The Deadliest Wildfire in California - Paradise 2018

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]November 8th, 2018, 6:33 a.m.

[00:00:06]A spark on a high voltage power line in Northern California ignites dry grass.

[00:00:14]Winds gust at 50 mph. The land hasn't seen rain in 210 days, and the fire burns a football field every second.

[00:00:25]>> This has got potential for a major incident.

[00:00:28]A fast-moving fire is forcing thousands of people out of their homes in Northern California. Authorities are going door todo to tell people to evacuate.

[00:00:38]>> Within 4 hours, an entire town of 26,000 people will be on fire.

[00:00:45]>> Are they coming for us?

[00:00:46]>> Come on. Watch out. Watch out.

[00:00:48]>> And most of the people driving away that morning had no idea the fire was already faster than they were.

[00:01:02]I can't get out.

[00:01:04]I can't get out.

[00:01:08]What do I do? I don't want to die.

[00:01:12]By the end of the day, 85 people will be dead. 18,84 buildings will be destroyed.

[00:01:23]This is the story of the deadliest wildfire in California.

[00:01:33]The town was called Paradise. It sat on a ridge above the Feather River Canyon, 90 mi north of Sacramento. About 26,000 people lived there. A quarter of them were over 65. People moved to Paradise to grow old. The cost of living was low.

[00:01:52]The pine trees were tall. The community was quiet. By 2018, it had become one of the most retirey dense towns in California. There was one problem almost nobody outside Paradise understood.

[00:02:07]Paradise had four roads in. But for most of the population, only one road out.

[00:02:14]Skyway Drive, a two-lane mountain road that ran the entire length of the town.

[00:02:21]In 2015, after a smaller fire forced a partial evacuation, the town had converted Skyway to a one-way southbound emergency route. The decision had been controversial. It had also been the right one. It just hadn't been enough.

[00:02:37]Studies done the year before the campfire estimated that in a worstc case scenario, the town's road network could evacuate only a quarter of its residents within 2 hours. The other three quarters would still be trying to leave when the fire arrived. Town officials had asked for additional evacuation infrastructure. They had not received it.

[00:03:00]The summer of 2018 had been dry. The vegetation around Paradise hadn't seen meaningful rain in over 6 months.

[00:03:09]40 m to the northeast, a series of high voltage power lines crossed the Feather River Canyon, built in 1921, inspected, but only sometimes and only briefly. Maintenance records would later show that PG&E had identified the line as a priority for replacement years before and had moved that replacement to the back of the queue repeatedly in favor of other projects. By November 7th, the National Weather Service had issued red flag warnings for the entire region. High winds were forecast for the morning of November 8th. The kind of winds that mixed with dry grass could move a fire faster than any car could drive. In paradise, most people went to bed early.

[00:03:59]At 6:15 a.m. on November 8th, a Pacific Gas and Electric monitoring system registered an outage on the Caribou Polarmo transmission line.

[00:04:12]A piece of hardware called a C hook had broken. The hook had been holding an insulator. The insulator had been holding a high voltage jumper conductor.

[00:04:21]When the hook failed, the conductor swung and made contact with the tower.

[00:04:26]The short circuit threw sparks down into the dry grass below.

[00:04:33]The hook, the insulator, and the conductor were all original components.

[00:04:38]They had been in continuous service since 1921. They were 97 years old. The grass caught fire immediately, and once it did, there was almost nothing left to stop it before paradise.

[00:04:54]18 minutes later, at 6:33 a.m., a maintenance worker spotted fire under tower 27/222.

[00:05:03]>> Hey, TG, Rock Creek Powerhouse. Yep. Hey, I just got a report of a fire >> above Po Dam on Highway 70.

[00:05:12]>> Po Dam.

[00:05:13]>> Yeah. On the railroad side >> under the transmission line.

[00:05:18]>> By 6:45 a.m. the fire had grown to 10 acres. By 7 a.m. it was 80 acres. The Diablo winds, dry winds that blow downs slope from the Sierra Nevada were gusting at 50 m an hour. The fire was moving eastsoutheast straight toward Concow and then toward Paradise.

