Campfire: Survival stories that the most deadly fire in America was fleeing

On November 8, the sun had not yet reached Sierra Nevada, in Butte County, when a Cal Fire radio channel crackled.

A fire was burning under power lines near the Poe Dam, part of a PG & E-owned hydroelectric system along the Feather River in northern California.

At 6:46, a firefighter who was one of the first to spot the fire, radioed that he was small: "Probably 10 acres of what I can see," he said. declared. Driven by gusts of wind up to 50 mph, he tore through the rugged, rugged forest of the Plumas National Forest. The fire has reached thousands of acres in a few hours.

The flames devoured the isolated communities of Pulga and Concow before reaching the larger cities of Paradise and Magalia. At the end of the day, it was a hell that would be engraved in logbooks under the name of Camp Fire: the most destructive and deadly forest fire in California.

Almost now contained, it has killed at least 87 people and destroyed more than 13,000 homes. More than 50,000 people were evacuated in 12 hours of terror, courage, confusion and turmoil that overwhelmed a public safety plan designed for a fire that would gradually spread to pine-covered communities. The campfire moved at a speed that no one – not residents, firefighters or public officials – could stand.

Brandon Hill was six miles away at Concow when the fire started, pushing four of his children to school. Around 7 am, he saw a plume of smoke rising from the northeast. He was not alarmed.

Each summer, Cal Fire red machines race to extinguish fires in the river canyon on the eastern edge of Concow. Hill, 38, said he has seen a dozen fires over the last decade.

"It seemed like it was far in the canyon, like what happened a hundred times before," Hill said.

He only traveled a few kilometers when he realized that the fire had spread between miles of trees and undergrowth and was heading towards Camelot, his subdivision of Concow. His wife, Sara, was still there with their 8-year-old son, Nathan.

"I literally squeezed my brakes (urgently) and turned a powerful old bend in the middle of the highway," he said. By the time he came back a few minutes later, his neighbors' houses were on fire. The embers flew sideways in the strong wind "as the worst snowstorm you've ever had, "he said.

Sara Hill was in her bag, unaware of the threat.

"What's wrong?" Said Hill, she asked him when he blew the door.

"I said, 'We have to go now. She tried to take more things and I screamed at her. I will not always forgive myself how I talked to my wife. My God, I told him to get the f — in the truck because he's here. It's already there.

Three roads on

Sheriff Kory Honea from Butte County sipped a coffee at his home in Chico when the fire broke out. His wife, a sheriff's dispatcher, called to tell him that Pulga, 10 miles from Paradise, was burning.

Honea did not yet fear that Paradise was in danger.

But at around 7.45, about 45 minutes after Hill saw the plume, firefighters reported that a large part of Concow, located five kilometers west of Pulga, toward paradise, was on fire, according to audio files archived online and reviewed by The Sacramento Bee. Officials began evacuating Eastern paradise.

Honea headed for Skyway, the main road between Paradise and Chico. The traffic towards Chico was creeping but the paths leading to paradise were empty. He grabbed his flashlight and asked the drivers to also use the arrival lanes.

Later, Logan Callahan, a California traffic police officer, discovered fallen power lines and a tree fell on two of the Skyway lanes, blocking traffic. The flames moved closer to both sides of the road as drivers were stuck. The escape routes became so crowded that the first responders could not go to town.

"Turn around!" Shouted a firefighter on his radio near Concow Road and Highway 70, the road through the mountain towns east of Paradise at 7:54.

"They block the road and prevent first responders from getting through," he exclaimed.

About the time Honea was heading to Skyway, Butte County supervisor Doug Teeter received an alert on his cell phone at Paradise telling him that an evacuation order was in progress.

Like the hill family in Concow, Teeter knew the forest fire well, having evacuated his home in the eastern part of the city at least three times. Teeter's wife, Pamela, had just dropped off their two children at school. Facing the departure, the couple gathered important items – tax records, computers, clothes – and took separate cars. Pamela Teeter left first to pick up the kids on Pearson Road, a winding two-lane road that separates Skyway and Pentz Road, two of only three arteries that leave Paradise.

Teeter was a few minutes behind her – enough to make a difference in traffic. He found himself moving slowly, embers landing all around as he headed for a wooded canyon.

