San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
In tiny Butte fire station, heroic fight to save a life
BERRY CREEK, Butte County — They found the man along a hot stretch of highway, 11 miles northeast of Bidwell Bar Bridge, which had been cast orange by the fire. He was past the Oroville Dam, nearly splintered three years earlier by record rainfall, and past shallow Lake Madrone, where the man might have sought refuge, as other people have done in other pools, from other fires.
By the time the firefighters found him, just before 8 a.m. on Sept. 9, the man had probably been lying facedown near the highway for hours. The soles of his white running shoes were melted, his shoelaces still smoldering. His
Tshirt and blue jeans hung off his frame in tatters. So did his skin.
More than 60% of his body was covered in burns, his features indiscernible because of his injuries. He could have been anyone in Butte County, a place where climatechange-fueled disasters have increasingly claimed not just homes but the lives of residents.
Since 1999, 20 big wildfires have battered Butte, a collection of rural towns 70 miles north of Sacramento. In the last decade alone, blazes have burned 30% of the county, and in 2017 severe winter storms nearly ruptured the nation’s tallest dam. The biggest heartbreak came in 2018, when the Camp Fire raced into Paradise and killed 85 people.
Butte’s small cities and hideaway towns were still reeling from the pandemic and power shutoffs last week when a handful of wildfires sparked by lightning strikes merged and exploded to 218,000 acres overnight. The man near the highway, like so many others in Butte, was caught offguard as disaster visited once more. By Thursday, this fire would claim 15 lives, making it California’s deadliest this year.
If the man by the highway were to have a chance, the firefighters would have to get him medical attention right away. They needed to hustle him to the burn unit at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento — but the massive North Complex Fire blocked the route. They would need to find another way.
So they steered through flames toward Station 62, a firehouse in remote Berry Creek. There, paramedics had staged what they called a “casualty collection point” for burn victims. Over the next three hours, the small station would become a field hospital, triaging more and more fire victims as they stumbled — or were carried — out of the burning woods.
As they drove, the firefighters tried to talk with the man in the white sneakers, to find out who he was. He struggled to answer, his throat too scorched to speak.
Two days earlier, Sean Norman’s cell phone rang. It was the evening of Sept. 7, and he had just arrived at his home in Grass Valley in Nevada County, after a threeweek stint on a wildfire in the South Bay. Now, his supervisors were on the line. They told the battalion chief his team was being deployed to the North Complex Fire — formerly the Bear and Claremont fires.
The next afternoon, Norman’s supervisors called again with an update: The complex might reach Lake Oroville that evening — 15 miles away from the flaming front.
These days, not much surprises Norman, who is 49 and has been with Cal Fire for three decades. In 1993, the year he joined the state agency, Norman watched about 300,000 acres of California burn. The damage had seemed massive at the time; now, that acreage amounts to onetenth of the 3.3 million acres charred this year. Norman has fought the biggest and most vicious wildfires in state history, from the 2018 Camp Fire to this summer’s CZU Lightning Complex in the South Bay. He’s watched these infernos escalate, particularly in Butte.
Few counties in California have burned and flooded and endured as much as Butte. Since 2011, the governor has issued a dozen disaster declarations here, including two in 2017 for the Ponderosa and the Wall fires. That same year, California saw an average rainfall of 30.75 inches — recordbreaking precipitation that followed a historic sixyear drought, indicative of a “climate boomeranging” that scientists have long warned of.
After the crumbling Oroville Dam spillway threatened to plunge the northern Sacramento Valley under a 30foot wall of reservoir water, Sheriff Kory Honea ordered a mass evacuation from the floodplain. About 188,000 people in the county of 219,000 were told to flee.
“What did we do wrong?” mused county Supervisor Steve Lambert, 54, on a recent morning. “Who has the voodoo doll and why are they mad at us? I don’t know anyone else that has had fires as big as we’ve had. I don’t know anyone else that has had a big dam that failed. It’s painful.”
Decades of disasters have left deep scars in Butte, a county populated by farmers, bluecollar workers and professionals who staff area hospitals and the state university in Chico. Seemingly everyone has been affected in one way or another, particularly the 20,000 families whose homes have been destroyed.
But on this Tuesday afternoon in early September, even Norman couldn’t anticipate the destruction that the community would soon encounter. At 3 p.m., as he finished speaking with his supervisors, CodeRed evacuation orders were being issued to cell phones across the county.
Two tiny hamlets, Feather Falls and Berry Creek, were on the list to evacuate. Nestled in the foothills of eastern Butte County, they had always been challenging places to navigate. Dirt and gravel roads braided the hillsides, homes tucked deep into the forest. Its people include retirees, timber workers, marijuana growers and others who relished the isolation of nature.
Still, the small community came together for the yearly berry festival, with its prized blackberry pies, and for yoga classes, held every Wednesday morning in a guild hall on Bald Rock Road, the main access route into town.
By 8:44 p.m., Cal Fire’s air attack was reporting a rapid rate of spread on the fire. Norman’s radio traffic picked up.
The lodge at Camp Okizu, which for 38 years had been a safe haven for children with cancer and their families, was on fire. A vehicle crashed on Bald Rock Road. A woman jumped on a horse to escape, carrying her dog. Embers blew on the wind and spotted into Feather Falls — where the Ponderosa Fire had blazed just three years before — then blitzed 8 miles to the Enterprise Area Boat Ramp on Lake Oroville.
Burn victims began showing up at Station 62.
As the flames pushed toward the firehouse, Norman had one thought: I’ll be incinerated. Two years earlier, the Camp Fire, as bad as it was, had seen houses break up the fire front, creating pockets of safe space for people to wait out the blaze. But now, Butte faced an unbroken wall of flames that snapped timber like toothpicks.
The battalion chief knew he wasn’t playing checkers. This was chess, and he had to be three moves ahead. He worked the radio from his Cal Fireissued truck, writing down the addresses of people who had called 911. He would try to locate them later, once it was safe.
Norman was thinking about his wife and two young children back in Grass Valley to the east. Bordering Tahoe National Forest, that city’s foothills location and strong seasonal winds make it so flammable that the movie theater plays fire preparedness trailers before the feature films. Norman hoped that