Rebuilding Paradise (2020)
To the people who lived in Paradise, Calif., there was no irony in their town’s name—not until November 8, 2018. On that day, the “Camp Fire” erupted in a nearby canyon and engulfed 18,000 acres within hours. Paradise became hell.
A-List Hollywood director (A Beautiful Mind, The Da Vinci Code) Ron Howard has turned to documentaries in recent years, including the new National Geographic production, Rebuilding Paradise. The title strikes a hopeful note against the inferno of the early scenes. Howard knits together remarkable footage, captured on cellphone cameras or shot in haste, of the conflagration. The soundtrack of those scenes is composed largely of news casts police and fire dispatches and panicked cell phone calls to 911 and loved ones. “Are we going to die?” someone asks. The ferocious wind overtook the jets of water from fire hoses; flames raced up driveways and devoured homes.
Despite their rapid response, police and fire units were overwhelmed by the speed and strength of the catastrophe. The Paradise hospital was evacuated just in time and the road out of town was jammed like an LA freeway at rush hour as 27,000 residents tried to flee. Eighty-five didn’t make it out alive.
Howard chose well among the found audio and visual, which tells the story without need of narration. The night sky went starless black from smoke and fires lit the landscape in bruised orange and acid yellow. The heat from the conglagration caused tires to pop.
After the dramatic opening, Rebuilding Paradise turns to the response of the residents and the officials suddenly charged with sorting out their future. A tent city with Porta Potties sprang up outside a Walmart in nearby Chico; the Red Cross set up an evacuation center sheltering thousands of residents on row after row of cots. Eventually, entire families were housed in trailers. And then came picking through the ashes and blackened husks of burned out cars. Most of the residents wanted to return to Paradise but the process of rebuilding material lives and emerging from psychological trauma would not be easy. One resident compares fleeing the Camp Fire with watching Hurricane Katrina on TV. “It doesn’t hit you till it effects your backyard,” he says.
Although lawyers and residents were quick to identify the immediate cause of the fire—sparks from a Pacific Gas & Electric powerline—Howard takes a bigger picture and looks beyond the faults of the utility’s Edison-era technology. Land use contributed to the Camp Fire. As one interviewee says, the lumber companies reached Paradise before the Forest Service. Looming over the disaster was the effect of climate change on the environment. Paradise hadn’t felt normal rainfall in years; the forest was kindling in the face of heavy winds that spread burning embers across the town in a perfect fire storm.
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