California today: a campfire lights the deadliest fire in the history of the state

Today's introduction comes from Thomas Fuller, the head of the San Francisco office.

The sad news of the devastated city of Paradise Sunday was accompanied by a disturbing asterisk. The Butte County Sheriff announced that the death toll in and around Sierra Town had reached 29, the highest death toll in the history of modern California as a result of Only one fire.

Asterisk: More than 200 people are still missing, suggesting that more bodies will be found. Research teams and rescuers have searched the cremated remains of the city, which is still evacuated from its residents.

Before the fire, Paradise had about 27,000 inhabitants, many of whom were elderly. A staggering 6,453 homes were destroyed.

"Paradise is an old wooded town with narrow streets. It's a retired community, "said Scott McLean, deputy chief of Cal Fire. The fierceness and speed of the flames were breathtaking, he said. "The winds were phenomenal and pushed everything on the roads. The roads were simply blocked. People ran out of gas. It was an accumulation of everything at the same time. "

In an article published Sunday, we examined how the difficulty of escaping aggravated the trauma caused by the fire. When the fire broke out Thursday morning, only one main road was leading out of Paradise. She was quickly saturated with traffic. As California's wildfires become larger and more intense, our story raises the question of how many cities in this state have a similar vulnerability.

Evacuation planning was not an oversight in Paradise. Mayor Jody Jones has worked for years as Regional Manager for the California Department of Transportation. Traffic management is his specialty. The city organized evacuation drills.

Jones worries that no planning effort could have prevented the panic deadlock in heaven.

"I did not know you could build the infrastructure to evacuate an entire city so quickly," she said.

How can you help

Make sure to do your research before donating to charities. Here is a list of nonprofit organizations in the state that solicit donations, as well as specific sites and organizations in Butte County and Southern California.

California Online

(Note: we regularly post articles on news sites with limited access to non-subscribers.)

• representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republicans who have served 15 terms have lost their candidacy for the re-election of Harley Rouda. [The New York Times]

• California has the the most stringent firearms control laws in the nation, but the shooting at Thousand Oaks has left some wondering if that's enough. [The New York Times]

• And on ThursdayOur technology editor, Pui-Wing Tam, will join four technical executives in San Francisco to discuss the next step for industry leadership. Tickets are available here.

And finally …

Why California? Veronica Chambers, the editor, explained:

This decision allowed us to cover a few things that fascinated us: Hollywood and technology; the movement of farm workers and the farm at the table; a spectrum of political activities ranging from new conservatism to the Black Panthers.

California newspaper coverage as a land of possibility was definitely not cynical.

In 1963, we wrote:

"California is proud of its tanned muscles in the sun these days, knowing that in recent months, it has overtaken New York as the most populous state in the Union. The individual statistic that has tilted the historical balance beyond the 17,300,000 mark may have been a newborn or young physicist from MIT crossing Lake Tahoe. More likely, it was a person in a family car full of exhausted children and parents. "

Our package begins with an essay by famed novelist Walter Mosley, who recounts his childhood in California, son of a Jewish woman and an African-American man, both came to the West after the end of the Second World War. Mosley writes, "The sun shone without mercy, but no one asked for mercy. Everyone was rich because everything was possible. "