Paradise by Lizzie Johnson

Author:Lizzie Johnson [Johnson, Lizzie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2021-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

OBSERVATION: TEN THOUSAND FEET ABOVE THE FIRE

Nearly ninety miles south of Paradise, in the foothill town of Auburn, a California Highway Patrol plane rose into the air. Brent Sallis, thirty-eight, piloted the Australian-made GippsAero GA8 Airvan, while Joe Airoso, thirty-six, peered out the window. It was a clear morning, a touch windy, but nothing exceptional. Even their radio was quiet, unlike most days. Sacramento Police had requested their help tracking a murder suspect as he zigzagged across the state capital. They planned to hover above the grid of suburban homes, relaying the man’s whereabouts to officers on the ground. But as they lifted off from the municipal airport and headed south, an impenetrable fog seeped over the horizon behind them. From forty miles away, the smoke plume punched through the fall sky. Soon Sallis and Airoso were redirected to Paradise to assist with a massive new wildfire.

They whirred north, taking a half hour to reach the Ridge. Below them, Highway 70 carved through the valley and flames hiked up the buttes. As they neared Paradise, the smoke condensed, thick as milk, as it scudded along the mountaintops. They snapped on oxygen masks to breathe, then climbed to 13,000 feet—twice as high as they normally flew—to avoid the turbulent updrafts and minimize the ash filtering into the cabin. To Airoso, it looked like a bomb had gone off. “There was this huge column of smoke that was not moving, like a solid, physical object in the sky,” he would later recall. “It had dimension, black at the base and gray and white at the top. It smelled like everything was burning…. It looked like an apocalypse.”

Their eight-passenger aircraft was used for aerial intelligence. Faster than a helicopter and heavier than an air tanker, the airvan contained heat-sensing technology that was invaluable to firefighters on the ground. A thermal camera hooked to the aircraft’s belly could cut through the dark strata of smoke, offering a God’s-eye view of the terrain below. The camera worked by detecting the heat signature of the landscape. Radiation registered as a gray-scale gradient on Airoso’s computer monitor. The hotter the object, the paler it was.

Sallis steered the aircraft north. Seated behind him, Airoso toggled the camera’s joystick and studied the images flickering on his screen. Blowing embers looked like pinprick stars in the night sky, twinkling almost merrily. The computer program superimposed a map on top of the camera footage, so Airoso could see the name of every street in Paradise. His radio was set to Scan, switching between the frequencies of Cal Fire and local law enforcement agencies like Chico Police and the Butte County Sheriff’s Office.

But where is the fire? Airoso wondered.

On the screen, he saw traffic obstructing the four escape routes out of Paradise. The fire was everywhere—in canyons, along roadsides. The town was a maze, and in their panic no one could find the exit. On Clark Road, the wildfire had blackened the hillsides down to Highway 70 near Oroville, leading officers to hold back traffic needlessly.

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