Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire
by Lizzie Johnson
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"The definitive firsthand account of California's Camp Fire-the nation's deadliest wildfire in a century-and a riveting examination of what went wrong and how to avert future tragedies as the climate crisis unfolds. On November 8, 2018, the people of Paradise, California, awoke to a mottled gray sky and gusty winds. Soon the Camp Fire was upon them, gobbling an acre a second. Less than two hours after the fire ignited, the town was engulfed in flames, the residents trapped in their homes and show more cars. By the next morning, eighty-five people were dead. San Francisco Chronicle reporter Lizzie Johnson was there as the town of Paradise burned. She saw the smoldering rubble of a historic covered bridge and the beloved Black Bear Diner and she stayed long afterward, visiting shelters, hotels, and makeshift camps. Drawing on years of on-the-ground reporting and reams of public records, including 911 calls and testimony from a grand jury investigation, Johnson provides a minute-by-minute account of the Camp Fire, following residents and first responders as they fight to save themselves and their town. We see a young mother fleeing with her newborn; a school bus full of children in search of an escape route; and a group of paramedics, patients, and nurses trapped in a cul-de-sac, fending off the fire with rakes and hoses. Johnson documents the unfolding tragedy with empathy and nuance. But she also investigates the root causes, from runaway climate change to a deeply flawed alert system to Pacific Gas and Electric's decades-long neglect of critical infrastructure. A cautionary tale for a new era of megafires, Paradise is the gripping story of a town wiped off the map and the determination of its people to rise again"-- show lessTags
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Member Reviews
This is a disaster movie, in book form - and it's a true story.
On a dry windy November morning in 2018, a poorly-maintained PG&E transmission line sparked a fire that caught in drought-dry grass and burned through forests thick after centuries of forest mismanagement; an accident of geography that put the town of Paradise right in the fire's path.
This book lays out all of the factors that helped turn the fire into a cataclysm, and tells the stories of people trying to escape the flames. Most of the people in the town that morning escaped and survived, but 85 didn't. We see the firefighters trying to respond to the fire, and the town government trying to respond to the fire bigger than anything they can imagine. It's a gripping show more page-turner.
On the day I bought this book, the sky was pale and the sun was a pallid yellow from yet another wildfire burning hundreds of miles away in the Sierra foothills in California, a sobering reminder that we're still in the opening scenes of the big disaster movie unfolding in real time around us. show less
On a dry windy November morning in 2018, a poorly-maintained PG&E transmission line sparked a fire that caught in drought-dry grass and burned through forests thick after centuries of forest mismanagement; an accident of geography that put the town of Paradise right in the fire's path.
This book lays out all of the factors that helped turn the fire into a cataclysm, and tells the stories of people trying to escape the flames. Most of the people in the town that morning escaped and survived, but 85 didn't. We see the firefighters trying to respond to the fire, and the town government trying to respond to the fire bigger than anything they can imagine. It's a gripping show more page-turner.
On the day I bought this book, the sky was pale and the sun was a pallid yellow from yet another wildfire burning hundreds of miles away in the Sierra foothills in California, a sobering reminder that we're still in the opening scenes of the big disaster movie unfolding in real time around us. show less
With a tragedy so perfectly followed and the lives of so many so compassionately told, this book can be forgiven for a lack of photos. Very, very well written and a compelling picture of the threat of climate change in a time of corporate malfeasance and public disinterest.
Quite a page-turner of an ebook on the Paradise fire in 2018. The author did a good job portraying a number of residents, staff, and fire fighters, their backgrounds, their families, etc., which made the tragedy very personal. This was the main California fire that affected us. Though it wasn't close, the toxic smoke came down the Central Valley and I had to drive the kids to school to protect their lungs.
I did catch one mistake -- and it's trivial. UC Davis is in Davis, but the UC Davis Medical Center and burn unit is in Sacramento, not Davis. I've lived in both cities.
This book was a wake-up call. Apparently, pine needles are very flammable. Pine needles blow over from the park behind my house, so I hosed them down in my roof gutters show more and will soon remove them. Next, I signed up for emergency alerts in my town. And today, I watched the Frontline documentary about the fire with its dramatic films, pics, and interviews. Wow!