"This canyon is a deadly trap," Teeter thought.

A few kilometers away, PSC officer Nick Powell was carrying three evacuees, two of whom were disabled, when a panicked driver crashed into his SUV and the airbags crashed.

Powell abandoned the sport utility vehicle, loaded his passengers into passing vehicles and ran on foot, before securing himself with the firefighters, said Callahan, another CHP officer.

Powell was just one of dozens of local rescuers who had lost their homes as a result of the fires as they desperately tried to save the lives of their neighbors and fought for their own survival.

Stuck in the same traffic, Teeter dropped his car into an alley and tried to get home to get his motorcycle, but it was too late to go out. As the fire drew nearer, he huddled on a mowed field about 300 meters wide with about 20 others.

The fire passed in the distance.

Later, rescuers found the hulls of cars burned on Edgewood Lane, the bodies inside, the aluminum rims melted on the asphalt.

Infrastructure burns

Unlike Teeter, Dorthy Burns, 94, has never received an evacuation alert, she said.

Burns lived alone with her black miniature poodle, Smokey, in a mobile home in the Camelot subdivision, not far from Hill.

She dressed when her phone rang. It's a neighbor who told her that she had to evacuate. Another neighbor called with more urgency.

"He said, 'You must go out now. The fire is in the back yard, "she said.

Butte County has signed a contract with a privately owned company, OnSolve, based in Florida, for an optional emergency alert system called CodeRed, able to call landlines, as well as to call a landlord. 39, send SMS, e-mails and smartphone messages, according to county officials.

The county has run campaigns to encourage Butte residents to sign up for CodeRed. OnSolve said it made 75,000 phone calls to people on the campfire road and "tens of thousands of other e-mails and text messages" on November 8, according to company spokesman Brian. Lustig.

It is unclear how many of these alerts were sent. Several people interviewed by The Bee said that they had not received any warning.

The initial notification, which covered 10,000 phone numbers, was only about 60 percent of the intended recipients, said Troy Harper, chief executive of OnSolve. Too many people were on the cellular network and it was overloaded with traffic, Harper said.

"Neighborhoods are burning, friends are calling friends," Harper said. "The infrastructure is burning."

After warnings from his neighbors, Burns charged Smokey into his Mazda.

"The wind was so strong, the embers blew horizontally," said Burns. "I thought," This is not a place for me. "

Driving in an impenetrable smoke, she lost the road and crossed a lawn before crossing a retaining wall. His car was stuck on it.

Hill was heading to Camelot with two neighbors of his Ford Focus when he saw Burns. He had already sent his wife and children in front of him, but had tried to save his house before realizing that it was hopeless.

He jumped to help.

"She had to weigh 90 pounds while soaked," said Hill, who measures nearly 6 feet and weighs 270 pounds. "I caught her by her purple puff jacket, and I just lifted her from the wall and I lowered her."

The men loaded Burns and Smokey into the Focus and drove to Hill's mother's house near Concow. Hill and about 12 neighbors spent the day using watering pipes to extinguish fires, with wet tissues covering their faces to filter out the sweltering smoke. Hill cut the lines of fire with a tractor while embers burned his shirt.

Shortly after, a man ran, soaked. The drenched stranger said he and others had jumped into the nearby Concow tank to escape the flames. There were still people trapped on an island, including a 90-year-old man, he said.

Hill 's son, Daniel, aged 14, seized an old canoe from a nearby workshop with other people. They headed for the tank and rowed to rescue the trembling survivors.

The 90-year-old, whom Brandon Hill knew only as Bruno, was in bad shape, he said.

"He was suffering from hypothermia. He was barely conscious and could barely communicate, "said Hill. "I did not have much hope for him."

They stripped Bruno of his wet clothes and put him in a hot bath at Hill's mother's. Hill said that the man had survived.

Just crazy

Surgeon Ruth McLarty began her morning emergency room in front of Concow at Feather River Hospital, east of paradise. She was completing a gall bladder operation when fire alarms occurred.

Her patient was loaded into an ambulance. McLarty drove down the hill.

"The fire surrounded us and it was obvious that we would not get out of it," she said.

