Escaping Paradise | California Wildfires: The New Normal

[Music] I was here today because it just looked so bad outside Christina Taft made a choice the day paradise burned down her choice saved her life and yet she regrets it I just wish I had done something different anything about every day wishing I could just you know reverse it all and do something different Christina chose to run even though she couldn't convince her mom to leave the house with her closed the door and I drove down so I had the things in my car and the car and knocked my mom that really hurts it's like why didn't she get in and why didn't I stay longer after she escaped Christina tried to get someone to go to the house to help Vickie to help save her mom she kept calling 911 they weren't getting anyone who couldn't get out themselves and that really shocked me and upset me I was like oh no my mom is gonna die now is mom alive Christina could only wonder while the sky grew blacker the campfire consumed the whole town between breakfast and dinner time 66 year old Vicki Taft became another face on the list of hundreds missing Christina's mind kept going back to the choices her own choice to leave her mom's choice to stay I know we were fighting so it was a really bad way to leave it to like me and her I didn't want to die and she wasn't gonna listen to me maybe and Christina spent a long time trying there's a lot being said she loaded their things into the car and pleaded with her mom to just get in so I think she was waiting for an authority the authorities had decided already but Christina and Vicki didn't know that the entire hour they spent fighting about whether to leave their house was already under a mandatory evacuation order the order and they weren't the only ones the fire started just before sunrise in a canyon about eight miles from paradise they called it the campfire because it started on Camp Creek Road a scraggly dirt service road beneath the high-tension power lines that wasn't much used to fire crews they couldn't get to the first flames in time to put him out it was ten acres and growing fast right away they knew this one would be big to begin to grasp why it killed so many people you need to understand that the campfire wasn't just a bad fire it was a perfect fire storm every play with 60fps those inquiring if the evacuations for the pool get here may be considered mandatory in if there's anywhere else she would like to extend that's so let's make it mandatory for folder with a you know it was a it was a note feeling because you see fire when it gets established in the canyon there's it's a notorious for large fires and goblin firefighters up just due to the limited access and the really steep terrain that that goes on in there Leland Ratcliffe was in his truck headed down the hill to his job as a firefighter with the Feather River hotshots he saw the column of smoke in his rear view mirror it was blowing sideways he called a friend from his team who also lives in Paradise today you see the column that's coming out of the canyon and where it's heading and he was right behind me and he says as always the same thing instances it's going right for paradise mandatory evacuation you can tell probably by 7:30 by the time I got to work it was probably five thousand ten thousand acres at that point which is unheard of you know just a rapid rate of spread it was heading right for town toward his kids and his wife he called her I said go get the kids from school and get home get the cats get the dogs and get the hell out of there she went to school and at this point the school was still accepting late arrivals because they hadn't gotten any kind of word to evacuate and they just hadn't gotten any word and that the fire was gonna be this bad he wasn't being paranoid Leland's training and experience told him exactly what that black column of smoke was doing as it blew sideways it was spreading the fire full of hot embers you can't start a fire faster than that you know starting it at the base of a dry hill on a really high wind that's blowing it up the hill that's the fastest fires his gun fire is gonna move right and at the top of the hill that wind is catching the embers off the trees and just throwing him out miles ahead of the fire those embers rained down on every part of paradise fire crews couldn't steer the campfire much less headed off because it wasn't a wall of flames it was a windstorm full of sparks flying right over their heads lighting a million spot fires rescuers started to get calls from people who couldn't escape [Music] Kampai spear report of a possible entrapment on psi Singh they cannot evacuate you to fire so at that point it's you know it's really starting to be impending doom it leland's hotshot crew didn't wait to be called they loaded up and headed to the fire deciding the best they could do was to go door-to-door to warn people they swung by Leland's house near Clark Road and Pearson my wife is still here what the hell are you still doing here she was at that point she was hopping in the car and they took off so they got out of here before any of the mass chaos panic could happen they've gotten they got down the hill luckily in plenty of time it was about 8:30 at that point and it was only until 8:30 that the neighbor not the neighbor had heard about a fire but there was only a light smell of smoke in the air I'm just kind of like took a shower and got ready and then started seriously packing seeing the car is outside starting to back up and my mom was making phone calls lightly packing sort of but kind of thinking it would just be fine and Christina started to hurry but says her mom Vicki seemed less concerned