This was an excellent read and is highly recommended! show less
I did catch one mistake -- and it's trivial. UC Davis is in Davis, but the UC Davis Medical Center and burn unit is in Sacramento, not Davis. I've lived in both cities.
This book was a wake-up call. Apparently, pine needles are very flammable. Pine needles blow over from the park behind my house, so I hosed them down in my roof gutters show more and will soon remove them. Next, I signed up for emergency alerts in my town. And today, I watched the Frontline documentary about the fire with its dramatic films, pics, and interviews. Wow!
This was an excellent read and is highly recommended! show less
A harrowing book, certainly one of the most immersive natural disaster books I’ve ever read. Also an infuriating section at the end about PG&E and their almost wilful negligence in maintaining their equipment. Highly recommend this.
One Town’s Struggle to Survive and American Wildfire
Paradis, California
“Paradise” is a brutal account of the deadliest wildfire in California history. The author, an investigative reporter, narrates in detail what she has drawn out from firsthand accounts, reports from 911calls, residents, officials and fire department workers.
November 2018,” Camp Fire”
The fire was fast less than two hours after it started, Paradis was engulfed in flames. Balancing horror with compassion Ms. Johnson notes that management’s practices had allowed the woods to become diseased and overgrown this with neglect on the part of Pacific Gas and Electric Company were the key factor for this disaster. The details are horrifying and overwhelming. The show more account of young mother fleeing with her newborn, a school full of children in search of an escape route, medics, nurses as well as patients trapped. Heartbreaking: The list of victims and where they were found. The fire nearly leveled the town of Paradise and the surrounding areas...This is a gripping, edge of your seat read.
The investigation: brought PG&E to their knees
The verdict: “Guilty: PG&E enters pleas for 85 Camp Fire felonies
It took time and heart to gives us this well-researched and reported account. Kudos to you Ms. Johnson you definitely painted a horrific picture of a wild fire out of control....
I had the opportunity to receive this book from Crown Publishing via Netgalley for my thoughts: this is the way I see it. show less
Paradis, California
“Paradise” is a brutal account of the deadliest wildfire in California history. The author, an investigative reporter, narrates in detail what she has drawn out from firsthand accounts, reports from 911calls, residents, officials and fire department workers.
November 2018,” Camp Fire”
The fire was fast less than two hours after it started, Paradis was engulfed in flames. Balancing horror with compassion Ms. Johnson notes that management’s practices had allowed the woods to become diseased and overgrown this with neglect on the part of Pacific Gas and Electric Company were the key factor for this disaster. The details are horrifying and overwhelming. The show more account of young mother fleeing with her newborn, a school full of children in search of an escape route, medics, nurses as well as patients trapped. Heartbreaking: The list of victims and where they were found. The fire nearly leveled the town of Paradise and the surrounding areas...This is a gripping, edge of your seat read.
The investigation: brought PG&E to their knees
The verdict: “Guilty: PG&E enters pleas for 85 Camp Fire felonies
It took time and heart to gives us this well-researched and reported account. Kudos to you Ms. Johnson you definitely painted a horrific picture of a wild fire out of control....
I had the opportunity to receive this book from Crown Publishing via Netgalley for my thoughts: this is the way I see it. show less
PARADISE by Lizzie Johnson
This is the history of the town of Paradise, California, and some of the histories of its early settlers and modern inhabitants. As we all know, the town of Paradise was devastated by the CAMP FIRE in 2018. Paradise was a thriving town before the fire and now it is a struggling area.
The book tells more personable details about some of the people who lived there and how the fire and evacuation impacted their lives. It is disheartening because the fire was found to be caused by a faulty PG&E line. This could have been prevented. 85 people lost their lives in this fire.
I wanted to read the story of Paradise since I have family that is from there and other family members that live in the same county of Butte. I show more thought it good to be educated on the strife and struggles of the residents that had endured the heartbreak of the CAMP FIRE.
