PARADISE

A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle gives a masterly account of the 2018 Camp Fire, which devastated the town of Paradise, California.

In her first book, Johnson does for California’s deadliest wildfire what Sheri Fink did for Hurricane Katrina in Five Days at Memorial. With stellar reporting, she tells the moment-by-moment story of an unfolding disaster, showing its human dramas as well as the broader corporate and governmental missteps that fueled it. The author draws on more than 500 interviews as she follows residents ranging from the Paradise fire chief and town manager to a mother who gave birth to a premature infant the night before her hospital was evacuated—and was then stranded for hours in a car on a gridlocked exit route with a baby who needed a neonatal intensive care unit. A state investigation blamed faulty Pacific Gas & Electric electrical equipment for the blaze—and the utility pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter for the deaths that resulted—but Johnson evenhandedly shows other factors that contributed to the tragedies. A drought had turned wooded areas into dry, overgrown tinderboxes. Authorities waited too long to issue mandatory evacuation alerts, and with the telecommunications system overloaded, 82% of residents didn’t receive one. The official evacuation routes proved dangerously inadequate. Johnson’s account of the crisis lacks the polish of disaster narratives by authors such as Sebastian Junger and Jon Krakauer. Although she has a jeweler’s eye for gemlike details, some aren’t for the faint of heart; the fire destroyed so many dental records that a coroner hoped “any steel hardware with serial numbers—artificial hips, knees, shoulders” might help to identify bodies. Though the storytelling isn’t flawless, the book is unmatched for the depth, breadth, and quality of its reporting on a major 21st-century wildfire, and it’s likely to become the definitive account of the catastrophe in Paradise.

An urgent, harrowing report on one of the country’s worst wildfires.