Down in flames
Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire. By Lizzie Johnson. Crown; 432 pages; $28
Soon after giving birth to her third child, Rachelle Sanders is evacuated from Feather River Hospital in Paradise, California. It is November 8th 2018 and a wildfire is raging in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Before long, flames are swallowing the town. The ambulances have all left and traffic is gridlocked as 27,000 people try to evacuate at the same time. Bundled into a car, her lower body still numb and a newborn in her lap, Ms Sanders and the driver make a grim plan. If the blaze overtakes them, he will take the baby and run.
The damage inflicted by wildfires is often measured in acres burned, buildings razed and lives lost. Lizzie Johnson, a former journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle (and now of the Washington Post), duly covers these costs in her new book. The Camp Fire, as the conflagration that incinerated Paradise is known, was the deadliest in California’s history, killing 85 people and destroying nearly 19,000 structures.
But the stories of individuals—such as Ms Sanders—on which the author focuses will haunt readers most. A schoolbus driver navigates bumpertobumper traffic and harrowing roads lined with “drooping oak” and “tangled brush”, fuel for the flames, to get a group of children to safety. An emergency dispatcher stays on the phone with an elderly woman as she hides in her bathtub—until the line goes dead. Ms Johnson lived among her subjects while reporting the book, and the result is a painstakingly constructed narrative that reads as though she was scribbling notes alongside each of them as they fled for their lives.
Nestling in the grisly tales of those who escaped, and those who didn’t, are wider questions of culpability. The Camp Fire was sparked by equipment owned by Pacific Gas & Electric (pg&e), California’s biggest utility. Last year the company pled guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter. “I make this plea with great sadness and regret”, said Bill Johnson, then the firm’s chief executive, “with eyes wide open to what happened and to what must never happen again.” Yet it may have happened again. This summer’s Dixie Fire was the second largest on record in California. Again pg&e acknowledged it may have provided the spark. Greenville, a town