alone and had run in to try and help her. Maybe this is someone whose family didn't know that they were in Paradise or around Paradise at the time.

And so it's hard to know what her final moments were like. But she's really indicative of a lot of those 85 people who died, people who were older, who had health issues, whose families lived far away, who, when the fire rolled into town, didn't have anyone to help them escape, people who didn't have the means. I remember there was one woman, she was 99, and she was home and couldn't get out because she was in a wheelchair.

And when the search and rescue team came to find her, they found her wheelchair on the front porch and she hadn't made it out. There were so many stories of people like that. It's just horrifying to think about.

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Paradise was actually one of the few places in California that had thought about its fire risk and had a plan. They had practiced evacuating people. They had signed up for an alert system. They had tried to get people to heed the fire risk by making these things called goat bags, basically a bag of your important documents, any family heirlooms, photos, things like that, putting it in a bag by the front door. That way, if a fire happened, you could leave quickly. And they had a plan to evacuate people.

But unfortunately, they were confronting a populace that, like a lot of people, knew that the risk was real but didn't fully think that it would ever happen to them. So a lot of people had never signed up for alerts. A lot of people didn't know what the evacuation plan was. They thought that they would hear from firefighters when it was time to evacuate.

And they just didn't know what to do. So it was this perfect storm of events where the people that were in charge of helping people know when to evacuate didn't know what was going on. And people thought that, you know, this was never going to happen. So they took longer to evacuate. There were a lot of people who tried to get all cars out of their households, which helped lead to this gridlock situation.

And then over in Town Hall, there were people making decisions thinking that this was a normal fire when it wasn't. So rather than evacuating the entire town, they were opting to do it zone by zone. You include excerpts of the indigenous Konkow tribe's legend throughout the book. Why is that? I went on a tour of the burn zone in January of 2019, so not long after the fire happened.

And two of the people who were on that tour with me were members of the Conkow tribe. And we were standing on this little ridge of land overlooking Conkow. The reservoir out there was sort of this like dark navy blue and all the trees around it were totally charred. And this couple had shared a story about

about these two people who had survived a very similar fire long, long ago. And I just remember standing there and getting goosebumps thinking about the prehistory of this place that is so often left out of history books and what it means that fires like this are so cyclical.

And it just perfectly paralleled what we were seeing in real time with the fire and people trying to survive, figuring out what resilience meant. And so I thought that was a tale that we could heed and learn from. So what was Paradise like in the months following the fire? What were people doing and how were they living during that time? It was a really confusing and chaotic time. I mean, you had all of these students going to school in different towns, and

The high school was relocated into an old airport office building. You had teenagers applying to college not knowing what address to put on their applications. I remember talking to one girl who wrote down the address of her father's office building because her family was living in an RV outside of it. She was like, is it going to be weird? Is the college going to think it's weird that I'm living in an office? So even questions like that being asked by teenagers. And then up in Paradise,

You know, it took a long time to remove all of that debris. You would drive around and all winter it just rained and snowed and it turned the ash into like this goopy glue-like consistency. And there were just, you know, burned play sets and burned homes and all of these fireplaces that pointed up through the rubble like tombstones.

People had to live with that for a really long time. And at the same time, the town hall was trying to figure out what to do. For a while, they were letting people live up there in their trailers or in their mobile homes. But then FEMA came in and said, we're only authorized to clear this debris if it's toxic. If you have people living up there, then it must not be toxic. So they were having to make these tough decisions about, OK, well, if people can't afford to live anywhere else,

They should be able to live on their land, but if the land is still covered in debris, then they can't live there. And so it was just a very complicated two-step for people figuring out how to move on when the fire had created this landscape that was unlivable. What did people tell you about making the decision to return or move away from Paradise? It was a deeply personal decision for people. There was a portion that felt like

paradise was no longer home, that they didn't want to live in that trauma, particularly people who had children. There were a lot of families that moved away. But then there was also a really strong demographic of people who loved the town, who, you know, their grandparents were buried in the cemetery, who lived blocks away from all of their siblings, who couldn't imagine being anywhere else, and they really wanted to return to

Others didn't have a choice. They couldn't afford to go anywhere else, and so Paradise was where they had to stay. Did Rochelle Sanders return? Rochelle lives downhill from Paradise right now in Chico. She was living in her grandparents' home, so she didn't own it. And she found an apartment in Chico, and that's where she's at. And about how many people have returned today out of the 27,000 originally?

