![]() Cal Fire officials are investigating a second possible ignition point, also at 6.30am and near the same area. It would be christened the Camp fire, after the fire’s location at Camp Creek Road. By 6.30am, according to the company, an employee observed fire on the same transmission line. Chapter two: the horror beginsĪt 6.15am, PG&E reported a power outage on one of its transmission lines near the community of Pulga, in the hills about 10 miles east of Paradise. The night before the fire, the utility company said it was continuing to monitor weather conditions, and by 10pm it still hadn’t made a final decision about whether to turn off power. Sparks from PG&E equipment have been blamed for igniting a number of fires, including the Tubbs fire, which killed 22 in wine country in 2017, and 2015’s Butte fire, which killed two and destroyed more than 900 structures after a tree came into contact with a power line. Two days before the fire, the gas and electric company PG&E, which serves much of northern California, warned roughly 70,000 customers in nine counties, including in Paradise, that it was considering shutting off power because of increased fire risks from high winds and low humidity. Evacuations would proceed based on which areas were affected, and during a disaster, cars would be permitted to use both lanes on certain roads to flee.īut the plan, officials would later say, had a crucial vulnerability: it did not envision the panicked evacuation of the entire town at once. Residents could opt in to an alert system that would notify them of trouble via telephone, text and email, and Paradise had an emergency plan that split the city into evacuation zones. One main thoroughfare, Skyway, leads out of town and into the valley to the west. It sits on a ridge between two canyons that meet like the lines at the top of a triangle, providing magnificent vistas but also impeding escape in the event of a disaster. Paradise’s geography makes it particularly vulnerable. Fire experts, who have long spoken out about the danger, don’t see this as vegetation – they see it as fuel. And because there has been a policy of suppressing wildfires to protect homes and businesses in the state since the early 1900s, the landscape is now unusually dense with shrubs and young trees that would otherwise have been burned off by naturally occurring blazes. Years of drought exacerbated by global warming have left its forests achingly dry and littered with dead trees. Recent conditions have boosted the risks. The house where William Goggia grew up in Paradise. More than 200 structures were destroyed in 2008. Wildfires are a normal part of the forest ecosystem in California, and over the past decade parts of Paradise have been threatened by at least four fires. When a Starbucks opened several months ago, a local joke went, Paradise had truly arrived.īut one menace was constant. The population skewed towards retirees, but residents say there was also a younger influx escaping real estate prices elsewhere in California. Dating back to the Gold Rush, Paradise was less a garden of earthly delights than a quiet community of 27,000, with homes and trailer parks hidden amid dense stands of pines and oaks. In truth, if this was a utopia it was a mellow sort. “You are ascending into Paradise,” read a road sign on the way into town, a charming spot in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in northern California. Christmas at William Goggia’s family home, which was lost in the fire.
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