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.
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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. Chapter one: a slice of heaven in the Sierra foothillsĬhristmas at William Goggia’s family home, which was lost in the fire. This is a reconstruction of Paradise’s final hours, based on interviews with more than 50 residents, first responders and wildfire scientists. And Paradise would suffer a fate that appears increasingly likely: the total destruction of a modern American city. Soon at least 86 people would be dead in a new and ferocious kind of climate change-inflected wildfire. Goggia didn’t know it yet, but he had been engulfed by the deadliest wildfire in recorded California history. So he turned back around against the traffic. The van was going to burn up with him and the cat inside, he thought. But the street was so clogged with people trying to escape that Goggia barely moved. By 9am he was on the road, accompanied by his tabby cat, Mikey. Goggia inhabited the same stucco, three-bedroom house he grew up in. His sister, who lived nearby, called to ask him to help a relative in the area, but Goggia told her that he couldn’t: chunks of burning wood were falling from the sky. He heard the piercing metallic clang of propane tanks exploding in the distance. William Goggia awoke to a poisonous orange atmosphere so thick with smoke he couldn’t see the sun.