Paradise Redux

J. Matt is a documentary photographer and writer who concentrates on climate issues and investigations of place.

In Butte County, California, five years after the Camp Fire

In 2019, I labored through what was then the single most difficult workday of my life — and I am someone who made a living excavating broken sewers with a pick and shovel. (After the Loma Prieta earthquake, in San Francisco, in 1989.) At the end of January 2019, I traveled around the town of Paradise, making photographs and researching the consequences of the Camp Fire, California’s deadliest wildfire to date. It was two months after the conflagration had at last been designated fully contained.

The Camp Fire in November, 2018, lasted eighteen days. It killed 85 people, and destroyed 18,804 structures in the town of Paradise.

Large fires that burn into developed areas are often described by those who experience the inferno or its aftermath as looking “like war zones.” Yet most war zones are bigger and more devastating than even the 5,636 buildings lost in the Tubbs Fire in 2017 — which, until the Camp Fire, was the most destructive in California history. ¹ Paradise grimly earned the analogy to a wartime scale. The fire lasted eighteen days; 85 people were killed, and the town lost 18,804 structures — 85 percent of its buildings. The conflagration damaged 754 structures it did not totally destroy, and even in buildings that did not burn, it was often necessary to remediate interior smoke exposure. ² The disaster’s scale and scope obligated the National Institute of Standards and Technology to parcel out its forensic accounting across fifteen “focus regions,” spanning from the fire’s origin point, barely six miles from downtown Paradise, to the outskirts of the university town of Chico, over a dozen miles from the ignition site. The burn zone constituted 153,336 acres (nearly 240 square miles). By comparison, the city of San Francisco comprises 30,016 acres.

At 6:25 am on November 8, 2018, no more than ten minutes after ignition beneath a PG&E high-voltage transmission tower, a 911 caller reported a fire in conifer woodland not far from the Jarbo Gap and the North Fork of the Feather River, in the Sierra Nevada foothills. At 6:45 am, the first firefighter to assess the situation found a well-established, inaccessible fire with sustained winds blowing 35 miles per hour. At this point, according to a case study published by NIST in 2021, the fire captain declared the “potential for a major incident.” ³

A witness to an incident that crosses the WUI is compelled to contemplate death by incineration — in their waking hours, and in their dreams.

A mile-wide wall of flame reached Paradise two hours later, casting firebrands ahead of it. Here the Camp Fire departed the wildland-urban interface — the WUI (pronounced “woo-ee”) — and became an urban firestorm. ⁴ At times, it moved at a rate equivalent to the area of a football field per second. Trees fell and blocked escape routes, as did utility poles. Vehicles jammed roads as the fire burned over them. Evacuees drove through heat and flames that shattered car windows and melted tires, plastic and rubber trims, door handles. At Adventist Feather River Hospital, a heroic staff evacuated patients from rooms, intensive-care wards, and surgical theaters as the fire burned into the hospital’s campus.

I’d been in Paradise before that 2019 visit. I’ve travelled quite a bit in the Sierra Nevada generally, and have grown used to the geographic consistency of this seismically unstable cleft in the continental plate, its visual rhythm. I thought I knew the terrain, but driving around that January day unnerved me. The trees that had defined the town and neighboring ridge communities were gone. (I was told more than once during my return trip that Paradise had become a place to view previously hidden sunsets.) I walked through decimated lots, and the barely recognizable remains of structures waiting to be remediated: houses, apartment complexes, stores, offices, churches, schools, trailer parks. Describe a building type: I probably had its ash on my boots. These were the ashes, of course, of peoples’ lives.

To spend time on the ground of what fire services call an “incident” is to travel in a landscape that sears the imagination. Everywhere the ordinary has turned macabre: hearths and chimneys stand alone, disassociated from their homes; cars, bicycles, metal shelving, and appliances have melted into grotesqueries. A witness to an incident that crosses the WUI is compelled to contemplate death by incineration — in their waking hours, and in their dreams.

Fires in Chile are on pace to become the country’s deadliest, and in Texas, a million acres have burned. In my home islands of Hawai‘i, we have Lāhainā to reckon with.

