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From Wendry, I'm Cassie Depecle, and this is Against the Odds.

If you drove up into the mountains above Chico, California, on November 7, 2018, you would have come to a town with a wooden welcome sign that read,

may you find Paradise to be all its name implies. Population about 27,000. Paradise was a friendly town where you could go to church, catch a football game, and enjoy the smell of the pine trees around you.

That is, until early on the morning of November 8, when the Diablo winds whipped across the landscape and a hook on a Pacific gas and electric utility tower snapped, causing the campfire.

Fast-moving flames descended on Paradise and two other towns. Thousands of desperate residents tried to evacuate. They got stuck in traffic jams or couldn't get out of their homes. More than 80 people died.

In the aftermath, the world stared in disbelief, images of block after block of burned hellscape and wondered how such a thing could happen.

My guest is Washington Post reporter Lizzie Johnson. Lizzie worked for the San Francisco Chronicle when the campfire broke out and ended up spending two years interviewing survivors, firefighters, and rescue crews as they dealt with the deadliest fire in California history. Her book is called Paradise, one town struggle to survive an American wildfire.

Lizzie Johnson, welcome to Against the Odds.

Thank you for having me. You were working as a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle in November of 2018. When did the fire and paradise come onto your radar?

Yeah, so I had been covering wildfires full time for the San Francisco Chronicle for about a year and a half at that point.

And as part of that, you know, every summer, fall and fire season rolls around, I get very used to getting calls from my boss at really odd time saying, you know, hey, there's a wildfire in Yolo County or Sonoma County, you need to go.

And so in the morning of November 8, 2018, something very similar had happened where he called me pretty early in the morning saying, I heard on the radio scanner that there is this fire that ignited in polga, just near Paradise.

And it sounds like it could be really bad. You should go. So I started driving north and really had no idea how bad it was going to be until I got there.

When you got assigned to cover it, did you have a sense of what you were heading into?

I had never been to Paradise before. To be honest, I hadn't really heard of it. Didn't know it existed.

And as I was driving there, it's about three hours north east of San Francisco. So just past Sacramento. I was listening to the radio scanner and the things that I was hearing firefighters and police officers saying was horrifying.

I mean, I remember so clearly there was this woman who had a high risk pregnancy and she had gone into labor in her SUV in a gas station parking lot. I heard that they were evacuating the hospital. All of these patients who had released serious illnesses.

I heard that there was gridlock traffic. You would hear firefighters over the radio saying that they were in really bad spots that they needed help getting out.

And so that was the first inkling that what was happening in this town was really bad. Were you scared to go into the town at the time?

I probably should have been, but I had a job to do. I think a lot of journalists would say that you sort of set your fear to the side because your job is to tell the story.

Not to be afraid and the fear came later, I think.

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