Only a fraction have returns. It looks totally different if you drive around town. There's a lot of new homes springing up, a lot of new construction, but there are also areas where it looks like you're in wilderness where...

What was a block of houses is just brush and vegetation. Pacific Gas and Electric is the utility whose downed power line started the Camp Fire. What responsibility did PG&E take? PG&E did end up pleading guilty to causing the fire and for killing 85 people. But it's a very different consequence for a company than it would be for a person. You can't put a company in jail. You can't make a company suffer.

serve time the way that you could a person. And so all you can really do is levy a fine and put them on probation or put the company on probation. And a lot of people were unhappy with that. They felt like PG&E should have received a stronger sentence. At the same time, though, you can't put a company like that out of business because millions of people across the state need power. Has PG&E done anything to improve safety of its lines? No.

PG&E has been trying to underground a lot of its power lines, and they've also experimented with cutting off power when high fire risk is forecast. So basically that means they shut their power lines down, and people can't charge their phones or turn on their air conditioner. But if a line does get tossed to the ground, it won't start a fire.

I know you prefer to say that your job is to tell the story of what happened, not to tell people what they should do differently. But if I could ask you to share some lessons learned, what would they be? I think the biggest lesson out of all of this is, you know, with climate change, we're all going to be facing some sort of disaster like this in our lifetime, whether it's flooding or hurricanes or a wildfire.

or the people we love will. And so you can't just think that it won't happen to you and not have a plan. I mean, I'm guilty of this too. I lived in San Francisco for many, many years and never made an earthquake bag and didn't have a plan. And so at a certain point, you can't expect other people to save you. Like we saw in the campfire, there were these firefighters who just couldn't do their jobs, couldn't put out the fire, and could only do so much to help people

And so sometimes your best shot at survival is having a plan for yourself and for your loved ones. Has the experience of reporting the story changed you in any way? Yeah, I don't see how it couldn't. You spend a lot of time when you're reporting with people getting to know everything about their lives, absorbing their stories, absorbing their trauma so that

You can write it in a way that makes other people care. And there's no way to walk away from that without also engraving it in some part of yourself and also carrying it with you forever.

Well, finally, I heard your book is being made into a movie. First off, congratulations. That is so exciting. Can't wait to see it. What can you tell us about that development? It is still in development right now. So unfortunately, there's not too much I can say, but it's in really good hands. My big thing is just making sure that

paradise and the other communities affected by the campfire stay on people's minds that people don't forget and so I think it'll be good and I hope that the town feels honored by it and helps bring attention. And why is it so important for everyone to remember what happened there? I mean we're doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over unless we learn from them right?

What we saw in Paradise, truly the worst wildfire in recent history. And if we can't heed those lessons, if that's not enough to make people care, then I don't know what will. Well, Lizzie Johnson, thank you so much for joining us on Against the Odds. Thanks for having me. It's really great talking with you.

On our next episode, I'll speak with CAL FIRE dispatcher Beth Bowersox, who was on call the morning the campfire broke out. We'll also hear from UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain about the link between wildfires and the changing climate. If you'd like to learn more about this event, we highly recommend the book Paradise, One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by Lizzie Johnson.

I'm your host, Cassie DePeckel. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker and Peter Arcuni. Our audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Our series producers are Matt Almos and Emily Frost. Our managing producer is Tanja Thigpen. Our coordinating producer is Matt Gant. Our senior producer is Andy Herman. Our executive producers are Stephanie Jens and Marsha Louis. For Wondery...

The missiles are coming.

What am I supposed to do? Featuring incredible performances from Tracy Letts, Mary Lou Henner, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Paul Edelstein, and many, many more, Incoming is a hilariously thrilling podcast that will leave you wondering, how would you spend your last few minutes on Earth? You can binge Incoming exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+, and the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.