Fire in Paradise

An American Tragedy

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Pub Date 5 May 2020 | Archive Date 30 Apr 2020

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Description

The harrowing story of the most destructive American wildfire in a century.

There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and killed at least 85 people. The catastrophe seared the American imagination, taking the front page of every major national newspaper and top billing on the news networks. It displaced tens of thousands of people, yielding a refugee crisis that continues to unfold.

Fire in Paradise is a dramatic and moving narrative of the disaster based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with residents, firefighters and police, and scientific experts. Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano are California-based journalists who have reported on Paradise since the day the fire began. Together they reveal the heroics of the first responders, the miraculous escapes of those who got out of Paradise, and the horrors experienced by those who were trapped. Their accounts are intimate and unforgettable, including the local who left her home on foot as fire approached while her 82-year-old father stayed to battle it; the firefighter who drove into the heart of the inferno in his bulldozer; the police officer who switched on his body camera to record what he thought would be his final moments as the flames closed in; and the mother who, less than 12 hours after giving birth in the local hospital, thought she would die in the chaotic evacuation with her baby in her lap. Gee and Anguiano also explain the science of wildfires, write powerfully about the role of the power company PG&E in the blaze, and describe the poignant efforts to raise Paradise from the ruins.

This is the story of a town at the forefront of a devastating global shift—of a remarkable landscape sucked ever drier of moisture and becoming inhospitable even to trees, now dying in their tens of millions and turning to kindling. It is also the story of a lost community, one that epitomized a provincial, affordable kind of Californian existence that is increasingly unattainable. It is, finally, a story of a new kind of fire behavior that firefighters have never witnessed before and barely know how to handle. What happened in Paradise was unprecedented in America. Yet according to climate scientists and fire experts, it will surely happen again.


About the Authors: Alastair Gee is an award-winning editor and reporter at the Guardian who has also written for The New Yorker online, the New York Times, and the Economist. Gee lives in New York City.

Dani Anguiano writes for the Guardian and was formerly a reporter for the Chico Enterprise-Record, where she covered Butte County, including Chico and Paradise. Having lived in Butte County for a decade, Anguiano now resides in the San Francisco Bay area.

The harrowing story of the most destructive American wildfire in a century.

There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8...


Advance Praise

“A page-turner from the get-go…The details of [the locals’] lives lend verisimilitude sure to hook the most callous of observers.” - Oakland Magazine

“Powerful…A riveting narrative that provides further compelling evidence for the urgency of environmental stewardship.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A tense and detailed account…Gee and Anguiano vividly describe the conflagration without sensationalizing it…This impressive report makes a convincing case that such tragedies as the Camp Fire are not a freak occurrence, but a glimpse of the future.” - Publishers Weekly

“A gripping and meticulously reported account of how one California community was wiped from the map, and a terrifying bellwether of the mounting personal costs of the world’s climate emergency.” - Adam Higginbotham, author of Midnight in Chernobyl

“A page-turner from the get-go…The details of [the locals’] lives lend verisimilitude sure to hook the most callous of observers.” - Oakland Magazine

“Powerful…A riveting narrative that provides...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9781324005148
PRICE US$26.95 (USD)
PAGES 256

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