Vicky even paid the phone bill she spent the morning calling friends in town none of them were evacuating that's when Christina and Vicki Taft started fighting about whether to leave they couldn't see the flames at this point but the smoke was getting thicker they hadn't been told they needed to evacuate a lot of people had yeah they expected that authority would tell them like every other fire like that we had we were told if you weren't actually there you might argue this is where common sense should kick in in fact that's the argument Christina was making to her mom but it's not that simple by staying put her mom was doing exactly what local emergency planners spent the last decade trying to convince everyone to do wait for their zone to be called it was a good plan for most fires but not this one what Paradise needed in this fire was to evacuate everybody at once bakwin county and town leaders wrote the evacuation plan you can hear what they thought about that you know we learn not to evacuate everybody at once they'd learned not to evacuate everybody at once and this wasn't just one town councilman's opinion this was accepted wisdom a lesson learned from the Humboldt fire in 2008 when thousands of people all tried to get out of town at the same time the roads jammed up so the community improved its roads they made a plan to reverse the direction of lanes to get more people down in bad fires and they also split all the neighborhoods into zones Paradise had 14 evacuation zones along with a bunch more for the neighborhoods outside the town limits the idea was to evacuate only those who needed to escape and keep the roads flowing so there wasn't a whole town evacuation plan there was never a whole town evacuation paradise town councilman Mike Zuccarello says he jumped in to help direct traffic the evacuation plans didn't cover this he wasn't sure what to do did we try to hold up the traffic to get the fire truck up or do we let the fire trucks hold and just keep running the traffic down the hill you were making decisions right on the spot because there was no the plan was out the window at that point the plan was get as many people's off as we can get off this hill as quickly as possible the plan may have been out the window but the go in your zone is called mentality was already baked into the culture here on the emergency traffic plan goal number one was to quote prevent people from entering the evacuation area and becoming an additional burden upon the road system the evacuation pamphlet warned people to know your zone and if you are not within the immediate hazard area and not directed to evacuate by public officials remain at your location and shelter in place they did a lot of people probably figure they could shelter in place because there was never a concept of everything burning I think if unfortunately a lot of the people that have passed that passed in their homes if they had received notice that you were gonna burn to death people may have tried differently and it kept getting darker outside and oh just like we were fighting and I even said I'm leaving and she said leave her mom wouldn't budge and Christina felt her life was in danger it was a time that don't work I mean I did try just oh no did it do it make the right decision either she did either in the responses so bad and I tried with that don't work either and one week after the fire Christina got word that crews found human remains in the house she gave a DNA sample another week later on Thanksgiving morning she got the phone call the body was her mom's Vicky died in her living room as fire consumed to the house didn't wanna die and I knew it was bad she didn't realize it's gonna be bad she's hiding in her house I had saved shapoval I know the rescuers working that day didn't want Vicki to die in her house in fact before Christina left at 10 a.m. we know they issued at least three evacuation orders that included the Taft house the first was almost two hours before Christina left that radio call out to fire crews despite that order to the entire town the Butte County Sheriff's Office issued another order for only four zones including the one where the Taft's lived that was at 8:30 - then again at 904 on the radio the sheriff's office also used social media we showed Christina a tweet with the order to evacuate her zone issued almost an hour and a half before she decided to leave the order she thinks her mom was waiting for it really hurts that they put this out here and they wouldn't tell us an order unheard is as good as no order at all and none of the evacuation orders ever reached the Taft's so you got no phone call no you got no alert on your cell phone no no one knocked on your door no we heard this over and over from survivors of this fire they got no warning at all some people died in their cars trying to evacuate but most died outside running for their lives or in their homes like Vicky Taft did two-thirds of the dead were found inside houses Leland the hot shot saw a lot of people he didn't know to evacuate until the embers started falling grandmas on the side of the road that word is you know barely able to make it up the side of the road 15 year old kids I didn't know where to go just started throwing people at truck masses of people didn't know to go for a couple of reasons first there simply weren't enough rescuers in paradise that morning to go to every street to warn people second our investigation found that rescuers did not use all of the mass notification systems they had and the one system they did use failed to reach a lot of people the county used the service called Code Red Code Red is a robocall alert system you're supposed