Such firestorms in populated areas have been relatively rare in living memory — albeit made frighteningly vivid by the Tunnel Fire, which burned in the Oakland and Berkeley hills in 1991, killing 25 people and destroying more than 3,400 homes. ⁵ In the coming years and decades, however, the combination of global warming and worldwide encroachment into the WUI will ignite such holocausts with increasing frequency. Last summer, a stunning set of facts was quietly reported in an academic paper: “We found that the total global WUI area in 2020 was 6.3 million km² or 4.7 percent of global land area, which is an order of magnitude larger than the global urban area or twice the size of India.” ⁶ As I was writing this, fires burning through the WUI in Chile were on pace to become the country’s “deadliest on record.” ⁷ As my editor and I worked on revisions, the Smokehouse Creek Fire in the Texas Panhandle burned 1.1 million acres and severed all escape routes from the town of Canadian. ⁸

In my home islands of Hawai‘i, we have Lāhainā to reckon with. In August 2023, after fire decimated this historic town on Maui, the Camp Fire’s status as “deadliest ever” was surpassed. An estimated 2,207 structures and 2,170 acres in Lāhainā burned. ⁹ One hundred and one people have been confirmed dead; two remain unaccounted for. ¹⁰ My hardest days at work, now, have been there. Despite the attempt that follows, I know from experience that the dimensions of loss in the two most destructive firestorms in the United States in the last century are impossible to report fully — whether with my camera or in my prose.

Five years have passed since Paradise and the unincorporated communities of Concow, Magalia, and Butte Creek Canyon were immolated. I had long planned to return for this anniversary, and Lāhainā made it imperative. Paradesians (for this is what they call themselves) have lessons to teach. What would Paradise reveal, to Lāhainā — and to all of us with catastrophes fueled by global warming on our minds and in our futures?

What would Paradise reveal to Lāhainā — and to all of us with catastrophes fueled by global warming on our minds and in our futures?

Counterintuitively, the first revelation was cheer. The town, in my eight days there, was grappling with nearly inconceivable bereavement and sadness. The landscape is still gridded with rectangles of iron-oxide-red dirt, where volcanic-soil fill marks the locations of razed buildings. But good spirits, solidarity, and welcome were abundant, even when accompanied by tears. I witnessed the badgering of a state assemblyman for yet another infusion of state money, this time to repair damage to municipal infrastructure caused by heavy equipment remediating the area — a veritable army traveling roads and collapsing storm drains. The prodding was accompanied by genuine smiles and comic repartee on both sides. Granted, these residents were a self-selected bunch; out-migration saw a predictably significant increase in the two years after the fire. Those lacking the social ties or means to aid their return did not come back. But, surprisingly, the fire has exerted no statistically significant effect on rates of in-migration. ¹¹ Paradise has been the fastest growing town in California for two years running. ¹² Paradesians I met want to be there.

Strangers waved at me. People often knew who I was before I introduced myself — at least insofar as I was “the reporter from Hawai‘i.” As such I heard, as a constant refrain, that people on Maui can’t possibly understand how hard it will be to get back on their feet. I know this to be true, although it hurt to hear it spoken by those with the authority to judge. Reporting the ongoing progress of recovery from a horrifying compound disaster nonetheless proved to be enjoyable in ways that I had not anticipated. This was so even as Paradise’s future remains — and Paradisians are candid about this — uncertain.

P&E’s equipment failure sparked the Camp Fire. But the ignition and behavior of the blaze were marked with global warming’s imprint.

A definition is useful here: a disaster counts as “compound” when it results from multiple extreme pressures, be those environmental events or influences, or failures of planning or policy. Think flooding compounded by the rising sea levels that global warming precipitates; escalating heatwaves coming on top of droughts and affecting food supplies; hurricanes juiced, and slowed or stalled, by rising ocean temperatures. Those responsible for remaking Paradise are, to their credit, seeking to work across the Camp Fire’s compounding factors. They are addressing the complex, climate-sensitive conditions faced by every municipality today.

