When Laurie Noble was growing up, in Fort Bragg, California, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, her family’s home doubled as a government weather station. The house was equipped with rain and wind-speed gauges, thermometers, a barometer, and a recording barograph, and the family belonged to a network of part-time observers paid by the federal Weather Bureau, the forerunner of the National Weather Service, to fill in gaps between its professionally staffed stations. By the time Noble was a teen-ager, she was earning a dollar and thirty-five cents to read the instruments every six hours, write down measurements in their handwritten logs, and call the information in, using the appropriate codes, to the San Francisco airport. Noble credits her early apprenticeship in meteorology with helping her spot, around two o’clock on Tuesday of last week, a terrifying column of smoke that appeared several canyons away from the apple orchard she owns with her husband, Jim, in Paradise, California. “I’ve always had my eyes to the sky,” she told me last week.
The smoke emerged from an offshoot of the so-called North Complex Fire, a conglomeration of several smaller fires that had started in mid-August, in Plumas County, more than sixty miles to the northeast. Around noon, the complex made what officials described as a “historic run” through the crowns of the area’s Ponderosa pines, and launched itself down into Butte County, where Paradise is situated. “When I saw that smoke, I knew it could be over here within hours,” Noble said. “It was very evident that that was a roiling fire that was just ripping.”
Noble appreciated the threat better than most. In November, 2018, the Nobles’ orchard was overrun, along with most of Paradise, by the Camp Fire, a conflagration that caused $8.4 billion in damage and killed eighty-five people. The fire largely spared the Nobles’ apple trees, but it destroyed eleven buildings on their farm, including their ninety-year-old home. For the past year, the Nobles have been living in an R.V. trailer on their property. A new house that they’ve been building is just weeks from completion, but Noble told me that her biggest fear, when she contemplated another evacuation, was what would happen to the stacks of legal and insurance paperwork that she has been working through since the Camp Fire. “It is kind of a monumental task to figure out what was in eleven buildings and try to write it all down,” she said.
Of the eleven thousand houses in Paradise that were destroyed in the Camp Fire, only around four hundred residential structures have been rebuilt. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, the town’s recovery was slowed by the time it took to remove nearly four million tons of contaminated soil, ash, and debris, and by the lingering threat of damaged trees, which sway lethally over the recovery effort. The same day that Noble saw the smoke cloud, she heard a huge Ponderosa crash while she was working outside. “I found out that it was one that had fallen on somebody’s motor home, maybe ten parcels up from here,” she said. “It was dead and hadn’t been removed.”
Noble suggested that it would be “a generous estimate” to say that around three thousand people are living in Paradise now, down from a pre-fire population of twenty-seven thousand. She knows plenty of people who will never come back. “There are lots of terrible stories of people having felt trapped, or being alone and scared to death. You don’t forget those things,” she said. The Nobles’ decision to return was motivated largely by history. Noble Orchards was originally planted ninety-nine years ago, by Jim’s grandfather; when they saw that the trees had survived the fire, she told me, “that kind of made the decision.” Still, the smoke she spotted last week took her right back to November, 2018. “It was very frightening to watch all that, because I knew what it meant,” she said. “Just talking about it now, I can feel my head and body tensing up. It was a horrific feeling.”
The Camp Fire remains, for now, the deadliest and most destructive California wildfire on record. But, even in 2018, it was clear that there was nothing special about the circumstances that caused it to pummel Paradise and the surrounding areas with such explosive force. The same conditions—the effects of climate change, the development of communities in forested areas, and particularly an abundance of fuel, the result of a century-long forest-management regime that took fire suppression as its watchword—were present in much of the state. Everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before another fire tried to outdo the Camp Fire’s awful accomplishments. As Noble told me, “Fire is part of our lives now.”
Six of California’s twenty largest recorded fires have occurred this year, and the Butte County fire—which has been renamed, somewhat clumsily, the North Complex West Zone Fire—has already killed fifteen people. If the Camp Fire opened this new phase in California’s age-old relationship with fire, the events in Butte County over the past week suggest a new mode of living with catastrophe more generally, one in which Americans are forced to contend with multiple acute community-scale disasters all at once. In the seven days leading up to last week’s fire, the county saw its highest weekly covid-19 caseload, and the coincidence of the two disasters has made each more difficult to manage. The pandemic, for instance, prevented the county from setting up traditional evacuation centers. Instead, people fleeing the fire were directed to drive to “Temporary Evacuation Points” and asked to remain in their cars there until relief workers could help them. The fire, in turn, has hindered efforts to cope with the pandemic. For one day last week, officials rescinded some of the county’s restrictions on indoor dining, because the smoke outside was deemed a greater health risk than the virus that was potentially lurking indoors. (The restrictions were reimposed on Friday.)
The compounding tragedies levied a heavy emotional toll even on those who were out of the fires’ path. For many on the West Coast, the blood-orange skies that blanketed California, Oregon, and Washington last week looked like a warning about a coming climatological apocalypse. In Butte County, the hue appeared no less ominous, but there it also pointed to the past, a reminder of the trauma from which the area was still working to recover.
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