Fire in Paradise – trydersmith.org

Reviews

“With his seasoned voice and theatrical timing, narrator T. Ryder Smith presents this comprehensive study of the devastating 2018 Northern California fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed more than 14,000 homes. Smith utilizes dramatic pacing–speeding up during the nail-biting personal stories and slowing down when explaining the fire’s causes (Pacific Gas & Electric failed to maintain equipment) and behaviors (it was hot enough to melt underground watering systems). The audiobook contains a remarkable weaving together of California history, fire science, climate change, individual accounts of heroism and horror, and fire trivia. (If you live in fire country, you’re better off without a long beard or more than two pets.) The result is, among other things, an outstanding study of how humans create and respond to disaster.”
– R.W.S., Audiofile Magazine

Winner Audie Award 2021 Best Non-Fiction Audiobook

Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award 2020

Voted one of Best Non-Fiction Audiobooks of 2020, by Audiofile magazine

Context

podcast with authors here

podcast about audio version of book here

Top two photos by Josh Edelson/Getty Images
Bottom photo by USA Today

Resources

The Connection Between Climate Change and Wildfires

Wildfires and Climate Change

How the Climate Crisis is Fueling Wildfires

Climate Change: 9 Ways You Can Make a Difference

How You Can Help Fight Climate Change

Synopsis

“The harrowing story of the most destructive American wildfire in a century.
There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and killed at least 85 people. The catastrophe seared the American imagination, taking the front page of every major national newspaper and top billing on the news networks. It displaced tens of thousands of people, yielding a refugee crisis that continues to unfold.
Fire in Paradise is a dramatic and moving narrative of the disaster based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with residents, firefighters and police, and scientific experts. Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano are California-based journalists who have reported on Paradise since the day the fire began. Together they reveal the heroics of the first responders, the miraculous escapes of those who got out of Paradise, and the horrors experienced by those who were trapped. . . . This is the story of a town at the forefront of a devastating global shift—of a remarkable landscape sucked ever drier of moisture and becoming inhospitable even to trees, now dying in their tens of millions and turning to kindling. It is also the story of a lost community, one that epitomized a provincial, affordable kind of Californian existence that is increasingly unattainable. It is, finally, a story of a new kind of fire behavior that firefighters have never witnessed before and barely know how to handle. What happened in Paradise was unprecedented in America. Yet according to climate scientists and fire experts, it will surely happen again.”
– Publisher’s summary