San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
150 Minutes of Hell
The inside story of death and survival as a fire tornado stormed Redding — and signaled growing danger in a warming California
REDDING — Death blew east on a savage wind, driving flames over foothills and across a river, spitting glowing embers and scrubbing the earth bare.
It was coming for Don Andrews.
His bulldozer’s windows shattered, flinging glass into his face. The bluegreen shards were everywhere: on the floor, inside his helmet, in his skin and eyes. He was alone and blinded. The firestorm shook the ground and roared as loud as a passing train. I’m not going to sur vive this , he thought.
In three decades of firefighting, Andrews, 60, had witnessed plenty of close calls. He’d seen blistering heat melt the stickers on his dozer in Mariposa County. More than once, when flames burned over his rig, he’d summoned helicopters or planes to cover him with water or pink retardant. But on this day, July 26, he wasn’t supposed to be this close to the edge. He’d come from his home in Orland in Glenn County for a fairly routine contract assignment at the Carr Fire in Shasta County, hired by the state’s
Cal Fire agency to carve a thick ring of dirt around a subdivision of homes. The containment lines were three dozer blades wide and designed to halt the advance of the wildfire, which was still miles away.
What Andrews didn’t know was that the Carr Fire — to that point a dangerous but rather ordinary California inferno — was about to spawn something monstrous: a fire tornado the likes of which the state had never seen.
The vortex of air ripped around a column of rising heat, flames licking its walls. A freak of meteorology, it would annihilate everything in its path, uprooting trees and crumpling electrical towers. For the men and women who spend their summers on the fire lines, the tornado was an ominous glimpse of the extremes our warming climate will bring.
As Andrews’ focus turned from plowing defensible space to warding off potentially fatal burns, several others in the twister’s path — firefighters, bulldozer drivers and residents not yet evacuated from their homes — faced similar peril.
Death was stalking each of them. Over 150 hellish minutes, they would claw for survival. Some would forge narrow escapes. Some would become heroes. Several wouldn’t live through the evening.
Andrews had little choice but to hunker down. He gripped the dozer’s protective foil curtains closed with his left hand to keep the wind from batting them open. With his right hand, he pulled his shirt over his nose and mouth. The heat seared his throat.
This was how most firefighters died, he knew. Not from flames, but their bodies roasting. Temperatures within the tornado soared to 2,700 degrees, flames blasting into the sky. A nearby Cal Fire truck exploded. Andrews dialed 911. His singed hands trembled. A dispatcher answered, on the verge of tears. Dozens of others had phoned in already to describe the unfolding hell. Now, here was a call from ground zero.
“I don’t know how long I can last,” Andrews told her. “I need to get out of here.”
“If you can, get out safely, OK?”
“I can’t. It’s all on fire around me. Don’t risk anybody’s life for mine.”
Even before the tornado formed, California’s fire season had been unrelenting. The ruinous Wine Country wildfires the previous year began to seem less a singular catastrophe than a foreshadowing.
In 2017, fires had set new state records for size and destruction. Those records would fall again this year as flames threatened Yosemite National Park, torched mansions in Malibu and, in the worst fire in California history, wiped out the Sierra foothills town of Paradise. Ninety-three civilians and six firefighters would die.
The tornado signified with horrifying clarity the reality California faces. As wildfire season intensifies, conflagrations will increasingly defy efforts to control them, becoming more powerful and erratic as they race into communities, striking in ways that once seemed unfathomable.
“As much as I hate to say it, this is what the future of wildfires looks like,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. “Except the acceleration hasn’t ended yet.”
For three days in July, it was the job of Incident Cmdr. Tom Lubas, 48, to try to outmaneuver the Carr Fire as it inched closer to his hometown of Redding, defying the multiagency effort to contain it.
The wildfire had begun in typical fashion — human error colliding with a dry landscape primed to burn. It hadn’t rained in the area since May and winter precipitation had been 50 percent below normal. More than 17 other wildfires were burning across the state, so emergency resources were stretched.
