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[BIRDS CHIRPING]
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BRAD: I was just cleaning up over here getting ready
to make more trestles and stuff for the gutters.
This is our vegetable garden.
LUCY: Did anything survive?
Uh, yeah, vegetables are all still pretty good.
We've still got some tomatoes, and lots of good fresh lemons,
and the pomegranates,
and there's still some squash growing.
This is the back deck.LUCY: Wow, paradise.
This is my part of the paradise.
LUCY: Oh wow, gorgeous.
This is nice, nice, comfortable area.
[LAUGHS]
LUCY: I don't know what to say.I get that reaction
from a lot of people.
Come inside, I'll show you.
Would you like to meet some people, Mom?
I don't care.Okay.
Your name again?LUCY: Lucy.
Lucy. Mom, this is Lucy.
LUCY: How you doing?
Oh, I'm doing just fine.
LUCY: How was the fire for you?
How was the fire to me?LUCY: Hmm.
Well, I'll clue you in.
Being blind, I thought they had all left me.
And then Brad came in and told me, he said,
"I'm sorry, Mom, we're fighting a fire storm."
And I told him,
"I want you always to remember
the angels are always with you."
Do you know they had to keep the fire, flap those wings,
keep that fire away.
Okay. I'll be outside for a little bit, Mama.
I love you.I Love you.
We're still here, we didn't burn up.
It was like it created a big firestorm over here
and just for about four or five minutes
it sucked the fire away from us.
Angels. [LAUGHS] It was angels.
Yup.
Would have both died if that hadn't happened.
So someone was watching for us.
LUCY: Do-- Were you praying, were you asking-- Were you--
who was it?I believe it was my wife.
Yeah, she died a few years ago and I built this for her.
So...
wasn't gonna lose it.
LUCY: So sorry, I'm so happy, I am so sorry.
Yeah, oh no, I'm happy. I'm happy.
Over here, my mom's here and safe and things are good.
Life could be a lot worse.
Most the people I know lost everything.
["“WE HAVE IT ALL"” PLAYING]
♪ There was fire around us So I should have known why ♪
♪ The touch of his hands Were as cold as his eyes ♪
♪ So don't you tell me We weren't hypnotized ♪
♪ Whoa, oho
♪ The print was so small I didn't understand ♪
♪ He cut our thumbs and placed A feather in our hands ♪
♪ Told us we would see
♪ All our dreams And plans unfold ♪
♪ Ohho
♪ Our hearts we have sold
♪ For diamonds and gold
♪ But hey, baby
♪ Take a look we have it all
LUCY: The world is waking up to the hellish realization
that all over this planet wildfires are burning us alive.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
♪ But haven't you heard
♪ Hearts turn to dirt
♪ Along with the rest Of your body ♪
♪ It's all claimed By the earth ♪
MALE VOICE: ♪ It will fade And it will wither ♪
♪ But gold, it will never
♪ And hey, baby
♪ Don't you know Diamonds are forever ♪
LUCY: My obsession with wildfire began
when I first moved to California.
I was confused, "Why is the hillside on fire?"
I couldn't believe that people just kept on driving.
I am from London and the last big fire we had there
was the Great Fire of London in 1666.
I thought fire was a medieval problem,
not a modern one.[HELICOPTER BLADES WHIRRING]
[PANTING][INDISTINCT CHATTER]
LUCY: Then the biggest fire in California history
came along in 2017
and I thought, "All right,
somebody's got to make a film about this one."
But I'd only just gotten started
when there was another even bigger one.
What was going on?
To hell with an individual fire.
I vowed not to stop until I got all the way
to the bottom of why these fires keep on happening
and that's why we came to be embedded
with firefighters on what turned out to be
the deadliest day for fires ever in California.
MAEVE: I mean, fucking hell. It's hot.[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
MAEVE: Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.
It's fucking heat, it's the whole ridge,
it's the whole ridge.
LUCY: In one day, the whole story
of why we're here now played out
and it has all the pieces.
Love, loss, liberty, capitalism, class, and crime.
But it isn't the story I expected to be telling.
I had expected heroism and I found even more.
But what I hadn't expected was hope.
Because we can do something about this problem.
Fire is a natural phenomenon.
These wildfires, however, are not.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MATT: The wind was stronger than normal.
It was just stronger. Woke me up that morning.
I saw the fire...
time kind of stood still there for a minute.
I took a quick picture of it. It's 6:48 in the morning.
And then I gave my report on conditions.
I knew it was gonna be a bad one.
We have our eyes on the vegetation fire.
It's gonna be very difficult to access
underneath the transmission line.
But it's heading in the direction
of towards Concow lake.
I go down the road and I see a giant blowtorch
going across the canyon.
I went on the community Facebook page
and just put down there, "Evacuate, run for your life!"
OFFICER:
LARRY: I turned around and looked at the window,
there was these dark gray clouds.
My wife was in the front room on the floor,
'cause her mother had spilled a cup of coffee.
And she's trying to clean it up. So we had to get out now.
I said, "You got three minutes or we're gonna be dead."
And I couldn't see the hood of my car,
the smoke was so thick,
I just shot in the middle of the flames.
The neighbors were about ten minutes behind me
and a tree had already fallen across on that road.
They couldn't get out.
Dozens of people have died in this fire.
Twelve of 'em were up here. Two on this road.
Yeah.
MALE VOICE:
MALE VOICE 2:
MALE VOICE:
MALE VOICE 2:
ALLYN: There were 67 patients in the hospital that day.
Evacuation warnings didn't happen.
TAMARA: I went to my patient's room
and I said, "We need to go now." And she started looking around.
And I said, "No, just grab your baby."