I must be clear, after these examples, that the Camp Fire was not a result of global warming. When I met the acting mayor of Paradise, Greg Bolin, I described my beat as a journalist in large part covering the climate crisis and the environment. He told me that he hoped I wouldn’t be reporting that “climate change caused” the fire, because “the climate was always changing.”

I responded that Pacific Gas & Electric caused the Camp Fire by failing to maintain its lines. This negligence, I added, was not unrelated to the 2010 explosion in a residential neighborhood in San Bruno, just south of San Francisco, when a 30-inch PG&E gas main exploded, killing eight and sending a fireball 1,000 feet into the air. ¹³ But, I insisted, while PG&E’s equipment failure had sparked the Camp Fire, the ignition and behavior of the blaze were affected by conditions marked with global warming’s imprint: the consequences of the state’s longest ever-recorded drought, including an abundance of unusually dry vegetation, compounded by an unusual late-season wind event. This, I said, was a global warming-intensified fire.

For a moment, Bolin looked up into the volume of space in the church gymnasium where he’d just eaten a memorial roast chicken dinner, and listened as his brother, a pastor at Paradise Alliance Church, delivered a sermon of remembrance. Then the mayor and I sat down. A frank conversation followed about the fire, Paradise’s recovery, and lessons to be drawn from the experience.

On November 8, 2018, California was in the grip of an extraordinary drought, which began in 2000 and would last until 2023; by the day of the fire, the area had experienced “over 200 days with almost no precipitation.” ¹⁴ The brutal dry spell killed as many as 100 million trees statewide, with even live plants primed to burn, their moisture content having fallen below critical fire-hazard levels. This drought cycle was more severe than any detectible in the soil-moisture record since the period between 1571 and 1593, a generation or two after the fall of the Aztec Empire.¹⁵ In February 2022, the lead author of the study that determined this, geographer Park Williams, told the San Jose Mercury News, “We are 22 years into a bad drought, and because of climate change we are now surpassing the severity of megadroughts that have always been thought of as the worst-case scenarios.” ¹⁶ The very idea of a 100-year-event is stripped of meaning in our present context.

It should have been raining in the Sierra foothills. But it wasn’t.

Windspeed on that November day achieved more than 50 miles per hour. But this was not unusual at the fire’s ignition site beneath PG&E’s high-voltage towers near the Jarbo Gap. The air’s relative dryness was more or less normal too; Californians are well acquainted with the seasonal Diablo or Santa Ana winds that drive dry, warm air from inland deserts through the mountains. What made circumstances notable was the confluence of dry conditions, so late in the year, with a relatively ordinary stiff north wind. By this point in autumn, according to the historical record, it should have been raining in the Sierra foothills. But it wasn’t.

These deviations from established patterns on the day of ignition met other conditions that allowed the fire, once lit, to behave as it did. Notably, the towns of Paradise and Magalia had lived more than a century without ecologically ordinary wildfire. The Gold Rush of the late 1840s and early 1850s drew fortune hunters into the homelands of as many as 9,500 Maidu people in this region. After gold speculation died out, agriculture and forestry took over, and settlers brought with them the intent and the ability to suppress fire, an idea antithetical to Indigenous land managers. Farms and lumber mills are not worked by those who want to expose their homes or livelihoods to incineration. This lack of fire, across generations, allowed for vegetation densities that far exceeded those of fire-healthy forestland. Such density has another name: fuel.

There were also the bark beetles. By 2016, the presence of bark beetles in California’s conifer forests was well known. Bark beetles prey on sick or damaged trees, helping to maintain healthy tree-to-area ratios, and they have historically been kept in check by altitude and cold winters. As the climate heats and warm winters creep upslope into subalpine forests, the beetles travel uphill too, and their populations explode. ¹⁷ In autumn 2018, stands of trees were dying up the ridge from Paradise. More fuel.

The towns of Paradise and Magalia had lived more than a century without ecologically ordinary wildfire. This allowed for vegetation densities that far exceeded those of fire-healthy forestland.