The traffic did not move when the flames hit its doors. A woman whose car caught fire arrived with her. McLarty called her 16-year-old daughter and started praying.

"I sit there imagining burning to death," said McLarty. "And I go to that great waking man."

A bulldozer passed in front of McLarty's car at that time and in the flames, clearing a path wide enough for her to turn around and go to the hospital. She found some twenty patients who had not been evacuated. They had been pushed out on trolleys and wheelchairs. When a hospital dependency caught fire, the group retreated to an asphalt heliport.

"We just watched everything burn," said McLarty.

The main building of the hospital survived the fire, but 13 other buildings burned or were badly damaged.

Teeter, the county supervisor, had already been to the hospital, he said. He did not know if his wife and children were safe.

He saw the sheriff's deputies bring more and more people, many of them elderly, to the parking lot. Hospital workers brought the bedside toilets to the outside.

"Everyone in a hospital coat," he said. "They are confused. They have pets. It was just crazy.

Send me an angel

Just off Pentz Road, Sheila Craft was up before sunrise, ensuring that emergency generators could intervene if needed at Cypress Meadows, a nursing and rehabilitation home. Pacific Gas and Electric Co. had warned two days earlier that it could cut off power that morning as a fire prevention measure.

The planned outage did not occur. PG & E officials later stated that the weather conditions "did not meet the criteria". The company has already been sued by several residents of Paradise, who charge defective transmission lines for causing the fire. Cal Fire has not announced a cause yet.

A little after 7 am, Craft went home to take her kids to school. Like Hill, she saw smoke but did not pay attention.

"We live in the mountains, so when we see a plume of smoke, we do not think it's imminent," said Craft, director of admissions and marketing for Cypress Meadows.

Soon she realized that the flames were going to reach the retirement home. She returned back. The nurses and assistants combined clothing, medicine and supplies for the 91 patients. Craft and others started calling to find a place to take them.

"It was raining ashes," she says. "Charred bark landed on our parking lot."

Craft found a facility in Chico, Roseleaf Senior Care, with vacancies. She took three patients to her Chevrolet Suburban – a stroke victim and two people with dementia – and left. It was not quite 10 o'clock in the morning.

Joe Zarate, a Cypress Meadows maintenance officer, has loaded four patients into his Ford F350 pickup truck. An amputee was mounting a shotgun, a bed-ridden patient was sitting in the back seat, and two elderly women in wheelchairs were placed in the truck with a nurse. After the sheriff's van, Zarate's truck crawled into flames and traffic jams.

About a kilometer later, Zarate heard the women in the truck praying. He grabbed rosary beads hanging from his rearview mirror and handed them back to him. Zarate's truck approached a barricade of flames crossing Neal Road, on the southwestern edge of Paradise.

"Put it on the floor, baby. Let's go, "said the amputee next to him. Zarate said that he had spun through, and then returned to tell the woman lying in the back, who seemed to have fainted at one point, she had reached it.

She said her first words in the morning: "I knew we would," he recalls.

In his Chevrolet Suburban, Craft was panicked in a Safeway car park. The SUV had a flat tire. She asked a man in a PG & E truck to help fix it. He said that he could not.

Her husband, Jeremy, was on the phone in tears, "asking God to send me an angel," she said. Moments later, a Safeway employee, Nate Reich, parked in his Ford sedan. He loaded everyone in his car.

They did it to Chico.

30 fire extinguishers and a hose

Fire planning paid off at Paradise Alliance Church, designated by city officials as one of two meeting points to be housed on site. During the campfire, it became a last fight.

Dave Roberts, head of church maintenance for 10 years, was introduced around 7:30 at the Clark Road facility. He could see smoke in the distance, but he started setting up tables for a fundraiser organized by the church that night. young pregnant women.

Half an hour later, there were flames behind the church, he said.

Roberts and others grabbed pipes and started spraying fires. A group of teachers from a nearby college joined them, while a mobile home behind the church was in flames.

Tim Bolin, the pastor of the church, arrived by car and told Roberts to lock the church and evacuate. Roberts started leaving, but Clark Road was in a stalemate. He returned to the church, where a hundred people sought refuge in the large open space between the pines. Many people in the lot were seniors, including a parishioner who had just turned 100 years old. A woman was barefoot with an almost empty oxygen tank, he said.