RACHELLE: But I still had a catheter from surgery.
Two lines with bags. I can't run. I can't even walk.
[RADIO BEEPING]OFFICER:
RACHELLE: There were no ambulances available.
There was a little Nissan
and they lifted me up and put me in the seat.
They put the IV bag and stuff on the floor.
And then handed me the baby in the front seat of the car.
[RADIO BEEPING]OFFICER 2:
ALLYN: As the last patients were getting in,
fire's breaking out on the campus.
MALE VOICE: I am at Feather River Hospital.
There's fire down on both sides here.
It's all blocked down here. There's no way to go down here.
MARY: When I got to school, one mother came in
and she really scared me.
She looked at me and she goes, "Get these kids out of here.
It's bad." And so I started pulling the kids out to the bus.
And you go to work and you think you're gonna teach about bats.
That's how quickly you're in a...[FINGER SNAPPING]
...life or death situation.
FRANK: You got 30 seconds to get out of your house.
What are you gonna grab?Take my two guns
that I carry all the time and put 'em in the basket
of my four-wheeler and that was it.
I didn't even have my ammunition, just the guns.
ROBERT: Tried the car facing the right direction
loaded with belongings, but the heat came so quickly,
so intensely, I had to leave my car behind.
I decided to run into the nearest swimming pool.
Create a buffer for myself.
I did a quick look behind me, it's gone.
OPERATOR:
FEMALE VOICE:
OPERATOR:
FEMALE VOICE:
OPERATOR:
We were sleeping and then I heard the neighbor and all.
And everything's black likeWar of the Worlds.
It's like we really have to leave now,
but my mom wouldn't come.
She didn't think it was an official evacuation order
and these other people and she's telling,
we didn't get orders either.
I just kinda panicked like I can't convince her.
I drove out and I was devastated,
I had everything I needed except my mom.
LAUREN: Communications were down.
Internet was down, power was off.
No one knew how fast and how furious
that fire was coming at us.
SEAN: It was a billion embers.
And every one of those embers started a fire.
OPERATOR:FEMALE VOICE:
OPERATOR:
FEMALE VOICE 2:OPERATOR:
MALE VOICE:OPERATOR:
OPERATOR:FEMALE VOICE 3:
OPERATOR:
So I climb out of the pool and there's a car.
Might be keys in the car.
There's people in the car, "What are you doing?"
FEMALE VOICE: I can't see in front of me.MALE VOICE: 1: I know.
They went, "We can't see."
"Well, I can see, get the fuck over."
I was really jacked up by then
and then old guy walked out of one of the condos.
I'm going, "Has nobody done a door to door here?"
And it's about 40, 50 homes over here and I'm going,
"Uh, okay", no one left behind type of thing.
[SIREN BLARING]
JOE: So I drove by my street
and saw that my house was destroyed.
Just went back to work.
BRAD: It was coming so fast and so strong,
I got our little garden hose in hand.
I don't know how I could describe it,
it's like fighting an elephant with a piece of spaghetti.
Felt like we had sunburn.
You know, you felt like your face was gonna peel,
it was so hot.
MARY: We turn the corner
and we are immediately already trapped in traffic
and they're already fires all over the place.
The entire event was one giant parking lot.
[TIRES SCREECHING]
MALE VOICE:: Go!FEMALE VOICE: Go!
MALE VOICE:
FEMALE VOICE:OPERATOR:
MALE VOICE 2: Keep your window up, guys.
BRAD: There was people trying to push each other
off the road to get out of here. It was pandemonium.
MALE VOICE 2: Come on, people, let's fuck out of here.[WOMAN 2 GRUNTS]
MALE VOICE 2: Time to effin go.
It's a full intersection and all directions
were completely blocked with traffic.
The fire was gonna impact all those people.
OFFICER:
FEMALE VOICE: Oh fuck!
JOSH: Nobody could go anywhere.
Fire was burning inside the cars.
People were just in fear, in shock
and didn't know what was going on.
So there's a huge feeling of helplessness,
'cause the fire is just kicking our ass.
REBECCA: I don't wanna die here. I don't want to die.
LUCY: It's hard to believe that the Camp Fire in Paradise
was only one of four major fires in California that day.
In southern California, the Woolsey Fire was taking off
and headed for Malibu.
REBECCA: Oh my God. Please God, please. Oh my God.
LUCY: It was the opposite end of the state.
The opposite end of the political spectrum
and the opposite end of the economic spectrum.
REBECCA: Please God, please.
LUCY: The median home price in Paradise...[REBECCA GASPS]
...was around 200,000 dollars.
In Malibu, it was over two million dollars.
Paradise tends to vote Republican.
Malibu always votes Democrat.
But all our skin burns just the same.
When you're in hell...REBECCA: Oh my God, please God...
...you're in hell....oh my God.
Oh my God. Please get me out of here.
Please God.
[HELICOPTER BLADES WHIRRING]
Air Attack Division November Command.
PILOT: Okay, copy that. I'll try to get the helicopter around.
Okay, I'll see you at some point.
It's dangerous I mean we're out...[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
...ahead of the fire right now, right.
We've had firefighter fatalities in this area,
because of the wind shifting on you.
You're constantly on alert
trying to assess what's going on.
It's a big Rubik's Cube and you're just trying to solve
the puzzle and figure out how to connect the dots
and put the fire out.
So there's our air tanker.
He's working on, dropping retarding on my line.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER][AIRPLANE ENGINE WHIRRING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[INDISTINCT CHATTER][SIREN BLARES]
MARSHALL: My dad was a colonel in the marines.
And now he's captain of the fire department.
He's also the mayor of Malibu.