Lastly, in this list of factors compounding the Camp Fire, add the exigencies of the WUI itself. Such contact zones are defined by a variety of methods, but under Department of Agriculture and Interior standards set in 2001, Paradise and its outlying settlements qualified as interface communities. In 1850, the census recorded 3,574 people living in Butte County. In 1950, that number had grown to 64,930. The last census, in 2020, reported Butte County as home to 211,632 inhabitants. Butte County is, effectively, a vast patchwork of WUI. Much of Paradise was built within ordinary suburban-site parameters, with setbacks between buildings of between ten and 25 feet; in the decades before the fire, the addition of several mobile home parks with direct wildland exposure only increased the town’s vulnerability. Lots were dotted with tall conifers and strewn with “pine straw” — mounds of dry needles that accumulated ankle deep. Clumps of pine straw stick together even aflame, and are lightweight enough to become easily airborne. In quantities, this material is the devil’s own firebrand.

Even with so many troublesome variables, however, Paradise was not unprepared for fire in the WUI. Butte County’s assessments of fire danger had designated the town a “Community at Risk” since 2001, a finding reiterated in a state document titled “2015-2020 Butte County Fire Protection Plan” prepared by Cal Fire and contributing agencies. The plan described danger posed by fuel burdens in the WUI and in the town itself, and cited evacuation and emergency access by road as issues of “real concern”; it noted the likelihood that fire control in the area might become “impossible … for safety reasons.” ¹⁸ Local officials understood that a fire in Paradise might become too deadly for fire services to face.

Paradise was not unprepared for fire in the WUI. The town had done almost everything right relative to contemporary disaster-planning standards.

The town had established a robust phased evacuation plan in 1998; by 2018, this local plan was in its fifth revision. In response to the 2001 Cal Fire document, Paradise had repaved several miles of its main artery, Skyway Road. Recognizing that the population had grown too large to evacuate at once even on the upgraded Skyway, the town’s plan divided Paradise into fourteen evacuation zones and its surrounding areas into thirteen more. The locations of traffic signals, personnel to direct traffic, storage sites for traffic cones and barricades, and the staging of tow trucks were noted. Emergency response agencies throughout the area trained using the town’s plan; fire services, paramedics, public-works personnel, and police knew their roles. The town had created an opt-in reverse-911 notification system. In 2016, the area’s first responders had participated in a more than fourteen-hour multi-agency WUI fire drill. NIST described this complex drill as having been modeled in part on lessons from the Humboldt Fire, which took place in Butte County in 2008, regarding traffic congestion and evacuation. ¹⁹ So there was precedent, and training had assimilated that precedent. A week before the fire, Paradise Public Works had undertaken a road sweep to remove pine straw and other combustibles. The day before the fire, the agency had replaced the backup batteries in its communications towers.

By any comparative metric, the town had done almost everything right, relative to contemporary disaster-planning standards. It was well prepared for a slow-moving fire, or for a hot, aerial fire that remained localized. But these were not the fires Paradise got. Because of this, the “2015–2020 Butte County Fire Protection Plan” failed, spectacularly.

Paradesians tell us that their experience will not be unique, and Lāhainā proves they are right. Paradesians are here to show us that we have much to learn from their experience — and they are eager to share the information they have so painfully acquired. It is our duty to try to learn what they are teaching.

Housed in a 1904 rail terminal, the Paradise Depot Museum was the first stop on my recent visit, and conversation with docents Donna and Phoebe quickly turned to Maui. “It’s gonna take a long time,” Donna said gravely, her compassion palpable. She then led me to the C-hook, the actual hook, that failed at 6:15 am on PG&E’s steel transmission tower No. 27-222, installed in 1909, causing a 115,000-volt line to arc and spark the blaze. ²⁰ We spoke of San Bruno and PG&E’s consistent, well-attested choice to prioritize profit over infrastructural maintenance, public safety, or good corporate governance. “We can’t stop the corporations doing what they’re going to do,” said Donna — depressing, unassailable American civic wisdom.