[00:05:41]It moved through brush that hadn't burned in decades. Burned through pine forest that was already dead from years of beetle infestation >> with an evacuee and talking with that fire captain. And just minutes after we got done talking with the fire captain, that fire just ripped up the hillside and we quickly moved downhill to get this vantage point. It crossed the Feather River Canyon in less than 30 minutes, a distance that should have stopped it. At 7:23 a.m., Calire issued the first official incident report.

[00:06:13]>> This is got potential for a major incident.

[00:06:16]>> They named the fire after the location of its origin, Camp Creek Road, the Camp Fire. Within hours, that name would be known across the entire country. By 8:00 a.m., the fire was generating its own weather. The intense heat created a column of superheated air rising thousands of feet into the atmosphere.

[00:06:37]Embercasts, small burning fragments lofted by that column, were landing miles ahead of the firefront. Spot fires were igniting on the ridge above Paradise. The fire was no longer a wall moving in one direction. It was raining fire from above. People would later say it looked less like a wildfire and more like the end of the world.

[00:07:03]The community of Concow, 6 mi east of Paradise, was directly in the fire's path. About 700 people lived there. They had less than 20 minutes of warning before the flames arrived.

[00:07:29]Some made it out, many did not. By the time Calire could account for everyone in Conc, the death toll there alone was four. By the time anyone in Paradise saw smoke, the fire was already on top of them.

[00:07:52]The first evacuation order in Paradise was issued at 8:00 a.m. for the east edge of town.

[00:07:58]>> I would say yes, there's going to be a large scale evacuation order. That fire is moving faster than we can keep up, but we're recommending people that are that are threatened get out.

[00:08:06]>> By 8:05, embers were landing on rooftops in the center of town. By 8:15, the evacuation zones had expanded three times. Most residents had not yet heard the order.

[00:08:18]>> It has reached capacity. There's roughly 300 people here right now. They're actually turning people away. But the people who are here, they've been here for hours. So many of them just watching the TVs on the screens here trying to get any kind of information they can about their friends, their family, and of course their their homes and their property.

[00:08:34]>> People woke up to a red sky. Not the red of sunrise, the red of a sun blocked by smoke so thick it filtered the light.

[00:08:42]Ash was falling like snow.

[00:08:45]Oh my god.

[00:08:47]>> Burning right here.

[00:08:52]>> The temperature had risen by 20° overnight. In the time it took most people to look outside, get dressed, and start their cars, the fire had already reached the eastern edge of town. Skyway Drive, the one road out, became the only thing that mattered.

[00:09:10]>> I guess everybody's going that way. I don't know why.

[00:09:13]And within minutes, thousands of people were trapped on it together.

[00:09:19]By 8:30 a.m., Skyway Drive was a parking lot. Some people would remain trapped there for hours while the fire closed in around them.

[00:09:28]>> So, I'm stuck here in traffic, if you can call it that. That's basically just an evacuation parking lot. We are not moving and um it's really dark out here.

[00:09:39]>> This is just downright terrifying.

[00:09:42]It's so black and dark.

[00:09:45]>> 26,000 people were trying to use a road designed to carry a quarter of them in 2 hours. The cars stopped moving. The fire did not. It kept moving through the town faster than emergency crews could even map it.

[00:10:02]>> Fire on both sides of the road on Pearson.

[00:10:05]>> Fire route to you.

[00:10:08]>> Negative. The deputy's car is also disabled. I am on foot with five other people. I still the fire.

[00:10:15]>> Embers landed on the cars. Some of them caught fire while their drivers were still inside. I >> hope your car doesn't overheat.

[00:10:23]>> My car will not overheat. We're okay.

[00:10:25]>> Come on, please.

[00:10:28]>> Pence Road, the secondary evacuation route, was already gone. Flames had jumped it before most people knew the fire was coming. The >> Why are these people here?

[00:10:42]You need to get out of here.

[00:10:45]>> Pearson Road, smaller and narrower, became choked with cars within minutes.

[00:10:51]>> Is it Is there traffic?

[00:10:54]>> Is it backed up?