to sign up in advance to get the alerts Mike Zuccarello the town councilman says only about one in eight people told them they got a mass notification that day he was signed up for Code Red did you get notified at all no you didn't get a notification no a review of the call logs from that day shows the code red alerts couldn't keep up with the fire the phone lines can only handle so many calls at once at a time when seconds mattered it took the system 16 minutes to call the phone numbers for the first evacuation zones in Paradise the system failed to almost a third of those numbers a rate that would get worse as utility lines burned up but even in this first round of code red alerts 1604 phone lines that were signed up were never reached there are two federal alert systems that could have been used to reach people even if they'd never signed up but responders never use those EAS the emergency alert system could have sent out warnings on TV and radio stations all over view county and the wireless emergency alert system or weeow could have pushed a warning to cellphones in the area both systems are run by FEMA which told us no alerts were ordered at all from California that day rescuers gave the order to abandon ship but they never used the biggest bullhorn they had to tell people people are dying like literally and they think the whole city is grand to go and then they're just not even paying attention like sounding alarms or anything do you think that we need to take a second look at why we and you know the broadcast alerts weren't implemented yeah I think I think it's certainly worth taking a look at it it was we were working the plan that we had and again I think that we saved tens of thousands of people with that whether or not that would have made a difference because it comes back to whether or not you have the phone on whether or not you have cell service Sheriff Corey Honea joined rescue crews on the ground to help people that day he told us he's not sure there was ever a conscious decision not to use the wireless and broadcast alerts he says the fire simply overwhelmed rescuers and I would submit to you that there's probably not a single jurisdiction in California or for that matter probably in this country that has the capacity to evacuate the entire population at one time so quickly still he acknowledges the warnings didn't reach everyone who needed them which means everyone here we'll have to live with an uncomfortable question if there were a plan for the worst possible firestorm how many of our friends and neighbors could have been saved no one ever came to us and said you know what you could have a town wide evacuation and you could lose everything in town no one ever tells that fire scientists are surprised at the high death toll of this fire but they've worried for some time that a fire just like this one could burn an entire town down and the danger gets worse each year there are literally there hundreds of towns in the Sierra Nevada that are in areas that are you know realistically just as risky Firewise as the situation was in Paradise and there are some dice being rolled if there's one takeaway you could tell the hundred other Foothill towns that could be in the same danger as you it could happen I mean today this is the worst tragedy that's ever happened I hope I'm the last person that says that I hope there's not another town Paradise had its own vulnerabilities one in five people had a disability there one in four were over 65 rates much higher than the state average in hindsight leaders are looking at warning options that they didn't have before air raid horns similar they do like tornado horns yeah maybe that's more of a concept of gear because you know we did have a more elderly population and I think that's something that going forward would be a good idea but one problem you have to consider because we've thought a lot about this we need to know what I mean you know what it means he's at three o'clock the morning when the air-raid siren goes off well what does that mean it's just one example of the things paradise and communities like it might consider as they look at how to plan for the next perfect store we can't prevent every fire sparks happen but no one thinks a spark should kill this many people it's wrong it was up to me know her and I didn't it I loved early earlier and I have to live with that decision forever Christina Taft carries a heavy burden she calls herself a coward for not waiting longer that's not really fair when you consider the fact that some people burned in their cars trying to escape down the wrong road at the wrong time but the heart can't always be comforted by things the brain knows there is some comfort though in an honest conversation about why this fire took the lives it did if there's some kind of change I feel like that would help too so it doesn't keep happening something good so my mom didn't die in vain if enough people get that message maybe the campfire will remain the deadliest fire in California history forever at least that's the hope

Channel: ABC10

Views: 278,348

Keywords: Camp Fire, Paradise, Wildfires, California, Concow, Magalia, PG&E, campfire, fire, the new normal, ca wildfires 2018, escaping paradise fire video, butte county, paradise fire, california fires, wildfires california, paradise fire documentary, camp fire documentary, camp fire series, abc 10, wildfire, wildfire documentary, escaping paradise, escaping camp fire paradise, escaping camp fire, fires new normal, california new normal, fire in paradise, camp fire in paradise

Id: gxt7L4x_NQo

Length: 20min 41sec (1241 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 12 2018