As recovery began after the fire, the flow of information and understanding between federal agencies and the town’s brass and first responders, most of whom had suffered losses, moved in both directions. In particular, local leaders (Bolin was vice-mayor at the time) took to heart advice that FEMA personnel gave early on: get schools, churches, and businesses open as fast as possible. With the fervor of the converted, Mayor Bolin told me that, even five years out, this remained “absolutely true”; community, he emphasized, must be “the center” of any recovery. I underlined the words in my notebook. Then I asked about long-term prospects. Did he think the town could develop the tax base to be self-sustaining again?

Paradesians tell us that their experience will not be unique, and Lāhainā proves they are right. It is our duty to try to learn what they are teaching.

Bolin was candid; Paradise is not there yet. There was no industry to speak of prior to the fire, so none would return. Private property surrounds the town, limiting wildland access and making it difficult to imagine a new tourist industry premised on the area’s natural beauty. It’s an unlikely spot for business development that isn’t local or underpinned by remote work. The willingness of Chico residents to see post-fire Paradise as a bedroom community remains untested at any scale. The mayor talked about his hopes for a trust to be funded, in part, by PG&E settlement money, to keep the municipal lights on until 2045 — by which time he hopes the town’s economy will be stable.

Bolin revealed a profound humility speaking about leading Paradise out of the fire. He told me that he has lost friends in disagreements over his administration’s vision of recovery. This plainly hurt him, but neither anxiety nor ruminating on past loss seemed to suit him for long. Irrepressibly, his bullishness roared back: “We had 66 applicants for town manager!”

This to manage a town that is, for all intents and purposes, a clean slate, both a dream and a memory.

Cal Fire’s Division Chief of North Operations, Patrick Purvis, is a third-generation wildland firefighter, assigned to his first campaign fire in high school, as a member of the Butte County Fire Explorer Post 414. (In a “campaign fire,” response structures are adapted from military hierarchies of command, as well as military protocols for assignment of personnel and materiel. ²¹ ) Purvis and I met at Station 81 in Paradise and spoke for nearly an hour, starting with updated evacuation plans, the crux of wildfire response planning in the WUI. Such planning revolves around complex fire modeling and traffic studies, without which there is no data; without data, funds are not budgeted to expand existing routes, create new ones, or improve alert systems. The Camp Fire demonstrated to politicians on both sides of the aisle that failing to consider line items for wildfire prevention, alert systems, and evacuation routes risks substantial numbers of dead constituents. State Assemblyman James Gallagher, a Republican, talks like a New-Deal Democrat when it comes to spending state money to prepare for wildfire. ²²

As comparatively good as the town’s preparations were prior to the fire — and they were good — emergency notifications in 2018 relied on cell phones and the opt-in registry. The data shows, however, that most people had not opted in. In any case, cellular networks fared poorly in the Camp Fire, as they did in the fire on Maui. ²³ In Paradise, 21 sirens are now strategically scattered around town, each with 30 days of backup power and six redundant communications links spanning radio and satellite networks. “We are able to broadcast an alert tone and let [residents] know that evacuations are in progress,” Purvis explained. People can be informed, quickly, “if there’s a specific route they need to take; what zones are under evacuation.”

Utility undergrounding is a must; downed power poles create electrocution hazards, block evacuation routes — and spark fires.

He went on to tell me about a bevy of new programs aimed at fire resilience — Firewise Community initiatives and Firesafe Councils; a Wildfire Resiliency Task Force; public “burn associations” that train local “burn bosses” to manage their own prescribed burns. We talked about PG&E, and Purvis acknowledged that the company has “been working really hard to go to underground.” Utility undergrounding in fire-prone areas is a must; downed power poles create electrocution hazards, block evacuation routes — and, of course, spark fires. And we talked about goats — we’ll get to the goats …

Purvis is a firefighter, though. He understands by miserable experience that the best planning isn’t always enough: “When you look at the perfect storm of what we have the day of the Camp Fire, and the way that it came in and affected so many different communities, there’s really no way to prepare yourself for it. Now we’ve seen it.” He was also blunt about what pre-fire planning did allow for — and prevent. “Had we not done what we had in the town, when the Camp Fire hit, I would have fully expected that we would have had hundreds, if not thousands of people dead.”