The embers hit the lawn of the church. Roberts and others have deployed a line of sprinklers. The water pressure started to fade. Roberts therefore distributed 30 fire extinguishers and began spraying the foaming retarder.

"It was like fighting a fire with a water gun," he said.

Two redwoods and a juniper ignite.

"I just remember praying," God, I can not do it anymore; it's up to you, "said Roberts.

A fire truck arrived and the crew "turned everything off," Roberts said. But there was no place to go. Survivors stayed in the field while others joined. Hours spent. Propane tanks continued to explode in the distance.

Around 16:45 a team of firefighters arrived to leave the group. Their caravan arrived safely at Butte College in Oroville a few minutes after 5pm.

A lost race

"The ridge", as the inhabitants of the Paradise region call it, has already been the subject of major fires.

In 2008, two fires burned more than 200 buildings. After the fires, a Butte County Grand Jury released a report that roads in the area did not permit rapid evacuation.

"Additional evacuation routes are needed," wrote the grand jury. "All roads out of Paradise and Upper Ridge, with the exception of Skyway below Paradise, are subject to significant constraints, limiting their use as escape routes during an event. major."

The city responded with a new evacuation system. Paradise, a population of 27,000, was divided into areas that would be evacuated as needed to keep the roads clear. In 2016, during the morning rush hour, officials turned the four lanes of the Skyway into a one-way street for mass evacuation.

The region has added other fire safety measures. The crews cut fires in the woods and undergrowth to protect portions of Concow, which housed about 800 people. Officials created safe havens in paradise, such as the Alliance Church where people could shelter, and set up firefighting and rescue zones.

As the fire approaches, radio reports indicate that evacuation orders are issued every few minutes, in accordance with the plan. But quickly, the orders covered vast expanses of paradise. Finally, at 9:03, about two and a half hours after the start of the fire, 12 miles away, the call was launched to empty the entire city.

"Mandatory evacuations, all from paradise," said an unidentified fire brigade commander during radio transmissions.

When Concow burned and Paradise was evacuated, Sheriff Honea directed traffic on Skyway. His radio brought troubling news. His deputies demanded fire trucks and begged for the planes to fall back on the delay.

"The answer is," There are no more resources, "Honea said. "Honestly, I thought we were going to have dead police officers."

Honea saw his daughter, Kassidy Honea, 23, a Paradise police officer, directing traffic across Skyway. A call came in: MPs and residents were stuck in a hardware store. The sheriff had to leave, wondering if he would see her again.

Butte County Sheriff, Kory Honea, and his daughter, Kassidy Honea, a Paradise policeman, direct traffic on the morning of the camp's fire.

Michael Zuccolillo Special to the bee

"I hugged her and I said goodbye and left," Honea said.

Honea said he did not study the events of November 8 enough to know if the zone system was the best way to evacuate Paradise or if anything could have prepared the city for a fire that was moving as fast as the fire. But he thinks that a single mass evacuation would probably have created "even more pandemonium."

"The pace of rapid fire progression has exceeded the plan," he said. "This fire overtook us before we realized we were in a race."

Frozen in fear

Hill and his band of survivors spent a restless night in Concow. They tried to sleep alternately on spare beds, sofas and bare floors, so that there was always someone who was watching to watch for the fires.

"All night, people woke up because there were flare-ups of light behind my mother's house in the woods," he said.

The next morning, Hill took a chainsaw and went to look around an ATV with another man. The man wanted to check his godmother.

"He just knew that she was there," Hill said.

They saw felled trees and power poles blocking a road and found the woman, Stephanie Rowe, 75 years old. She was frozen in the driver's seat of her car. hands holding the steering wheel.

Hill thought she was dead.

"I will never forget his face when I opened the door," Hill said. "She sort of tilted her head to the side, completely speechless with empty eyes, and just looked at us."

The men met with a sheriff's deputy who escorted Rowe to safety. The MP told Hill that he should leave what was now the camp fire evacuation zone, otherwise he could be arrested.

Hill said he had no reluctance to face the threat. He knows that the deputy minister has had 24 difficult hours.

He did it too.