My dad and I had set up this fire system
where we have a big tank in the backyard.
And so that morning, my dad put his hand on my shoulder.
He's all in his fear gear and he said, "Don't leave."
And then he had to go. You know, he has duties,
so I was kinda like, "Wait, stay here.
[CHUCKLES] We need you."
Today's the very last day of the temporary workforce
for the Forest Service. Everyone's getting laid off today.
We don't have our workforce, we don't have our hotshot crews.
Usually, I have superintendents that are driving around with me
and we're going into these canyons,
and getting up high, and looking down,
and coming up with a plan.
And yet again, two years in a row,
we're caught with our pants down with no workforce
and an end of the season fire.
[HELICOPTER BLADES WHIRRING]
MAEVE: California just mobilized
a ton of our firefighters up north
and then all of a sudden everyone had to shift gears
and fight this fire that was down here.
Either I send helicopters there to save that one
or I work 'em through here and that saves
the other 50 homes on the way up.
You're left making shitty decisions, you know,
that you don't wanna make.
MALE VOICE: No fire engines. Fire everywhere.
Holy shit.
FEMALE VOICE: There's no fire trucks up here.
Where's all the fire trucks?
MALE VOICE 2:
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
MALE VOICE 3: The wind's picked up and there are embers.
Fires are starting left and right.
CANDACE: They stopped me and they said, "We'll escort you.
And I said, "Why?"
Try and be nice.And they said, "Fire on both sides.
It's really dangerous." I would not evacuate.
The idea was I would be inside and he would be outside.
As you can see a 50,000 gallon pool
and I finally got the pump working.
But there was so much material in the pool, the siphon clogged.
THOR: We got a minute or two over on this side
and shoveled dirt on it
and then the next one would start.
There's no adrenaline going. You're past adrenaline.
You're in survival win.
JOHN: It was like a fire tornado.
The thing was like 400 feet tall.
Spinning. I never seen anything like it.
FEMALE VOICE: Let's get outta here.
This whole row,
it's sort of like what you would see
in the Midwest after a tornado.
CRAIG: It pulled us off with our feet towards it
and it was circulating debris 200 or 300 feet in the air
and I'm talking like pieces of corrugated iron,
whole pieces of tree
like some kind of monster or a demon.
I just felt my legs going. You know, like I'm out, I'm out.
JEFFERSON: Your heart sinks to a spot.
Thirty years of mortgage payments
and five years to build the place.
[SOBS] I'm sorry.
Watching the second floor fall onto the first floor.
That seemed to be a heartbreak for me.
There was like kind of a thing around here that
the Point doesn't burn
and... [CHUCKLES] ...we were fucking wrong.
The big second wave came through and I was like
this could be the end of it.
MALE VOICE: Dad, get back. Let's go.
Get behind the fucking house. Get behind the house!
MARSHALL: I am a professional cyclist,
so I was prepared to run for 15 hours straight.
But my legs were just shredded.
My friend looked at me and he's like,
"We're surrounded by fire.
All your neighbor's houses are on fire.
We need to leave." He's like, "You're gonna die."
I heard my dad's words in the back of my mind,
"Don't leave." He's like,
"If we lose the house, we're fucked."
It was emotional, I didn't really know
what to do, I was like honor my dad
or listen to my friend who's telling me I'm gonna die.
[CHUCKLES][MUSIC PLAYING]
SEAN: I started seeing people coming down the Skyway
carrying children, dogs, suitcases.
There were people who had burns and I was just yelling at 'em.
"Just keep going down the hill. Go into the Walgreen,
so I have firefighters waiting for you."
I had told the guys we're gonna use it as temporary refuge area
and whatever you do,
"Do not let that building burn down."
[SIREN WAILING][INDISTINCT CHATTER]
SEAN: And to be honest, I wasn't convinced
it was going to work.
It was just that it was the only option we had.
Once I pull these guys off protecting this building,
we're gonna go and start trying to save all your homes.
I think we ended up with like a hundred people in there
and the fire came, and it came really hard.
[SIREN BLARING]
OFFICER:
SEAN: We had massive explosions going on.
[EXPLOSION]
It shook the ground you were standing on.
Everyone has ammunition and it sounded like a war zone.
Grown men holding their children's hands
began crying.
You go them and say, "I know what you feel.
But you gotta cut it out and you have to cut it out
right now, because it's contagious."
MALE VOICE:MALE VOICE 2:
OPERATOR: Okay, and he still can't get out?
MALE VOICE 2:
OPERATOR: Are you trapped?MALE VOICE:
OPERATOR: Okay, ma'am,
you need to get out of the house.
FEMALE VOICE:
Please.
Oh my God.
JESSIE: And I've never heard anybody scream like that before.
Looking back, you know why they were screaming.
They're burning alive.
I saw people being burned alive in their cars, trailers,
their motorcycles laying on the ground.
Like just people fleeing for their lives.
There was burned up bodies in the traffic jam.
Skeletons. That's all that was left.
FEMALE VOICE: Somebody, help![CAR HORN HONKING]
RACHELLE: The window's hot and I'm hot.
The baby's hot. I dumped a little water on him
and rubbed his head. The driver's out of the car
and I called my dad and I said,
"Dad, I'm in a fire and I can't get out.
There's people getting out of their cars
and they're running.
And I can't run.
I can't even hardly feel my legs.
I can't even stand up
and I've got this baby on my lap.
And I don't know what to do.
What do I do? I don't wanna die!
[SOBBING]
When the driver got back in the car, he said,
"If we have to get out of the car and go,
what do you want me to do?"
And I said, "I just want you to take the baby and run.
If you have to run, just take him and go."
