"A bucolic community was reduced to ash by a new kind of wildfire – the deadliest in California’s history. Survivors recall that horrible day"
"William Goggia awoke to a poisonous orange atmosphere so thick with smoke he couldn’t see the sun.
It was 8am on Thursday, 8 November. He heard the piercing metallic clang of propane tanks exploding in the distance. His sister, who lived nearby, called to ask him to help a relative in the area, but Goggia told her that he couldn’t: chunks of burning wood were falling from the sky.
Goggia inhabited the same stucco, three-bedroom house he grew up in. Now it was time to leave. By 9am he was on the road, accompanied by his tabby cat, Mikey. But the street was so clogged with people trying to escape that Goggia barely moved. The fire was getting closer. The van was going to burn up with him and the cat inside, he thought. So he turned back around against the traffic.
Goggia didn’t know it yet, but he had been engulfed by the deadliest wildfire in recorded California history. Soon at least 86 people would be dead in a new and ferocious kind of climate change-inflected wildfire. And Paradise would suffer a fate that appears increasingly likely: the total destruction of a modern American city."
Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano report for the Guardian December 20, 2018.
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