[00:10:56]>> Better off staying here.

[00:10:58]The manufacturable >> survivors describe the sound not the sound of wind, the sound of the gas tanks of abandoned cars exploding one after another like a chain of distant gunshots.

[00:11:16]One Skyway dash cam video later posted to local news shows a single moment that captured the morning. A driver stuck in gridlock films through her windshield as the trees on both sides of the road become a single wall of fire.

[00:11:34]>> And now I'm like scared.

[00:11:36]>> We're getting out of here.

[00:11:40]>> The headlights of the car ahead of her vanish in the smoke. She just keeps filming. The car behind her never appears. Nobody knows what happened to it after the video ended. At Adventist Health Feather River Hospital on the east side of Paradise, the evacuation had already begun. The hospital sat directly in the fire's path. There were 80 patients inside, many of them elderly, many on ventilators, many who could not be moved without help. The charge nurse that morning was a man named Paul Weineartner. 40 minutes after the fire reached the hospital grounds, every patient was out. 80 patients. 40 minutes. No deaths inside the hospital.

[00:12:26]But the road outside the hospital had already become impassible. Nurses began driving patients out themselves. They used their own cars. They stuffed sedans and SUVs with three, four, five patients each. They drove through walls of flame.

[00:12:44]One of those nurses was named Nicole Jolly. She was driving a patient out when her car was rearended in the gridlock. completely engulfed in flames and we're stuck in the middle of it.

[00:12:56]>> The impact pushed her car into a ditch.

[00:12:58]She got out and ran.

[00:13:00]>> Don't die. Run. If you're going to die, die fighting. You have to run. Jumped out of my car in the middle of these flames and ran. There was no oxygen in the air. The fire was just consuming it.

[00:13:13]And we were just I was just gasping and I ended up touching the back of a fire truck. Knocked on the doors. stickers were melting off this truck and two firemen came out and picked me up and put me in their fire engine.

[00:13:26]>> And then there was the bus. Kevin McCay was a school bus driver. He had picked up 22 children that morning from Ponderosa Elementary School. With him on the bus were two teachers, Mary Lewig and Abby Davis. The fire reached the school as he was loading the bus.

[00:13:47]He drove out through smoke so thick the headlights couldn't penetrate it. The trip from paradise to safety on a normal day takes 30 minutes. It took him 5 hours. For most of that drive, they could barely see the road in front of them. When the smoke became too thick for the children to breathe, McKay tore his own shirt into pieces, dowsed them with water, and handed them to the teachers to give to the kids as breathing masks. There's smoke coming in a little bit, but um they gave us like rags to put over our mouth.

[00:14:21]>> All 22 children survived. So did the teachers. So did McKay.

[00:14:28]The largest single hero story of the campfire is not the bus. It is the choice that one man made twice. His name is Alan Pierce. He was an ICU nurse at Advent Health Feather River Hospital. On the morning of November 8th, he helped evacuate the 80 patients in the building. Then he got into his own truck, a Toyota Tundra, and tried to drive out. He didn't make it. The gridlock on the road outside the hospital was so complete that his truck became stuck in a tunnel of fire. The paint on his truck began to blister. The plastic on the side mirrors began to melt. The interior temperature climbed past 130°.

[00:15:15]He recorded a video on his phone of the inside of the truck, the windows glowing orange, expecting that the video would be the last thing he would leave behind.

[00:15:24]He recorded a message for his family in case he didn't make it. He has never publicly said what was in that message.

[00:15:31]The fire passed. The truck somehow did not catch fire. He had survived. What he did next became one of the most remembered stories of the entire disaster.

[00:15:43]He turned around.

[00:15:45]He drove back into the burning hospital.

[00:15:48]There were people there who had not made it out. Doctors, other nurses, patients who were missed in the first evacuation.

[00:15:56]PICE drove his tundra, the same tundra whose mirrors had just melted, back through the flame zone to retrieve them.

[00:16:04]He did this not once but multiple times throughout the morning. He was not the only one. Of the more than 40 caregivers who participated in the hospital evacuation, dozens were later awarded medals for valor by the California Emergency Medical Services Authority.