ALLYN: My car is being burned and I saw the side-mirror
just starting to melt.
That's when I thought like it's over.
I wrote my wife and said, "I just want you guys to know
I did everything I possibly could
to get out of this to see you again
and that I love you."
I said, "There's fire on both sides of the road.
The house next to me is on fire.
I'm not gonna make it. Just pray with me.
Heavenly Father, please help us.
FEMALE VOICE:
ALLYN: Some of my colleagues behind me,
their car stalled out,
'cause the oxygen was literally being
cooked out of the air.
They ended up trying to walk back up the road.
OPERATOR:
FEMALE VOICE:
JOE: I overheard some radio traffic that a dozer
might be able to help move some of the burning cars
and protect the people stuck on the road.
The cars on left side of the road
were engulfed in flames
and starting to explode and threaten the vehicles
next to them. I encountered the nurses
and law enforcement officers on foot.
MALE VOICE:OFFICER:
They were incredibly panicked, rightfully so.
At this point, everything surrounding us was on fire.
Almost every vehicle on that road
had people taking refuge in 'em.
A hundred cars, maybe more.
The looks on their faces,
they were sure they were gonna die.
I've never seen that look on anybody's face.
FEMALE VOICE: [SOBS] Oh my God.MALE VOICE: It's all that's important.
JOE: The heat broke the windows of my dozer
and I knew I was running out of time.
And I was now endangering myself.
I don't believe I could've let myself stand back
and watch those vehicles and people burn up.
I was perfectly willing to move forward and risk myself
for those people.
Right around that time like
I hear this like kind of bang.[EXPLOSION]
[TIRES SCREECHING]
And this bulldozer had knocked this truck almost the size
of mine like out of the way.
Like you're kicking over a shoebox.
And I've got a path like to turn around.
[CAR ENGINE REVVING]
[HELICOPTER BLADES WHIRRING]
I've never been so happy to see a sunny sky. [LAUGHS]
MAEVE: I'm exhausted.
I've been out here for...
28, 29 hours, 30 hours, something like that.
If you're sleeping behind the curb
and meanwhile someone's house is burning down.
This is why you don't take naps.
No.
There's a lot of horses in there.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]Oh, I'm so sorry, horses.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I remember just like peeking through this smudgy dark windows
out over the canyon
and I was just wondering I was like,
"I think all of Malibu burned down."
SAM: For about three days we stayed up all night.
It was so anxious-ridden and we knew the fire
was still so active.
We've been given the name of the Point Dume Bombers.
The name of the little surf crew down here.
We did save a lot of homes.
And to be completely honest I have no fucking idea
how we pulled it off.
Paramedics didn't even assess me.
Intensive care unit three days.
I also got a hernia.
And they ended up amputating the toe.
MAEVE: A lot of times, people don't evacuate.
So we will spend two or three days there
prepping their property for a fire to come.
And then we come back today
and they died overnight in the fire.
So two of those Indians made friends with the people
which means I can't send them
to start mopping up,
because it'll be too much of a mental fatigue
if I send them in there. So I need to send them
somewhere else and then get fresh people in...
to where the fatalities are, so that they're not looking
at bodies of people that they spoke with yesterday.
STACY: I mean, the first words out of his mouth were,
"Everything is gone." [CHUCKLES]
I don't care, you know. Everything is not gone.
He thought that he had failed us you know.
As the father, as the protector.
But I can you tell today for sure
with no doubt in my mind a hundred percent
that I have the love of my life standing next to me
and he is my hero today.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
FEMALE VOICE: Oh my God.
MALE VOICE: Oh.FEMALE VOICE: Can't believe it.
[LAUGHS]
I can't believe that!
This house, my grandma and grandpa,
her mom and dad built. And my grandpa made this sign.
"May all who enter enjoy its warmth
and share our contiment."
Contentment.Contentment.
[LAUGHS][LAUGHS] Contentment.
Mom's getting all choked up, aw.
This house means a lot to her.[SNIFFLES] Everything.
And when we had to leave and left him there,
I couldn't even think.
It's everything to have my kids here
doing what I did and what my dad did.
It's not just a house, it's a home.
That's why we're like not gonna let a fire take it.
[LAUGHS][LAUGHS]
This whole side of the canyon, the whole thing was on fire.
And it was just skipping down the hill
faster than you could run.
RICK: The fire behavior up in the canyons
was you know, like peering into Dante's Inferno
and when I came by and I saw the house there it was like...
[SIGHS] Yes, this is great.
Did a great job.
LUCY: Dante's Inferno?
Yes, it was terrible.
I've seen a few fires like that,
but that was on a scale that I hadn't seen before.
You know, I look and say, "Oh, what if that whole canyon
went off. That would be terrible, but they all went off
at the same time.
So the amount of energy that was released
up in those canyons was horrific.
It was horrific. And if you're in the wrong place
at the wrong time, you can die. Certainly.
And the fact that more people didn't die in this
is very lucky.
And that's the success story of this fire.
So that's my mayor side talking. The evacuation effort worked.
Clear.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
[CAR ENGINE REVVING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MALE VOICE: What do you think?
I need just something...[MUSIC PLAYING]
[ENGINE STARTS]
SEAN: People were unable to escape that fire
and it caught 'em where they were.
Some were in their homes, and some were outside,
and some were in their cars.
It was difficult. [CLEARS THROAT] Very difficult.
SEAN: It's easy to motivate firefighters to go fight a fire.
It's difficult to motivate them to sift through the remains
of 18,000 buildings to look for bones.
And that's what we were doing.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CHRISTINA: This yellow tape is where they found her
'cause they dug.
The couch would have been that way, not this way.
