"Fire In Paradise: An American Tragedy"

"It was 4:00 a.m. on Friday, November 9," write Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano of 2018, "and the destruction of the Paradise Ridge as it had been known for a century and a half was almost complete." 

Gee is an editor-reporter for the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper in its West Coast office. Anguiano, also a Guardian reporter, honed her journalistic career at the Chico State University Orion and (for three years) this newspaper. Together, drawing on hundreds of interviews, they tell the story of the Camp Fire with skill and even-handedness.

"Fire In Paradise: An American Tragedy" ($26.95 in hardcover from W. W. Norton & Company; also for Amazon Kindle) is divided into three sections: "Paradise" (which establishes the town's setting in California history and its vulnerability to conflagration); "Hell" (which includes the stories of those who had to make the agonizing decision of whether to stay or go); and "Ashes and Seeds" (which chronicles "a city dispersed").

It's an "American tragedy" because there are other communities, such as Nevada City, about which residents say "it's only a matter of time." "In the wake of the Camp Fire," the authors write in an Epilogue, "a century of certainties about the ability of humans to dominate fire were in question." 

In the wake of the Camp Fire, P.G.&E. plunged millions of Californians into darkness with power shutoffs--and yet there apparently was at least one utility-caused fire, in Sonoma County, evoking for those in and around the Ridge "a familiar sense of dread."

There are eerie resonances with the world we are living through now. In the midst of the fire, "firefighters across the Ridge adopted the makeshift tactic called 'sheltering in place' ...." 

As the fire burned, thick smoke enveloped large parts of the state. "Authorities recommended n95 respirators, so called because they claimed to filter out at least 95 percent of dust and mold in the air." 

Evacuees faced sickness: "In the coming days about 145 people in shelters caught norovirus, a highly contagious illness causing vomiting and diarrhea."

"It was incomprehensible," Gee and Anguiano write, "just how swiftly an entire world had been lost." It happened, and is happening again.