![]() “It was so close to a highway yet so far away,” he said. It was a situation in which McKenzie would want to call in aircraft to drop water or retardant, but he knew that wasn’t an option: it was too dark and the wind too savage. That would be agonizingly difficult under any circumstances, but especially in the face of flames being wind-whipped toward them. It could take another forty minutes just to carefully creep down to the blaze, and once they reached it there would be nowhere to turn around, meaning the truck would have to reverse out. It was so narrow that a fire truck could pull in its wing mirrors and still probably scrape the rock outcroppings. Camp Creek Road was hewn roughly into the side of the valley and in some places had been washed out by floods. Instead they were west of the river, off a dirt track called Camp Creek Road. McKenzie had been hoping that they would be on the canyon’s east side, where they would be accessible from the two-lane highway he was on. The flames – sheltered and low to the ground, a dusky orange – were on the wrong side of the river. As soon as they got there, McKenzie was dismayed. It took them about fifteen minutes to reach the fire, going as fast as they could while keeping the engines on the road and avoiding nosediving into the canyon. It was a place McKenzie had known his entire life – as a kid growing up in the nearby town of Oroville, he would come up here with his dad to hunt, fish, or log a Christmas tree in the high, green solitude. He and five other firefighters headed into the canyon in the dark in two trucks. Although he expected to catch the smell of the fire, all he got was the dry pines. He opened the back door to the kitchen and the wind ripped it right out of his hands. ![]() Sparked in a region desiccated by drought, a few hours north of San Francisco, it would also be a harbinger of how the climate crisis is transforming the natural world.īefore long, McKenzie’s phone lit up with a text informing him of an ignition. This was the first warning of what would become the deadliest US wildfire in a century, claiming 85 lives and ravaging an entire town. ![]() Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images At about 6.28am, a PG&E supervisor driving through the canyon six miles north of Jarbo Gap saw a fire that he estimated to measure 100 sq ft in a clearing below the transmission line, and radioed a nearby company facility, which conveyed the alert to emergency services. Only one customer was affected – a hydroelectric station located in the canyon that was operated by a small city in the San Francisco Bay Area. Fires in the region often start in this steep and inaccessible declivity, served by a single main road that meanders alongside the water.Īt 6.15am, the electric company PG&E experienced a power outage on a high-voltage line that traversed the canyon. Winds streaming down the canyon would run straight into this turn and spill out, moaning over the top of the station, especially at night, when canyon winds commonly pick up. The station was atop a high ridge overlooking the canyon in which a branch of the Feather River flowed southward, at about the point the canyon and the river make an abrupt, 90-degree turn to the east. Its location alone was enough to quicken the heart. A 20-year veteran of Cal Fire, California’s state firefighting force, McKenzie had never rested easy at Jarbo Gap.
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