The Daily - The California Wildfires

Episode Date: November 12, 2018

One of the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in California history is raging in the north of the state, as two others burn simultaneously in the south. Devastating wildfires have already become the new normal for the state. We look at why this feels different. Guest: Kirk Johnson, a New York Times correspondent who covers the American West and is reporting from Paradise, Calif. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.This episode includes disturbing language.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. The Camp Fire, one of the deadliest and the most destructive wildfires in California history, continues to rage in the state, as two other fires burn there simultaneously. age in the state, as two other fires burn there simultaneously. In a state where devastating wildfires were already the new normal, this time feels different. It's Monday, November 12th. Paradise is right in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, about 100 miles north of Sacramento.

It has roots back in the old extraction economy days of the 1800s as a logging and mining town. But its real life in recent years has been partly as a retirement community and partly as an affordable place for people who don't have a lot of money. It has a kind of working class vibe. And I never saw it in the days before the fire, but it, by all accounts, was a beautiful place. Kirk Johnson is a national correspondent covering the West. He spent the weekend in Paradise, California. Around 6.30 a.m. on Thursdayursday it began in the hills near paradise this is legit how dark it is in my

car right now and it is 10 23 in the morning um and it's so smoky out that it looks like nighttime like i can't even see inside the house. I'm in my car right now. We're loading up, and me and my mom are going to be meeting down at Kohl's in Chico. And a kind of a firestorm roared through with a pace that no one there had ever witnessed or really foreseen, I think. It's 11.39 in the afternoon. Or really foreseen, I think. It's 11.39 in the afternoon.

Only reason I can see is because of this fire. Holy shit. It was something that could not be stopped. Those are homes down there. All this is happening right now. It's 1242 in the afternoon, but all I see is smoke. And because it was sweeping through a populated area, 26,000 people in that valley, it was all about rescue and getting people out, and there was no attempt or ability to even start to do anything about it until it was hours into the fire. So it all became about evacuation before it ever became about putting it out.

Absolutely. And evacuation from home was really, for many people, only the beginning of the ordeal and the horror. We're on the road and we're meters away. And we're all stuck on this road. People's houses and the fucking wind is bringing it over. Why is it true? I wonder what the fuck they're going to do. There's one main highway in and out of Paradise. I'm on Skyway on my way out right now.

Everything is on fire. And it was choked with people escaping, but also fire closing in on both sides of the highway as people talked about and photographed and recorded at the time. I hope my fucking car doesn't start on fire because I got this. Is this fireproof? I bloody hope so. What's up with the lights? People told me about getting into their cars, and the car died.

And the fire is closing in, and they can see the fire, and they can see neighbors' homes on fire, and suddenly they have no way out. The window is so hot, I can't even touch the window right now. And one woman described going by a motorhome that had pulled off and was fully engulfed in flames. And the traffic ahead of them stopped with her vehicle right next to this burning motorhome. And they couldn't get out. And the heat was coming through the glass of their car from the blazing motorhome. And it felt like hours, she said, but it was probably, you know, a couple minutes. the glass of their car from the blazing motorhome.

And it felt like hours, she said, but it was probably, you know, a couple minutes and they were able to get past it. Hey, guess what? We're not going to catch on fire, okay? We're going to stay away from it and we'll be just fine, okay? We're doing all right. Another guy told me they had gotten the signal that it was closing in when they started hearing propane tanks exploding in the neighborhood around them. So they ran from their home.

This was a guy who didn't own a car, so they went out onto the road on foot. There was a young pregnant woman and eight people all together. And a guy in a pickup truck just pulled up next to them and screamed, Get in the back. And they piled in and made it down. Oh, shit. What? That's a tree that's on fire there right in front of us.

Oh, my God. Should I pray to God? Yeah. I don't know how to. Shirley's praying right now. There was just one story after another that was impossible to forget. Okay. Just keep going.

I know. By the time I drove up Skyline, it had been 48 hours since that mass escape, and the smoke was intensely thick still. The ash was still falling from the sky, and ash coated everything that had been airborne and still laying down a layer of ash. Mm-hmm.

The power lines and power poles were down across portions of the road and then vehicles that had burned to the metal frames and glass and melted things everywhere. And it was impossible

for me not to just stop sometimes and look at a scene and try and imagine what had unfolded there when you would go by a school bus and it was, you know, completely gutted by flame. You know, what had happened there? Who had been in that bus? And where did they go, and how did they get out. Kirk, how many people do we know to have died in this fire at this point, as we're talking on Sunday afternoon? 23.

It's still a running tally, so we don't know where it's going to end up. But based on where we are, it looks like it will be the third most deadly in lives lost, but most destructive in terms of homes and businesses and communities destroyed. And that's because this fire, it sounds like, behaved in a way that despite the history of wildfires in California, was somehow unlike anything before it? The general nature of fires, they don't burn generally every single thing. They seek out the fuels that are handy in a way and drawn toward those. But if there's a new normal that is feared, it's the kind of fire like Camp Fire that is sort of monolithic in kind of sweeping the slate. And that's really raised a lot of anxieties

about what the future might hold. So these fires burn everything. They don't hop around. They don't skip a tree or a house. They just consume everything. There were huge stretches of that very pattern in Paradise. It didn't seem to leave anything standing, or its pace and its heat and its ferocity was such that it didn't pick and choose and it just swept. So more or less, the town of Paradise was destroyed this weekend. That is about what you have to say. The cumulative impact is really going to be

either the end of that community or a moment to think about rebuilding it entirely, there was very little that looked like, well, here's a place where you can kind of start over and go back. The assumption by survivors and former residents is that the place is gone and that they have nothing left to go back to there. Good evening. My name is Steve Kaufman. I'm a fire captain with the Ventura County Fire Department, and I'm the public information officer for CAL FIRE Incident Management Team 4. And how has the federal government responded to the campfire and to what's happening right now in California? I'm going to start out with the most current numbers. The federal government has responded as it always has for emergencies of this sort.