Of those who were killed by the Camp Fire, 80 percent were over age 65, and more than a dozen were physically or mentally impaired. Fatality statistics in Lāhainā are similar, demonstrating a pattern by which the elderly and impaired disproportionally perish in our 21st-century firestorms. ²⁴ The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that about a quarter of the population in Paradise between 2012 and 2017 was elderly; nineteen percent of those who did not qualify as senior citizens had a disability. ²⁵ To aid such people in evacuating, Chief Purvis told me, the town is developing a Special Needs Awareness Program, a registry that will be made available to first responders and human-services personnel in future disasters that require evacuation. Planning like this offers a chance of escape to those who need assistance, rather than leaving them stranded to die, alone.

Central to any community’s disaster recovery is reconstruction of the buildings lost. California has both a pioneering WUI building code, and one of the toughest hazard-driven codes in the nation. But even stringent codes can’t stop structures from burning. The odds of a building’s survival when a fire crosses the WUI is a complex calculus with outcomes tied to both immediate neighbors’ levels of preparedness, and enforcement of fire hygiene throughout a community. The state WUI code was implemented in 2008. Of homes built after that in Paradise — i.e. homes that were WUI code-compliant — 56 percent were destroyed by the Camp Fire. ²⁶

Of those were killed by the Camp Fire, more than a dozen were physically or mentally impaired, and 80 percent were over age 65. Statistics in Lāhainā are similar.

As fire marshal, and chief building official in charge of code enforcement, Tony Lindsey’s job is not entirely enviable. “We do weed-abatement enforcement,” he explained to me. This means that, in addition to managing the town’s building department and permitting processes, Lindsey’s agency ensures that overgrown lots are cleared of vegetation near structures, so that those weeds don’t burn, igniting homes that in turn set other homes alight. These days, what was once a seasonal task has become a year-around concern, and, to the Don’t-Tread-On-Me crowd, the fire marshal and his team are scolds with an unlimited license to bitch. In one respect, this is true: there is no longer a time of year when a fire-prevention specialist can relax, or let his neighbors relax either. As the rainy season becomes more unpredictable and snowpack lessens, fuels are always growing and drying. “At this point, what does fire season mean anyway, right?” Lindsey asked. It’s another question for our age.

Facing such imponderables, Paradise has modified its building codes. “The town is actually requiring more” than the California Building Code stipulates, Lindsey told me, relative not only to weed abatement, but to fencing adjacent to buildings, accessory building separations, and maintenance of defensible space. “Those are the things that we adopted locally and [are] certainly exportable,” Lindsey said when I asked about lessons others might take from the town’s experience. At the same time, even with these additional requirements to review, his department is doing something that most similar departments nationwide would find inconceivable: they are expediting the permitting process. “Yep. First come, first served. No matter who you are, what you’re building, from your custom to your [prefab], we’ll turn those around in three weeks.” Three weeks? “We just say it’s three weeks, and we over-deliver on that. So that’s — I don’t know — it’s pretty fast, right?”

Central to recovery is reconstruction of buildings lost. California has one of the nation’s toughest hazard-driven codes. But even codes can’t stop structures from burning.

All the interconnected obligations required to rebuild and maintain at these newly heightened levels bring us to “good fire,” and to the goats. During my week in Paradise, I witnessed a prescribed burn on 330 acres, in a narrow valley of pine and bay laurel some fifteen miles out of town. The Cohasset Prescribed Burn was staffed by wildland hand crews from the California Conservation Corps, using drip torches and incendiaries under Cal Fire design and supervision. Two Cal Fire choppers flew overhead, fitted with flame throwers, raining more destruction down on the valley’s overgrowth. This was good fire, too long absent in California and across the west. The burn was executed with uncompromising precision, a rigorous ballet without a step or sweep of an arm out of place. The next day I saw an equally important but far less dramatic and resource-intensive fuel-management strategy in action in and around Paradise: goats and sheep from Hanski Family Farms eat what can’t safely be burned. Proprietor Swede Hanski told me that his animals clear about a thousand acres per year at roughly $450 an acre, versus a cost of two to three thousand dollars an acre for hand-clearing and mechanical mastication. The Hanskis have regular clients; employ Chilean herdsmen with Anatolian shepherd dogs to live onsite; and still can’t do all the work they are offered.

