Residents could opt in to an alert system that would notify them of trouble via telephone, text and email, and Paradise had an emergency plan that split the city into evacuation zones. One main thoroughfare, Skyway, leads out of town and into the valley to the west. It sits on a ridge between two canyons that meet like the lines at the top of a triangle, providing magnificent vistas but also impeding escape in the event of a disaster.

Paradise’s geography makes it particularly vulnerable. Fire experts, who have long spoken out about the danger, don’t see this as vegetation – they see it as fuel. And because there has been a policy of suppressing wildfires to protect homes and businesses in the state since the early 1900s, the landscape is now unusually dense with shrubs and young trees that would otherwise have been burned off by naturally occurring blazes. Years of drought exacerbated by global warming have left its forests achingly dry and littered with dead trees.

Recent conditions have boosted the risks. The house where William Goggia grew up in Paradise. More than 200 structures were destroyed in 2008. Wildfires are a normal part of the forest ecosystem in California, and over the past decade parts of Paradise have been threatened by at least four fires. When a Starbucks opened several months ago, a local joke went, Paradise had truly arrived.īut one menace was constant. The population skewed towards retirees, but residents say there was also a younger influx escaping real estate prices elsewhere in California. Dating back to the Gold Rush, Paradise was less a garden of earthly delights than a quiet community of 27,000, with homes and trailer parks hidden amid dense stands of pines and oaks. In truth, if this was a utopia it was a mellow sort. “You are ascending into Paradise,” read a road sign on the way into town, a charming spot in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in northern California. Christmas at William Goggia’s family home, which was lost in the fire.

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