![]() ![]() ![]() But at three o’clock they were stuck in the same spot they’d gotten to at noon. At one point they put Avery on and he told me he loved me and he’d be okay. I kept calling his grandparents, who were driving by then. When she tried to go back to rescue them, she was stopped by the police. Jennifer Christensen (right) let her 2-year-old son, Avery, sleep late on the morning of the fires when she left him with his adopted grandparents and drove to work in Chico. Soon she’s leaving, heading west to work as a massage therapist. It’s in her blood, she says, and now a reminder of her hometown is also tattooed on her forearm. “So he survived okay too.”īrook Madison (left, with her children, Justin and Eva) grew up in Paradise. “We saw him again a few days ago,” Michelle says. Coyotes and deer fled through the yard, and at one point, a terrified bear. Brandon, who has a fire sprinkler business, walked the grounds in a pair of swimming goggles and a backpack water tank, tamping out grass fires. By 5:00 p.m., fallen trees in the road blocked their way out and fire surrounded the ranch. “Brandon got the idea to make a stencil with my phone number and spray-painted it on all the horses, just in case we had to let them loose.” They moved the animals close to the house for safety, creating a makeshift corral with electric tape. “Horses don’t like to be alone, so we tried to keep them together,” Michelle says. She drove in as Paradise burned on the ridge above. “We’re the last one in the canyon so it would have hit us first,” Michelle told me. The ranch survived the Humboldt fires of 2008, and they had made some crucial changes, like installing solar paneling for the water pump, but early on the morning of November 8, there was a new urgency in her father’s voice. She drives to her parents’ ranch near Butte College almost every day to take care of her horses. “If you’ve been through wildfire, you think you know what to expect,” says Michelle Camy, a photographer who lives in Chico with her husband, Brandon Squyres, a musician. “Forest fires are totally preventable.” Trump’s pronouncement came two days after 100 Camp Fire victims were told they could no longer camp on their own lands as they rebuilt, because of benzene contamination, and a week after the Red Cross closed its last relief shelter in Chico, which still housed approximately 600 people. “We cannot continue to spend billions of dollars, billions and billions of dollars,” he said in early February. The president repeatedly called Paradise “Pleasure” when he visited a little over a week after the blaze, advised the state to “rake” the forest floor, and made repeated threats to cut off federal disaster aid. It is believed to have originated on Camp Creek Road, north of Paradise, which is where the Camp Fire, now the deadliest and most destructive in California’s history, got its name. It devastated entire neighborhoods, and inexplicably it left some houses unscathed. On Butte Creek, it burned the Honey Run Covered Bridge, a local landmark for 132 years. The fire burned through rural Concow, through Magalia, through Paradise. No one had experienced the unique horror of watching the hospital burn, or the Safeway, as flames lapped at the sides of their own cars on the one main road out. Most people in Butte County had lived through multiple fires before-this is northern California, this is wildfire country-but no one had seen one like this, so fast and enveloping. Through the pines and cedars came the persistent sound of crackling foil. The Camp Fire began on the clear morning of November 8, 2018, which made it eerier still, a radiant sky that turned black. ![]()
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