I don't know.
They cross-confirmed the DNA with my mom.
I didn't even get to say that I loved her.
I blame myself about it.
I'm an only child and she was my only family.
JAMIE: I moved to LA five years ago
from New York as a widower. As a fresh widower.
So the hardest thing to lose is like a tall stack
of notebooks of remembrances of my wife.
And then my father just passed away,
so I had clothes that I really looked forward to wearing
that were his.
So that's the stuff that's difficult.
Everything I could replace, books, furniture, clothes
really had no meaning.
And everything that had meaning which is mem-- notes, photos,
keepsakes, I could never replace.
MALE VOICE: The smoke that so many complained about
was the last remnants of my pets.
STREDWICK: I had a lot of pictures that went back
few generations.
My mom's and grandmom's deaths, lot of years.
And there were a lot of the recipes.
THOR: I'm not sure what happened.
But I'm finding there's a new importance
to the little material things.
Objects and photographs, they unlock memories.
It's a memory that comes back out of the fog.
The keys to my memory were my belongings.
But everything's gone.
I could be a fog person now. One of the ones in the fog.
MALE VOICE: Didn't have a lot of personal stuff,
but the watches I wanted, they were my step-dad's.
He was a navy hero.
Had a silver star and a purple heart.
Feel like I'm on an acid trip that might not end.
How do you not end up homeless which is almost a joke
at this point, because I am technically homeless.
How do not let it drive you down, down, down, down
to whatever spark or semblance of a spark
that moves you forward in the world
and brings opportunities, and friends,
and love, and all that.
Just goes out and you become embittered
and it-- and-- and that-- and it's-- it just doesn't seem
like it's a far jump when stuff happens to you
and you really-- It hits hard.
[SIZZLING][INDISTINCT CHATTER]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
BRAD: There's a lot of people with no place to go.
They're sleeping outside, it's gonna start raining.
It's getting cold.
So I'm cleaning out-- this was--
this little middle room was my storeroom.
My garage, everything is getting cleaned out
and going out in the shop, so can move some other people in
and give 'em a place to live until they can rebuild.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
THOR: It's just wonderful to get something hot, something cooked.
Well, these eggs are fantastic.
And I like the ketchup, I'm a big fan of the ketchup.
It beats granola bars hands down. [LAUGHS]
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]LUCY:
[DOGS BARKING]
[SOBBING]
FEMALE VOICE: I love you so much, Brad.BRAD: I love you, too, baby.
FEMALE VOICE: I brought you water, and food, and fruit for Mawmaw.
I want my kisses.
Love you.Love you.
I told you can come live with us.
Aww, thank you, Mawmaw.
[BREATHES HEAVILY]
That's my neighbor's house.
Their garage didn't make it.
They have their home.
Oh my God. [SOBS]
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
I was hoping that this wouldn't be burnt so bad.
So this was my kids' bedrooms...
and then my bedroom where the wall collapsed.
[SIGHS, SNIFFLES]
[MAN COUGHING]My daughter's bed. [SOBS]
All my kids' stuff.
[SNIFFLES] I mean I know it's just stuff, but...
it was my stuff. It was my memories.
[SOBS]
[CRIES]
BRAD: I don't need coffee, bud.
I'm on--Are those regular cookies
or special cookies?Those are regular.
Okay.Those are not specials.
I have specials if you want one.Can I have some-- No, no, no.
I mean we've had the Tubbs Fire. We have the Carr Fire.
You know, Lake County seems like they can't get a break.
And it seems like every year now they're on fire.
And what do we do--BRAD: Every other year Concow,
Yankee Hill.And what do we do different?
Even if we believe that it's climate change,
we gotta do something about it.BRAD: Mm-hmm.
So let's just say I believe it, which I don't.
But let's just say I did for a brief second.
Even if you wanna go with that explanation,
what do we do differently?Mm-hmm.
LUCY: It came as a shock that the residents most affected
by the fires didn't connect them with climate change.
Fire, and it happen every year, so it has nothing do
with global warming. That's just a hoax.
It's just people making money off it, you know.
You can sit back, you can see who makes money off it.
And--LUCY: Who does?
All the big shots are the ones squawking about it,
you know, it's--
It's none of us people down here, on the other end,
we ain't gettin' nothing from it,
but yeah, no that's just a hoax anyway.
You said you were from what, New York?
LUCY: I am not from New York, but what I think he means
is that I'm not from around there.
And I am one of those people
who goes with the science on climate change.
CHAR: Climate change is shifting the environment.
We have deep drought, fast fire, and hard rain,
and it's only going to accelerate.
The western part of the United States
is going through this massive conversion
in terms of climate-driven alterations of its environment.
The research is showing that what we're doing
is converting forest to grassland.
Grassland that over time will become more desert.
And one way of thinking about it is the Sonoran,
Chihuahuan deserts in Mexico are moving across a border.
That it's normal that it's emerging
actually is far more dangerous
than what we've seen in the past.
The numbers themselves don't lie
if you look at the trends of 'em.
And the trends are really overwhelming.
Historically, the winds were always there,
but the fuels were not dried out.
Something is happening more and more
is the rains have not arrived.
At a time of year, when normally the fuels
would've been too wet to get going.
Had nighttime temperatures go up almost two degrees Fahrenheit.
And you make the most of your progress
containing a fire at night.
And when you don't get that recovery period at night,
that's a real recipe for catastrophe.
STEPHEN: We're creating a kind of fire age.
The fire equivalent of an ice age.
For me, it fits into a master narrative
that I have of ourselves as fire creatures.
It had always been our problem as a fire creature.
Our quest for fire, if you will, to find more stuff to burn.
