Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire

by Lizzie Johnson

Hardcover, 2021

Status

Available

Genres

Publication

Crown (2021), 432 pages

Description

"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 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"--… (more)

Media reviews

The Washington Post

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. 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

— 5 more

San Francisco Chronicle

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 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

Shelf Awareness

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 "swirled over the furniture, fingering framed family photos like looters, then incinerating the entire place within minutes."

Show Less

Kirkus Reviews

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.... 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.

Show Less

Publisher's Weekly

Journalist Johnson debuts with a brutal account of the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history. Drawing on firsthand accounts and 911 dispatch reports, Johnson follows a cast of residents, officials, and fire department workers as the fire ravaged their town and their lives

changed.... This devastating history may be tough to read at times, but those who stay the course will find it crucial, comprehensive, and moving.

Show Less

Harvard Book Review

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.... 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 Less

User reviews

LibraryThing member HuberK

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 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

2 more

LibraryThing member kiesa

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 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

LibraryThing member Lemeritus

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.

Fewer