On July 23, an older couple, driving home from vacation
ABOUT THIS PROJeCT
After reporting on the Carr Fire in July, reporter Lizzie Johnson, working with Chronicle photographers, graphic artists and digital producers, sought to reconstruct in detail the deadly fire tornado that swept into Redding three days after the blaze ignited. The account in this story is based on exclusive interviews with survivors and family members of those killed, as well as more than a dozen other interviews with witnesses and officials, Cal Fire investigative reports, audio of 911 calls and video footage provided to The Chronicle. Email: ljohnson @sfchronicle.com Twitter: lizziejohnsonn to tend to a family emergency, cut through Redding. A tire on their trailer went flat, leaving the wheel to drag on pavement near Whiskeytown Lake. Sparks flew into parched grass.
Lubas, a 23-year Cal Fire veteran, knew most wildfires did their worst damage in the first hours after ignition, before firefighters dug in. Now, days later, the crews in Shasta County were well past that threshold. Lubas and his colleagues had set up a command center. Called in firefighters from all over. Carved containment lines.
But on Thursday, July 26, the fire exploded from 4,500 acres to more than 30,000, its footprint rippling outward in a rainbow of colors on Lubas’ maps. Just after noon, he had handed off his incident commander role, becoming an operations section chief, and left base camp at the Shasta County fairgrounds in Redding.
It was supposed to be his day off, and he planned to shower and rest. From his truck window, though, he could see coastal winds stoking the blaze and smoke thickening.
He watched as a 30,000-foot-tall convection column — a plume filled with ash, debris and hydrocarbons — ballooned in the sky, condensing into fluffy pyrocumulus clouds. The column acted like the lid on a pot of boiling water. When you took it off, oxygen fed the fire, sucking up the hot air. That’s what the column had done overnight: collapse, then blow flames in every direction, ripping through the county’s rural oak woodland and knotted manzanita.
As Lubas drove, his truck registered the temperature outside: 113 degrees. On the coast, 150 miles west near Eureka, it was 59 degrees. Lubas was worried — and right to be. As the cool coastal air blew over Bully Choop Mountain and into the Sacramento Valley, the 54-degree difference caused warm air to shoot up in a vortex. The convection column would rotate faster and faster, contorting into a cyclone.
Sometime after 5:30 p.m., as Lubas finished grocery shopping, the sky grew dark. The fire’s behavior alarmed him, so he went back to work, driving to the hills northwest of Redding to assist evacuating residents. But at the intersection of Keswick Dam and Quartz Hill roads, near the Lake Keswick Estates neighborhood, he stopped. He was blocked.
Ahead of him, the tornado twisted. It was sinister and snake-like, a swirl of orange that seemed to fill the sky. Flames soared 400 feet in the air. It would grow to 1,000 feet wide, the length of three football fields, and produce temperatures double those of a typical wildfire. The howling obliterated every other sound.
Lubas jumped out of his truck to record a video on his cell phone and was immediately blown onto his back. Goosebumps prickled his arms.
Holy shit, he thought, scrambling back into his truck. Nobody is going to believe this.
Across the Sacramento River, 5 miles west of Lubas, Don Ray Smith’s radio crackled with the voice of his crew leader.
“Get out of there!”
Smith, 81, had been bulldozing contingency lines into the razorback ridges near the Buckeye Water Treatment Plant. It was treacherous work; dozers can tip and roll on such steep ground. The lines had been abandoned earlier in the day for this reason, but no one had told Smith, who kept working.
He’d driven nearly four hours from his home in Pollock Pines in El Dorado County to help battle the blaze. Some thought he was too old for the work, but he wasn’t the kind who took to retirement. As a private contractor, he’d operated heavy machinery for Cal Fire for more than a decade and had no plans of stopping.
As day turned to dusk, the tornado began to form. It
“I need to get out of here,” Don Andrews told the 911 dispatcher.
“If you can, get out safely, OK?” she said.
“I can’t. It’s all on fire around me. Don’t risk anybody’s life for mine,” he answered.