The morning of November 8, 2023, the anniversary, dawned with gusty winds, and as the memorial began, people in the crowd spoke of the day’s eerily familiar “unseasonable” weather. Assemblyman James Gallagher was emotional as he recounted the losses, describing Paradise as “that ‘city on a hill’ that continues to shine for the world.” Not the best metaphor, perhaps, but his point was clear: there are lessons on the ridge. ²⁷ Teri DuBose, the district’s representative for U.S. Congressman Doug LaMalfa, told the audience that she had been a volunteer firefighter responding to the Camp Fire. This is the way it is, up and down these hills: constant, persistent connections.

The morning of the anniversary dawned with gusty winds. People spoke of the day’s eerily familiar ‘unseasonable’ weather.

At 11:08, an aching 85 seconds of silence were observed, one second for each community member who perished five years ago. Mayor Bolin then took the mic to dedicate a time capsule. “I don’t like the word ‘anniversary,’” he said. “I guess ‘commemoration’ or something? ‘Anniversary’ just sounds like a celebration.” Grappling publicly, poignantly, with language’s limits, Bolin’s voice competed with the wind in the mic. The crowd murmured a collective acknowledgement.

The next night, at Paradise Alliance Church, I talked with lead pastor Josh Gallagher (no relation to the assemblyman), who told me that the town “is never going to look like it did.” He described the social challenge of reconciling old and new Paradise. Historically, it’s been a hard-working blue-collar place, but the new people are often white-collar folks working remotely. This class difference dovetails with another social issue that might act as a speed bump on the journey to recovery. Colette Curtis is the town’s Recovery and Economic Development Director. I told her I had heard that some minority residents were feeling their recovery concerns had gone unheard. “There is not as much diversity [here] as you find in other parts of California, even just in Chico,” she acknowledged. Curtis spoke of “distrust among certain groups,” adding, “I think people, sometimes, that tend to want to live in mountain towns — they feel like they’re kind of far out, far away. They want less government for [whatever] reasons …. The distrust [of government] is a huge barrier.” The personal and social tensions the mayor had mentioned snapped into sharper focus. It’s a broadly American picture.

Even given all of this, it was social cohesion that I felt most vividly during my visit. At Paradise Alliance Church, as I finished talking with Pastor Gallagher, he introduced me to Pastor Tim Bolin, one of the mayor’s two pastor brothers. Pastor Bolin told me that, right after the fire, church staff casting about for a way to help had settled on Thursday dinners. The community was scattered to the wind. People missed their friends, and the church wanted a way to draw them back together. The dinners would last six months, they figured — tops. The gatherings continued for three years.

The church figured their Thursday dinners would last six months — tops. The gatherings continued for three years.

This Thursday’s meal would be the last, and 350 chicken dinners had been prepared by volunteers — though that wouldn’t be enough for the overflow crowd. Standing on the gymnasium stage, Pastor Bolin asked how many of the assembled had been in town during the fire, which meant fled for their lives and, likely as not, lost everything. Nearly every hand went up. Then Mayor Bolin again took the mic. He rattled off a catalogue of staggering statistics: 3.7 million tons of debris removed and driven 28.2 million road miles, to be buried as hazardous waste in landfills in nearby Shasta and Yuba counties. ²⁸ Allocations of $93 million from the state and feds to repave public roads, with an additional $200 million for evacuation routes — the largest such grant in U.S. history. Another $7 million for fire-hardening area homes that survived.

At this point, I confess, my note taking falls apart, and I’m not sure who was onstage. On each table in the church gym were postcards illustrated with two outlined shapes, the state of California and the island of Maui. The inscription read: “You Are Loved FROM ONE PARADISE TO ANOTHER.” On the reverse it said: “We have been where you are five years ago. Let me encourage you…” There was room for a message and a signature. My eyes welled up.