Total firefighters assigned to the fire right now, 3223. The personnel and the coordination and the promise of funding has been there. There's more than 7,000 firefighters out on the fire lines still. But many of those assumptions were sort of upended on Saturday. President Trump is responding to the fires burning in California right now. When President Trump tweeted that... There's no reason for these massive, deadly, and costly forest fires in California. There were mismanagement issues of the forests in play in California.

Billions of dollars are given each year with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments. And that really hit a raw nerve for people who were still reeling from it. That statement was idiotic. It was ill-timed and it's ignorant. In fearing that the federal response or the future response was somehow in doubt. Look, I don't think it's a gross exaggeration to say Trump's declared war on California. Governor-elect Gavin Newsom immediately and vehemently denounced the president's tweet. He said that this is not a time for partisanship. So clearly interpreted the president's statement as a politically driven rather than land management

or environmental policy statement. And presumably politically driven at a democratically dominated state. That is certainly how you would read Gavin's statement. And President Trump is suggesting that these fires are the fault of mismanagement, presumably by the state of California. Is that what people think he's saying? That appears to be the suggestion that the state of California was somehow at fault in managing those lands. But the fact is that the vast majority of forest lands in California, like most of the West, are federal. The community of Paradise itself really backs up to a national forest. And those are not state policies at all. The U.S. Forest Service

defines and manages those lands for better or worse. And there are definitely people who believe federal forest management has not been exactly what it should be. Well, and also, how much of this, as far as we understand it, does have to do with forest management versus, say, climate change? That's a hard mix to try and parse out. Certainly, there are many areas in the West and in California where decades of fire suppression, when a fire starts in a forest, you try and put it out. That's been the ethos and the mantra since, you know, the Smokey Bear days.

And there's also a lot less logging in a lot of those areas that people have said reduces the fuel load that can burn in a fire. burn in a fire. So it may be that it kind of comes from both sides if the forest is less healthy at a time when the environment around it is also changing and drying and whatever, it gets hit from both sides. So fire suppression combined with less logging may leave these forests primed for fires, and climate change may do the rest. In that sense, the president has a point about the need to manage these forests. But in fact, it sounds like you're saying, Kirk, that that's really the job of his own federal government, more than the state of California,

that he's just threatened to withhold funds from? Well, if it comes back down to who owns the land, then yeah, you can only hold the state of California responsible for what it's responsible for. And like most Western states, the federal government is a giant presence on the land, whether it's in Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management or Fish and Wildlife. It's a huge cumulative force that either does its job well or doesn't.

And Kirk, as we speak on Sunday afternoon, the Camp Fire, which destroyed so much of Paradise, is just one of the three fires that are still burning in California. Right. The Camp Fire became the focus, and in the huge numbers of homes and businesses destroyed and lives lost, that sort of focal point of the fires. But it's really a fire moment in a totally catastrophic and really, I guess, coincidental way. I mean, environmental forces are always interconnected, but the campfire began early in the morning on Thursday, and seven hours later, the Woolsey Fire began in Southern California.

And in a state where something like that is coming from both ends at you, starting in the same day, it's a collective trauma rather than, you know, one big bad disaster. You know, ever since the officials in California started using this phrase, new normal, I've struggled to understand how anyone could possibly embrace that concept, that at any moment in California, no matter what season of the year it is, your home, your neighbor's home, your town hall, your post office could just be destroyed by fire, as if that is somehow normal at all.

I think it's, yeah, it's an impossible thing to get your head around. It's like living in the present. We all say we want to do it, but it's very difficult to do. And it's impossible and probably not good for your mental health to walk around all the time thinking that your town, your home, your community is on the sword's edge or whatever. So I think there's a lot of natural human denial that there is a new normal.

It's much easier to and tempting to want to look back and say that things will look more like they have in the past. And we have dealt with bad things in the past and we're tough. And so how a new normal sinks into ordinary people is, I think, a tough road of its own that hasn't gotten there yet. Kirk, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you. By Sunday night, the campfire had matched the deadliest in California history with 29 fatalities.

Seven of the victims in the town of Paradise died in their vehicles. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Joining us now from Naples, Florida, Governor Scott, who thought he won election to the Senate Tuesday night. Florida has begun the first full statewide recount of votes in its history after results from Tuesday's midterms left the elections for governor and U.S. Senate too close to call. In the Senate race, Republican Rick Scott's lead over the Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson has slipped to 12,600 votes. Well, we had eight million people vote. Chuck Schumer spent over $50 million trying to beat me, but we won. In the governor's race, Andrew Gillum, the Democrat, is behind about 33,000 votes and has retracted his earlier concession to his Republican opponent, Ron DeSantis. I am replacing my words of concession

with an uncompromised and unapologetic call that we count every single vote. In the Georgia governor's race between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp, there is still no declared winner, with the votes expected to be counted until tomorrow. And the Times is reporting that last year, top Saudi intelligence officials,

close to the crown prince, explored the possibility of using private companies to assassinate Iranian enemies of the kingdom. Coming months before the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, those talks indicate that Saudi officials have considered assassinations as a political tool since the beginning of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's reign as he was first consolidating power.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.