FIRE IN PARADISE

How climate change and corporate irresponsibility fueled a disaster.

Making a powerful book debut, Bay Area–based Guardian journalists Gee and Anguiano draw on their extensive reporting to produce a tense, often moving narrative about the fire that destroyed the northern California town of Paradise. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of residents of Paradise and neighboring towns, public officials, first responders, and scientists, the authors reconstruct a tight chronology of events from the time the fire broke out on the morning of Nov. 8, 2018, through Nov. 25, when it was finally contained, to the weeks and months afterward, when evacuated residents sifted through the debris. The authors focus on many individuals who heroically fought the blaze and helped struggling evacuees and on many whose experiences were emblematic of the community: an elderly man who lived, with his daughter, in the house in which he grew up; a woman who had just given birth by caesarean, evacuated from a hospital tethered to an IV bag, her newborn son on a pillow on her lap; a man so disabled that he was essentially marooned in his own living room. When told to evacuate, the challenge for the town’s disabled and elderly residents “was not simply getting out of Paradise. It was getting out of their own homes.” The town’s evacuation plan proved woefully inadequate: No one had foreseen a fire that would impact the entire town, but the Camp Fire, as it became known, continually jumped firebreaks, whipped by unusual wind patterns. Downed power lines and abandoned, charred cars blocked roads; heavy smoke impeded visibility; embers—“it looked like rain coming down of red and blue,” one woman observed—ignited houses, and entire neighborhoods were quickly reduced to rubble. The fire gained notoriety as “the most expensive natural disaster of 2018” and incited anger against Pacific Gas & Electric for its inadequate oversight of its infrastructure. PG&E became “a byword for negligence and corporate greed,” and Paradise became synonymous with tragedy and resilience.

A riveting narrative that provides further compelling evidence for the urgency of environmental stewardship.