Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy

by Alastair Gee, Dani Anguiano

Overview

The harrowing story of the most destructive American wildfire in a century.

There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and killed at least 85 people. The catastrophe seared the American imagination, taking the front page of every major national newspaper and top billing on the news networks. It displaced tens of thousands of people, yielding a refugee crisis that continues to unfold.

Fire in Paradise is a dramatic and moving narrative of the disaster based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with residents, firefighters and police, and scientific experts. Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano are California-based journalists who have reported on Paradise since the day the fire began. Together they reveal the heroics of the first responders, the miraculous escapes of those who got out of Paradise, and the horrors experienced by those who were trapped. Their accounts are intimate and unforgettable, including the local who left her home on foot as fire approached while her 82-year-old father stayed to battle it; the firefighter who drove into the heart of the inferno in his bulldozer; the police officer who switched on his body camera to record what he thought would be his final moments as the flames closed in; and the mother who, less than 12 hours after giving birth in the local hospital, thought she would die in the chaotic evacuation with her baby in her lap. Gee and Anguiano also explain the science of wildfires, write powerfully about the role of the power company PG&E in the blaze, and describe the poignant efforts to raise Paradise from the ruins.

This is the story of a town at the forefront of a devastating global shift—of a remarkable landscape sucked ever drier of moisture and becoming inhospitable even to trees, now dying in their tens of millions and turning to kindling. It is also the story of a lost community, one that epitomized a provincial, affordable kind of Californian existence that is increasingly unattainable. It is, finally, a story of a new kind of fire behavior that firefighters have never witnessed before and barely know how to handle. What happened in Paradise was unprecedented in America. Yet according to climate scientists and fire experts, it will surely happen again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324005148
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/05/2020
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Alastair Gee is an award-winning editor and reporter at the Guardian who has also written for The New Yorker online, the New York Times, and the Economist.

Dani Anguiano writes for the Guardian and was a reporter for the Chico Enterprise-Record. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Part 1 Paradise

1 A Gold Rush Town 7

2 Off the Grid 26

3 Firebrands 45

Part 2 Hell

4 Daybreak 65

5 Stay or Go 90

6 The Cemetery 109

7 The Day After 128

Part 3 Ashes and Seeds

8 A City Dispersed 141

9 Search and Recovery 158

10 A Pile of Ashes 180

11 The Perfect Fire 202

Epilogue 227

Acknowledgments 231

Notes on Sources 237

Editorial Reviews

03/16/2020

Guardian journalists Gee and Anguiano deliver a tense and detailed account of the 2018 Camp Fire, which devastated the town of Paradise, Calif. The deadliest fire in California history began in the early morning hours of November 8, when high winds snapped a power line, shooting off sparks that ignited the underbrush. The fire rushed through the community of Concow and into Paradise, where it destroyed 6,000 acres by 10 a.m. and ultimately killed at least 85 people. Gee and Anguiano’s interviews with residents feature stories of survival and disaster, including a family and their pets swimming to safety as their home burned behind them, the evacuation of a hospital, and an 82-year-old former volunteer firefighter’s efforts to save local landmarks from the blaze. The authors also report on search-and-recovery missions, relief efforts, and lawsuits filed against utility company Pacific Gas & Electric by victims. Gee and Anguiano vividly describe the conflagration without sensationalizing it, and their blow-by-blow reconstruction is balanced by background information on the history of wildfires and the links between their proliferation and climate change. This impressive report makes a convincing case that such tragedies as the Camp Fire are not a freak occurrence, but a glimpse of the future. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"A gripping ticktock account…Fire in Paradise covers the history of that part of California and the influence of climate change on these disasters, but at its core are visceral individual stories of bravery and tragedy."

New York Times - John Williams

"Gripping…Fire in Paradise has the narrative propulsion and granular detail of the best breaking-news disaster journalism."

Rachel Monroe

"Drawing heavily on the powerful interviews they conducted at the time and in the stunned aftermath, [Gee and Anguiano] have created a gripping account of the fire and how it affected the community."

Booklist

"A page-turner from the get-go…The details of [the locals’] lives lend verisimilitude sure to hook the most callous of observers."

Oakland Magazine

"A gripping and meticulously reported account of how one California community was wiped from the map, and a terrifying bellwether of the mounting personal costs of the world’s climate emergency."

Adam Higginbotham

"The Paradise fire will stay in our collective memory; like Hurricane Katrina, it was a landmark moment in coming to see the changes that we’ve wrought by shifting our climate. This remarkable account will drive home the human cost, as well as remind you of the power of the human spirit, even, or especially, in a crisis."

Bill McKibben

"Fire in Paradise is the detailed reportage of people suddenly caught in a catastrophe that is spreading worldwide wherever there are forests—uncontrollable wildfire. This is a frightening book that will make readers take stock of their own home surroundings, regional infrastructure, and the values of our times."

Annie Proulx

"Gee and Anguiano’s on-the-ground reporting from California’s deadliest wildfire is so riveting and evocative that you can almost smell the smoke—not just from the oaks and pines, but from all the scorched vinyl-sided homes, melted car tires, and exploding propane tanks. Their account of how a city of 27,000 burned to the ground in a matter of hours reads like a thriller—full of daring escapes, life-saving heroics, staggering loss of life, and bad actors. It’s also crucial. As the world warms, cities across the arid West are increasingly at risk of suffering a fate similar to Paradise."

Dan Egan

"A book about a California calamity that speaks to our present moment…With one voice, [Gee and Anguiano] tell a story that is both sweeping in scope and vivid in its particulars "

Carolyn Kellogg

"Fire in Paradise is not only a riveting narrative of the unprecedented but long-predicted disaster of the Camp Fire and the tragedy it wrought on a California town, but a thorough analysis of the histories that led to the disaster, a detailed look at its continuing consequences, and a glimpse of the harrowing, fiery future that western communities face."

Michael Kodas

"A crisp, intimate portrait of the catastrophe."

Wall Street Journal - Gregory Crouch

"Gripping…The scale of the disaster is enormous, but the authors' focus on individual survival lends the book harrowing intimacy."

Shelf Awareness

★ 04/01/2020

Gee and Anguiano, Guardian reporters from the San Francisco Bay area, have penned a gripping, in-depth account of the Camp Fire that devastated Paradise, CA, on November 8, 2018, killing at least 85 people. The authors interviewed hundreds of residents, some with relatives who died in the fire, along with first responders, local officials, and scientists, to uncover the events leading up to and during the fire. They document the almost total destruction of Paradise, then cover the aftermath of the fire and the start of the town's recovery. They provide information about fire science and the drought-stricken vegetation as well as weather conditions and other factors that fed the Camp Fire. Telling the story from myriad points of view as events unfold, Gee and Anguiano share the actions of fire and police department personnel and citizens such as employees of the local hospital who evacuated patients in their personal vehicles as the fire closed in on the town. Gee and Anguiano also expose the culpability of Pacific Gas and Electric, whose aging infrastructure has led to numerous costly wildfires, including the Camp Fire. VERDICT A vividly descriptive, compelling, well-researched, page-turning work of narrative nonfiction, both heartbreaking and uplifting.—Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove, IL

Library Journal

★ 2020-01-27
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.

Kirkus Reviews