What we've done is find a whole new world
of buried fossilized biomass.
And we're taking it out of the geologic mass,
burning it, and releasing it into the geologic future.
That has been enormously powerful for us,
but that broke our relationship with the living landscape.
'Cause this stuff, it can't be absorbed
and so we are destroying our habitat
with this kind of fire.
LUCY: I had made an assumption that climate change
was the thing that was driving these hellishly bad fires.
We've had these record-breakingly hottest years
and these record-breakingly biggest fires.
So it just correlated.
But it turns out there's more to it.
Climate change in a lot of ways is a distraction
from the issue of fire, because Paradise was gonna burn
whether there was climate change or not.
STEPHEN: Even if climate change miraculously went back
to the 1960s level,
we would still have a fire crisis.
Climate change is undoubtedly aggravating fire problems.
It's a major factor,
it is a performance enhancer, but it is not the only thing.
I'm sorry, I-- I'm sorry to say this in a way,
because you get blamed and climate changer denier
or you're soft denier, that's not my intention.
But if you say climate change is the only thing that matters,
then the only thing to fix it is fixing climate change.
That's not gonna happen for a long time.
I say that with sadness.
I've got grandkids, but we don't just have to build
concrete bunkers and wait it out.
We can work with this and if we're lucky and good,
then we'll leave enough for our grandkids
to be able to build a different world out of.
LUCY: So this is the good news.
Climate change and fire are separable.
This movie doesn't have to be about something
that's going to get inevitably worse and worse.
We can do something to turn this around.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
LUCY: Now I hadn't been the first European
to land in California.
That would be Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo.
And it happened on October 8th, 1542,
When his expedition sailed up towards what's now Los Angeles.
And their first impression was smoke.
There was fire everywhere.
And so they called what's now Los Angeles,
the "Bahia de los Fumos", the "Bay of Smokes".
History doesn't tell us whether that was
a natural wildfire or a fire deliberately set
by Native Americans, whose practice it was
to intentionally set fires.
But we do know that the Europeans left
and they didn't come back for 150 years.
And when they did, they banned those native burning practices.
And anyway, barely any of them wanted to live there
until all that changed one cold January morning
in 1848
when James Marshall discovered gold in Sutters Mill
which is about a 100 miles from Paradise.
And with that the old American dream
of Puritan men and women content to accumulate
a modest fortune was replaced
by the golden dream of instant wealth.
One in a twinkling by audacity and good luck.
[CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKING]LUCY: By 1849, thousands were pouring in
from around the world in search of their golden dream.
But it wouldn't end with gold.
Hollywood would follow, then aerospace,
NASA, Silicon Valley, wine, surfing, punk rock,
the internet, and the dot-com boom.
California was hot, hot, hot.
And if an occasional fire did burn down some things,
well, so what? Put that thing out.
Hire some firefighters and buy some more AOL stock.
Yes, we'll be right there, thank you.
LUCY: And then I learned about another boom.
Sort of boring, sort of inscrutable.
Sort of probably why I hadn't thought of it before.
The timber boom. Bear with me.
ZEKE: In the early part of the 20th century,
big companies from Minnesota and Michigan,
that had made fortunes logging all the Great North Woods.
They had run out of trees to cut
and so they built land empires in California.
After the timber barons had acquired
all the best timber land,
there was suddenly a great interest
in protecting these investments
and these corporate earnings basically
by getting the Forest Service to put out all the fires.
STEPHEN: In 1910, three and a quarter million acres burned.
Seventy-eight firefighters killed.
So they were determined that it would never happen again
on their watch.
MALCOLM: And so starting in 1910,
the Forest Services made it
its primary mission to be able to put out wildfire.
They developed the 10:00 a.m. policy
that meant that as soon as you had an ignition,
the objective was to try to put the fire out
before 10:00 a.m. of the following day.
And that is what we call, "fire suppression."
STEPHEN: And then the great housing boom after World War II,
suddenly there's a huge demand for timber.
You're creating all kinds of slash.
You're starting to have fire problems
and so a whole lot more of fire protection
was necessary.[SIRENS BLARING]
ZEKE: So straight to the 20th century,
we've been trying to put out as many fires as we could.
We've got a narrative that has been built for us
by the media that casts the firefighters as heroes
and the suppression as this kind of
noble combat operation.
And fires always cast as the villain.
SMOKEY BEAR: Hello, I am Smokey Bear.
Bambi's family lives here in this forest, too.
It's their home.
But sometimes, people come here and they get careless.
PETE: We've had all this Bambi-fambi stuff
being put out to children,
you know that, "Don't encroach on the forest.
Don't do anything. Fire is bad."
Remember, only you can prevent forest fires.
HALSEY: So they've created
this huge fire industrial complex
to address the whole problem, because that's what we do.
The solution to fire has been to attack, attack, attack
with these militaristic strategies.
And it makes us feel good and everyone's a hero.
But it's not working.
FEMALE VOICE: Look, Ashley, at all the smoke.
MALE VOICE: Look at the fire, Ashley.
FEMALE VOICE: See the dark smoke.ASHLEY: Yeah.
LUCY: But we didn't seem to be winning this war on fire.
In fact, the battles kept coming
and right into town. [INDISTINCT CHATTER]
LUCY: This is Oakland in 1991 when 25 people died.
My God, I've never seen anything like that?
LUCY: By 2020, the entire western United States
was on fire at once.
The sky was red from Seattle to San Diego
and it seemed like the end times had come.
MALE VOICE: Looks like doomsday.
I mean you could tell something is going horribly wrong.
ZEKE: Rather than look at this as a war on fire,
we should call it a war on nature,
because that's what it is.