Many thanks to #netgalley for the complimentary copy of #paradise I was under no obligation to post a review. show less
This is the history of the town of Paradise, California, and some of the histories of its early settlers and modern inhabitants. As we all know, the town of Paradise was devastated by the CAMP FIRE in 2018. Paradise was a thriving town before the fire and now it is a struggling area.
The book tells more personable details about some of the people who lived there and how the fire and evacuation impacted their lives. It is disheartening because the fire was found to be caused by a faulty PG&E line. This could have been prevented. 85 people lost their lives in this fire.
I wanted to read the story of Paradise since I have family that is from there and other family members that live in the same county of Butte. I show more thought it good to be educated on the strife and struggles of the residents that had endured the heartbreak of the CAMP FIRE.
Many thanks to #netgalley for the complimentary copy of #paradise I was under no obligation to post a review. show less
This one was hard to read. It’s not listed as a true crime novel but it is.
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The awful thing about disasters is that most are predictable but somehow not preventable. Lizzie Johnson’s “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire” shows just how prone humans are to overlook the catastrophes coming their way.... Writers seek intimacy to get readers to care about their subjects when disaster strikes. That tactic works here, yet it does more. show more Johnson’s kaleidoscope of biographical snapshots creates a 21st-century version of Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 novel, “Winesburg, Ohio,” which describes middle America with all its contradictions....The displaced Americans are like the Alaskan caribou and polar bears pushed into ever-smaller habitats. People and animals out of place cause new ecological problems. show less
added by Lemeritus
In California, bucolic place names come cheap. But — I speak from personal experience here — Paradise was the real deal.... Eden ended on the morning of Nov. 8, 2018. In a canyon northeast of Paradise, gale-force winds lashed decades-old PG&E transmission towers and power lines, frying them, spewing molten metal into surrounding vegetation tinder dry after months of drought.... The tragedy show more of Paradise is tragedy enough. But there’s a larger shadow that falls over the story, one that Johnson addresses in her afterword. The wildfire’s immediate cause may have been PG&E’s antiquated infrastructure. The deeper cause was a California made catastrophically flammable by global warming. Once, Paradise might have been an outlier. Now it’s a harbinger. show less
added by Lemeritus
Paradise is a moment-by-moment chronicle of the fire, seen through the eyes of the town's terrified residents and the local and state officials who fought frantically to contain it and to reduce the unimaginable toll of life and property damage. Johnson's account is comprehensive and her descriptions of the inferno are vivid and immediate, like one of the "hundreds of flaming matchsticks" that show more "swirled over the furniture, fingering framed family photos like looters, then incinerating the entire place within minutes." show less
added by Lemeritus
Lists
Science: Earth
109 works; 1 member
Author Information
1 Work 171 Members
Awards and Honors
Awards
Distinctions
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 2021
- Important places
- Paradise, California, USA
- Important events
- Camp Fire
- Epigraph
- Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead a... (show all)nd to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows sky-high.
—Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History" - Dedication
- In memory of Phil John,
who believed in Paradise, even,
and especially,
when it was ruined. - First words
- In the beginning, Wahnonopem, the Great Spirit, made all things. -Konkow Legend
- Quotations
- That November morning, wind wasn’t the only problem. Relative humidity plummeted to 23 percent and continued dropping. It was forecast to hit 5 percent by noon—drier than the Sahara Desert.
In the Northern Sierra Nevada, the National Fire Danger Rating System’s energy release component—an estimate of how quickly a flaming front could consume a landscape—broke records all summer. Any of these signs would be... (show all) troubling on its own: the curing vegetation, the parched landscape, the gales wailing like banshees. Combined, they foretold an unprecedented peril.
Within two years of the Gold Rush, a hundred thousand had died. Much of the killing was state-sponsored, with Indigenous groups enslaved over petty offenses or forced into indentured servitude. Within twenty years, about 80 p... (show all)ercent of California’s total native population had vanished. In 1863, the 461 surviving Konkows were marched ninety miles west to the Round Valley Reservation. Only half of them survived the journey, called the Konkow Trail of Tears.
In November 2018, houses sold for an average of $304,000 in Sacramento, $671,000 in Los Angeles, $1.31 million in San Francisco, and $2.46 million in Palo Alto. The median property value in Paradise was $205,500.