The speaker — I think it was Pastor Gallagher — explained to the diners, who had just finished slabs of cheesecake, that there was one postcard for every attendee to fill out. They’d be collected and sent to Maui by Alliance Church. Then he announced my presence. Everybody turned. I waved wanly, just another journalist entangled in their own disaster reporting.

On the fire’s anniversary, before the official event at Paradise Community Park, I ducked into a pancake breakfast at Table Mountain Masonic Lodge, a stout stone building constructed in 1936. Among the memorial installations in the lodge’s overflow hall was an epic poem, presented in a ring binder on a podium. It started conventionally enough. But a few pages in, the saga became a harrowing accounting of the individual circumstances of the deaths caused by the fire — and the lives and loves of the victims, all 85 of them.

I won’t relay the heartrending specifics of what I read.

Four days before the anniversary, on November 4, 2023, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Mark Arax, an investigate reporter with familial ties to California’s Central Valley. Arax describes Paradise as “one of those blunders of American suburbia, a misplaced place that made little ecological sense.” He quotes Colette Curtis, who told him, “We can choose to let these disasters chase us from place to place or we can learn to live with them in a way that is as sustainable and resilient as possible.” Arax writes that he did not challenge Curtis, though he plainly sees things differently; he argues that PG&E’s settlement funds and other rebuilding money might be dressing up “human folly as it greets climate change barging through the door.” He is incredulous that the state has not declared “Paradise an unfit place to grow again.” ²⁹

It is hard not to see all California like this. Certainly Arax’s Central Valley fits the bill, as wildland no longer wild, inhabited by the hubris of capital and ignorance, set to burn, sink, flood, topple in the Big One, or maybe just to cook people to death in successive heatwaves. Look past California’s borders, and it is easy to see the U.S. and the world at large through Arax’s pessimism. We live in the world that we have built. I myself have questioned, in print, our return to the sites of climatically influenced disasters.

Paradesians should be able to return to systems supporting life, health, and property insurance that have been redesigned to function as community safety nets.

But we humans, for a while at least, will remain — whether we figure out new ways of living on the earth or not. Where should Paradesians go if not home? After this visit, I am certain that they ought to be able to return to a home that is re-envisioned to exact a less destructive impact on the land. They should be able to return to systems supporting life, healthcare, and property insurance that have been redesigned away from profit to function as community safety nets, especially for those communities who do the work to mitigate their risk. This is the opportunity in Paradise. It is an opportunity, also, in that other paradise of Lāhainā, where the lessons to be learned in Butte County must be applied in the context of an active extirpation of Indigenous culture at its nexus with ancestral place — a slow-and-fast brutality driven by today’s untenable housing costs. Not to mention tourism, overwhelming tourism.

The first flowers to bloom in Paradise after the Camp Fire were daffodils, a North African species widely hybridized. True: these flowers are not native to this place in the Sierras, any more than contemporary Paradesians are. But the town is returning here, perhaps even blooming, because it is a place: a community with a history. It is a town being rebuilt on the ashes of catastrophic failure. It may not work. Nobody I spoke with saw self-sustaining tax bases and reliable economies as faits accomplis. The lessons of Paradise are incomplete, as are revisions to the ways we live, everywhere, in the face of global warming. Our history of living on earth is proving to be not-great. But it is the history we have, the one we must carry into the futures we make for ourselves.

Arax’s position is wrong; Paradise will not be targeted by another climate-influenced fire just because of the town’s so-called hubris in rebuilding. Global warming will not discern between “blunders of American suburbia” and the building strategies of Arax’s presumably more enlightened settlements — not unless that enlightenment is nearly universally applied on earth. Climate-compounded disasters will come for any of us, anywhere. But, in the face of that hard reality, Paradise’s disaster planning shows that some of the worst outcomes are preventable. With this in mind, might we return to the disaster sites — the places — that can be rebuilt, as wisely as we’re able to rebuild them?

DMU Timestamp: January 14, 2025 01:57