STEPHEN: If we're at war with fire,
three things are gonna happen.
We're gonna spend a lot of money,
we're gonna take a lot of casualties
and we're gonna lose.
MALCOLM: When we think about these large fire events,
often say, "Oh my God, it's an act of God.
There's nothing we really could have done about something
with that kind of ferocity." That's just not true.
There are a hundred years of decisions that people made
to put out each one of the small little fires.
REPORTER: Fires are quickly located before they have a chance
to spread over large areas.
TRINA: If we haven't burned in a fire-adapted landscape
for years, you know when fire comes along,
it's going to blow up, it's going to be voracious.
I don't see this as a natural disaster.
I see this as human error.
LUCY: Comparing photographs makes it very clear.
You can see the changes.
You can see what fire suppression has done.
Forests just didn't use to be this thick.
PETE: In the past, it was more of a savannah situation.
Bigger trees, farther spaced apart.
There's more trees up there than there's ever been.
There's too many trees up there.
Now you create a heat source that you can't stop.
LUCY: And it's not just the forests
of northern California where the fuel loads
have drastically changed.
When we first came to Malibu,
of course, there were no trees anywhere.
But people who move here think they want to build
a little tropical paradise in the desert.
People that aren't really paying much attention.
SAM: There was so much fuel, the eucalyptus trees,
The palm trees that people planted,
they're matchsticks.
KRISTEN: 2020 was the biggest fire season on record
in California. And thousands
of the ancient giant sequoia perished in these fires.
And these are trees that survive through hundreds
of wildfires in their lifetimes.
They are the quintessential fire-adapted species,
so they have really thick bark.
Their cones are cue to open with fire
and land on that really rich seed bed
that is cleared of debris.
And what we're finding now is more and more
of these ancients giants are dying
as a result of the fire.
So clearly like, we are doing something wrong.
LUCY: A month after these fires in Paradise and Malibu,
the Trump Administration issued an executive order mandating
a major increase in logging as a solution to the fires.
Forest fires burn, this isn't a new norm.
You know, it can be managed.
The only endangered species happens to be a logger.
LUCY: But I was confused.
Hadn't we learnt that California had been logged?
ZEKE: We had the Secretary of Interior come out
and say that a lack of active land management
was to blame for fires like the Camp Fire.
As a geographer I can say that the industrial timberland
that the Camp Fire burned across on its way to Paradise
was managed about as intensely as you can manage land.
We've had a ton of logging in the area that was burned
by the Camp Fire and it didn't save Paradise.
LUCY: So is it too much logging or too little logging?
And could that have been a factor in the Camp Fire?
There's their rail road right there, Diamond Match.
They would cut down a tree bigger than anything
you can see around here, take it down there,
and make match matchsticks.
LUCY: That's exactly right. Diamond Match was here.
It's literally made of matchsticks this place.
Made of matchsticks!
Paradise started out Diamond Match.
Diamond Match used to own all the land around here
'til BiC put 'em out of business.
That little lighter.
So they turned the land over to Sierra Pacific.
LUCY: So I looked at the satellite image
of the Camp Fire burning after about four hours.
And I looked at how much of that land was owned
by Sierra Pacific Industries.
And look...
it's a lot.
Sierra Pacific is owned by one guy.
You know, this Red Emmerson.
He's the largest private land owner
in the state of California.
LUCY: In fact, he's one of the richest people in the world,
but nobody seems to have heard of him.
He's also a huge Republican donor,
especially to members of the agricultural committee
which oversees forestry.
He personally owns 1.9 percent of California,
making him the third largest land owner in the US
And it turns out Sierra Pacific Industries
is very controversial.
For one thing, because their practices involve
clear-cutting.
What we like to do is select an area of about 16 acres,
and cut down all the trees, and essentially, start over.
Really more of a restoration to the original forest.
LUCY: But doesn't cutting down all the trees
sound like the opposite of an original forest?
I feel that forest and fire ecology
is like opposite world.
What we're being told by the logging industry is that
the more trees you pull out of the forest,
the more that's going to stop fires.
And the reality is it's exactly the opposite.
ZEKE: The California Forest Practice rules
require timber companies to plant a lot of trees
when they clear-cut.
The result is that now we have enormously thick forests
that we have to come and thin,
creating more fire-prone conditions
in the woods by having slash, and small branches,
and pine needles that have been laying everywhere.
CHAD: And the logging is spreading invasive grasses
like cheatgrass which is incredibly combustible
and spreads fire very quickly, and very intensely.
ZEKE: And we're really subsidizing
their un-fire safe land management,
because we pay for all their fire suppression.
The public pays for the air tankers
that come and drop. They pay for the bulldozers.
They pay for the inmate crews
and it's not really costing SPI...
anything at all.
STEPHEN: All of these mammoth mega fires,
it was the debris left from logging
that powered those fires.
Logging and fire do different things.
Logging takes the big stuff and leaves the little.
Fires burns the little and leaves the big.
If you have a campfire
and it's starting to die down, what do you do?
You throw in pine needles, you throw in kindling,
you throw in all the small stuff,
you throw in a big chunk of green wood
and the fire's gonna go out.[MUSIC PLAYING]
LUCY: And those trucks are serious on these roads, huh?
Well, they're limited on time.
They're trying to make three trips a day
to the saw mills in various locations.
And they don't have a lot of patience for the tourists.
LUCY: Yeah.Yeah. Uh...
These guys are on their second trip right now.
And that direction is where the Camp Fire came from.
Uh, it's all Sierra Pacific's ground.
It was an inferno in here.
We're now in the heart of the Camp Fire
in an area that was heavily post-fire logged
after a huge fire that occurred in 2008.
