Paradise

March 1, 2021

Plumbing the Camp Fire, America's deadliest in a century, San Francisco Chronicle staffer Johnson shows its impact on the town of Paradise, CA. (At least 85 residents died.) She tells some chapters from the fire's perspective and concludes, "This is the future of our warming planet."

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 12, 2021
Journalist Johnson debuts with a brutal account of the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history. Drawing on firsthand accounts and 911 dispatch reports, Johnson follows a cast of residents, officials, and fire department workers as the fire ravaged their town and their lives changed. Outlining the factors that set the stage for the blaze, Johnson notes that fire management practices are not as straightforward as they seem: by the time the Camp Fire broke out, “a century’s worth of colonial fire suppression policies... had allowed the woods to become diseased and overgrown,” compared to Indigenous practices that historically cleared out debris with low-intensity burns. This, coupled with neglect on the part of the Pacific Gas and Electric company, whose equipment sparked the inferno, primed Paradise for disaster. Johnson’s attention to grisly detail can be overwhelming (the list of victims, along with how they were found, for instance)—but she balances the horror with compassion: “Maybe someday the town she had known would... rise strong and whole again under the tall pines.” This devastating history may be tough to read at times, but those who stay the course will find it crucial, comprehensive, and moving. Agent: Larry Weissman, Larry Weissman Literary.

July 1, 2021
A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle gives a masterly account of the 2018 Camp Fire, which devastated the town of Paradise, California. In her first book, Johnson does for California's deadliest wildfire what Sheri Fink did for Hurricane Katrina in Five Days at Memorial. With stellar reporting, she tells the moment-by-moment story of an unfolding disaster, showing its human dramas as well as the broader corporate and governmental missteps that fueled it. The author draws on more than 500 interviews as she follows residents ranging from the Paradise fire chief and town manager to a mother who gave birth to a premature infant the night before her hospital was evacuated--and was then stranded for hours in a car on a gridlocked exit route with a baby who needed a neonatal intensive care unit. A state investigation blamed faulty Pacific Gas & Electric electrical equipment for the blaze--and the utility pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter for the deaths that resulted--but Johnson evenhandedly shows other factors that contributed to the tragedies. A drought had turned wooded areas into dry, overgrown tinderboxes. Authorities waited too long to issue mandatory evacuation alerts, and with the telecommunications system overloaded, 82% of residents didn't receive one. The official evacuation routes proved dangerously inadequate. Johnson's account of the crisis lacks the polish of disaster narratives by authors such as Sebastian Junger and Jon Krakauer. Although she has a jeweler's eye for gemlike details, some aren't for the faint of heart; the fire destroyed so many dental records that a coroner hoped "any steel hardware with serial numbers--artificial hips, knees, shoulders" might help to identify bodies. Though the storytelling isn't flawless, the book is unmatched for the depth, breadth, and quality of its reporting on a major 21st-century wildfire, and it's likely to become the definitive account of the catastrophe in Paradise. An urgent, harrowing report on one of the country's worst wildfires.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from August 1, 2021
San Francisco Chronicle reporter Johnson covered California's 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in state history, which devastated the town of Paradise and surrounding communities in the Sierra Nevada foothills 175 miles northeast of San Francisco--85 people killed, 18,800 structures destroyed, 153,00 acres of forest burned. She expands her coverage here to deliver a viscerally harrowing, almost minute-by-minute narrative of the events leading to that conflagration, the dawning realization that a massively fatal wildfire was descending on the region, the perilous escapes of Paradise townspeople, and the heartbreaking aftermath, including the legal reckoning of energy supplier and chief culprit PG&E. She humanizes the book with detailed, sensitively told stories of many of the townspeople, from the driver who ferried a busload of schoolkids out of the inferno to the tough but compassionate dispatcher who might have saved hundreds of lives by overriding a non-evacuation order. A cautionary tale in this age of climate change.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.