Most locals spent their money outside Paradise, which was one reason the town had been known as Poverty Ridge as far back as the early 1900s—though old-timers always joked that it was a “darn nice place to starve if you h... (show all)ave to.”
Employees left the CPUC to work for PG&E or as lobbyists on the company’s behalf, helping to write the laws that governed them. PG&E was a top political donor in Sacramento, shelling out $5.3 million to campaigns in 2017 an... (show all)d 2018. The relationship was so inappropriate that the utility paid nearly $100 million in fines following the San Bruno explosion for communications that violated state law.
Cutting electricity was controversial, and PG&E had resisted imposing such outages for years. But management felt it had few options. As the planet warmed, nighttime temperatures had risen twice as fast as daytime temperature... (show all)s, lowering relative humidity during the early morning hours, when firefighters had heretofore been able to contain a wildfire more easily. In the previous four years alone, more than 1,550 wildfires had been linked to PG&E equipment failures. There was no room for error.
Embers hurtled one to two miles ahead of the flaming front, carried on the wind. Every second, flames raced a distance greater than a football field. Every eight minutes, a swath of land the size of Central Park—or downtown... (show all) Chicago or the country of Monaco—burned.
On average, wildfires moved 1.4 to 1.9 miles per hour. In 2008, it had taken five weeks for the Butte Lightning Complex to reach the Feather River Canyon before sputtering out.
The card defined a “critical” blaze as anything faster than 3 mph. According to Hawks’s calculations, the Camp Fire was moving at twice that speed.
A small pile of firebrands could generate forty times more heat than a languid August afternoon of relentless sun. The superheated air started a chain reaction, broiling so hot that sheer curtains behind a single-pane window ... (show all)in a nearby home could catch fire and ignite the building from within.
PG&E was required to submit an “electric incident report” to the public utilities commission within two hours of an issue occurring in its system. The rule applied to any event that might have been caused by its infrastru... (show all)cture if it had resulted in a fatality, inflicted damage greater than $50,000, or drawn significant public attention. From January 1, 2017, through December 20, 2018, the utility submitted 131 reports, 86 of which were related to fire.
They had found that cardiac arrest for humans was as much as 70 percent more likely to occur on smoky days. And the amount of wildfire smoke in California was only expected to double in the next century, along with the number... (show all) of deaths due to chronic wildfire smoke exposure. In the United States, smoke claimed twenty thousand victims annually.
But the biggest finding in the government agency’s report involved Tower 27/222, whose hook had broken and sparked the Camp Fire. The CPUC report revealed catastrophic negligence. Company rules mandated that each transmissi... (show all)on tower be climbed once every five years for a detailed inspection. Yet this one had not been scaled since 2001—seventeen years before the historic wildfire. “Timely replacement [of the hook] could have prevented the Camp Fire,” the report concluded.
...the weakening of the broken hook was consistent with about “97 years of rotational body-on-body wear.” The ancient hook had been whittled down to the barest thread of metal—less than one eighth of an inch, about the ... (show all)width of the tip of a ballpoint pen—when it finally snapped. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)And then: the first crackle of red flame. - The Fire: Lightning Siege of 2020
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)And in the long, long years - as many as the stars above - around the campfires of the tribe at night the story was told by the old to the young; and I tell it to you, as it came down to me -Konkow Legend
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Perhaps someday the sign would again ring true, letting the weary and the curious in on a secret that everyone in town already know: that this really and truly was paradise. -Epilogue - Canonical DDC/MDS
- 363.37909794
- Canonical LCC
- SD421.32.C2
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Science & Nature, General Nonfiction, History, Biography & Memoir
- DDC/MDS
- 363.37909794 — Society, government, & culture Social problems and social services Public Safety - Police, Crime Investigation Terrorism, Disasters, Civil Defense Fires and fire-fighting
- LCC
- SD421.32 .C2 — Agriculture Forestry. Arboriculture. Silviculture Forestry Conservation and protection
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 171
- Popularity
- 191,656
- Reviews
- 8
- Rating
- (4.45)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 3