[00:16:21]But Pierce was the one who chose to go back.

[00:16:27]Most of the 85 people who died in the campfire never got that choice.

[00:16:32]A 63-year-old man named Ernest Foss died in his home, his medical equipment too heavy to move. A 78-year-old woman named Joyce Achesen died in her car on Elliot Road, 5 m from her house, never having made it to Skyway.

[00:16:50]A married couple in their 70s were found together in the burned remains of their living room, holding each other.

[00:16:57]Over 12 of the dead were people with physical or mental disabilities. Most of the rest were over 65. Many had lived in paradise for 30, 40, 50 years. They had moved there to grow old in quiet.

[00:17:16]By the time the fire was contained 17 days later, it had burned 153,336 acres. It had destroyed 18,84 buildings. It had become, by every measure, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California's recorded history.

[00:17:38]The official death toll was 85. Roughly 80% of them were over 65.

[00:17:44]The investigation took 2 years, and what investigators found would eventually destroy one of the largest utility companies in America. What it found was this. The sea hook that failed on the morning of November 8th had been in service since 1921.

[00:18:01]The transmission tower it was on was original to the line. PG&E had inspected the tower in the years leading up to the fire, but the inspections had been done by workers prosecutors would later describe as inexperienced, untrained, and unqualified.

[00:18:18]>> They knew that they had this problem.

[00:18:20]That's the negligence portion of this.

[00:18:22]choosing to ignore.

[00:18:26]>> A separate internal investigation revealed an operating philosophy within the company known to engineers as run to failure. Delay replacement of aging infrastructure until it breaks.

[00:18:40]Money that had been allocated for repairs had been moved into the company's capital budget. a quiet accounting decision that meant the cost of the aging hardware was passed on to rateayers while shareholders kept their dividends. In January of 2019, 2 months after the fire, Pacific Gas and Electric filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It was the largest utility bankruptcy in American history. The company eventually agreed to a $13.5 billion settlement fund for fire victims paid out in a combination of cash and PG&E stock. Many survivors are still waiting for full payment. In March of 2020, Pacific Gas and Electric Company pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter and one count of unlawfully starting a fire. pleading guilty to 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter for the 2018 campfire that all but wiped out the town of Paradise in B County.

[00:19:41]>> It was the largest corporate criminal case for negligence in modern American history.

[00:19:47]>> No words from me can ever reduce the magnitude of that devastation or do anything to repair the damage. But I hope I sincerely hope that the actions we're taking today will help bring some measure of peace. The company paid a $3.5 million fine, the maximum allowed by law. It is worth thinking about that number. 18,000 buildings, 85 people, a town erased. The fine was $3.5 million.

[00:20:20]In the years since the campfire, PG&E has introduced what it calls public safety power shut offs. When wind conditions resemble those of November 8th, 2018, the company now turns off the electricity to large parts of Northern California for hours, sometimes for days. It is, by their own admission, the only reliable way they have found to prevent their own equipment from starting another fire. The town of Paradise is partially rebuilt now. The population, as of the most recent census, is just over 9,000. about a third of what it was. The new houses have steel roofs and fireresistant siding. The new evacuation plans assume a worst case, more honestly. There are signs all over town pointing toward the road out. The same road that in November of 2018 became the place where so many people died trying to leave.

[00:21:22]>> The fire didn't kill those 85 people. a piece of hardware older than any of them did. It had hung above the canyon for 97 years. No one had ever replaced it. And for nearly a century, the people living below it never knew that one forgotten piece of metal was slowly becoming a countdown.

[00:21:48]And if this story meant something to you, maybe take a second to support the channel. These videos take weeks of research, writing, editing, and digging through real stories from people who lived through moments like this. And every small bit of support genuinely helps keep these documentaries alive and helps these stories reach more people.

[00:22:06]Because disasters like Paradise are more than headlines. They're real places, real families, real people who woke up one morning thinking it would be a normal day. And sometimes the only thing keeping these stories from being forgotten is someone willing to tell them. Thank you for watching.