LUCY: These trees are all like eight feet tall.
I mean that's like, it's just--This is a tree plantation.
This is our stop. This is it.LUCY: Let's get out.
I'm like in shock.
Yeah, in fact, you can see
the distance between the little horizontal branches.
Those are called-- Every place where you got
horizontal branches coming out, those are called "whirls".
Each section between the whirls is a year of growth.
So these trees are seven years old,
they're eight years old. They're all young trees.
That are densely packed, planted after the post-fire logging.
Not only is it very damaging ecologically,
but it also means that fires tend to burn hotter.
And that's a very dangerous situation
when you've got a town nearby.
LUCY: How much reporting has it been on the Camp Fire?
And I'm not hearing this story anywhere.
LUCY: I couldn't help but stare at that area
that burned so quickly in the first four hours
of the Camp Fire.
Because I was realizing all that area marked in black
had burned in the last major fire
that happened ten years previously
and subsequently, had been post-fire logged.
And so these areas marked in purple,
they were all Sierra Pacific's young tree plantations.
All dense trees less than ten years old.
You get fire into those young plantations.
They get incinerated, in fact, vaporized
is probably a more accurate word.
And that's because all the crowns are interlocked
and they're really close to the ground.
So when a fire comes through,
it immediately just torches up into one
and then spreads through the whole thing.
As it pressed in this ridge, it was in Concow in 15 minutes.
I don't think, with any of us, have ever experienced
a wildfire that quick.
CHAD: That's incredibly fast.
It's the fastest forest fire in California.
Fires just wick through those areas
and like these things are matchsticks.
This is the story about the Camp Fire.
These post-fire logging operations
are making fires burn faster and hotter.
I mean, I'm not sure how you could be
more heavily logged than what we're looking at here.
This is industrial forestry at its kind of maximum.
And what we saw is fire burning at its maximum.
PETE: One of my good friends Richard Brown
you know, passed away in this fire.
Red Emmerson is obviously a very good businessman,
but these clear-cuts
are nothing more than ignition points.
The fire spread through this area right down there
toward Concow Lake and the community of Concow,
where 12 people out of 300 were killed,
because the fire just moved so fast
and there just wasn't time to evacuate.
And then it kept going through more post-fire logged areas
very, very rapidly up over the ridge
and into Paradise
where far more people were killed.
LUCY: Every fire from the tiniest BiC flame
to the sun itself doesn't want to go out.
It tries its hardest to stay alive as do we all.
Standing up there looking down over that whole area
which I'd traveled around talking to so many people,
hearing their stories of so much suffering,
so much trauma, so much loss, so much death,
it was so clear that all our disruptions
of this landscape were benefiting the fires
and not us.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CALIN: How do you not feel like you failed?
I mean it's all on the ground.
I'm a firefighter
and this fire just destroyed this town.
How do I live with that feeling of, "Did you do enough?"
FIREMAN: And a lot of firemen that saw a lot of bad things
that day that are questioning whether or not
they want to continue their career as firemen.
BRAD: Yes.So.
BRAD: A lot of death, a lot of people burned up.
Yeah.A lot of ugly, a lot of ugly.
MALE VOICE: Yes. We had a lot of regular patients
that we went to on a regular basis to help
through the past ten, 15, 20 years
and then going to those homes and finding their remains.
That's probably the worst.
Officer: We don't really get that time to process and mourn,
because the fire is still burning.
JASON: "I could've saved more people,
could've saved that house. I could've done more.
I could've done more," you question yourself.
MATT: When you roll the incident through your head
right before bed, when your brain takes over,
and start saying,
"What if the winds went this way that day?
What if I could have done...", you know your rational side
has to come in and say, "You would have died
if you had tried that
or you would have just killed your crew."
I'll be re-playing for a long time.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
BRAD: You enjoyed all the company, ma?
Oh yeah.
You need some Cheerios, spaghetti?
Well, now then you hit it.You want spaghetti?
All right. I'll get you some spaghetti.
Love you.
I sure love you, honey, like with all of me.
There are 20 people living here.
From three before the fire.
The little trailer, that was a donation.
Somebody said, "Use that long as you want."
That one we bought cheap. That one we bought cheap.
LUCY: How do you describe what's going on here?
Small commune.
Small commune, you know there's 20 of us.
I guess that qualifies.
LUCY: What do you-- What was that look for?
[LAUGHS] You know, just that occasional, uh-oh.
LUCY: Why's that?I miss her.
I try not to think about those things.
Think about the depressing things,
this happens.
So I don't like to think about it.
Stay on the other side.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
MALE VOICE: Okay, can you please just give me a moment here please.
And then we don't tone it down.
And find a direction, so that we can move forward
this so that when the east end of Malibu burns,
we can say, "We addressed it."
Because in the next couple of years the east end of town
is gonna burn.[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
REVA: Hi, everybody. I'm Reva Feldman.
I am the city manager.[AUDIENCE BOOING]
FEMALE VOICE: Oh, let her talk a minute, geez.
I didn't start the fire
and I am not responsible for putting out the fire,
so you're booing is inappropriate.
That's why the fire department is here.
They're here on my request to answer these questions.
ED: Everybody wants to blame
somebody for their house burning down.
Well, they'll look for anything to blame.
This is gonna get wild.
MALE VOICE: Well, my son was right there.
We saved our house. I didn't...I don't--
...see one firefighter the entire time.
There were more children fighting the fire
than there were firefighters in Malibu park.
Well, I can tell you this--FEMALE VOICE: I wanna know
who was giving those orders
specifically.The-- yeah--
FEMALE VOICE: There are 19 homes on my street
and the adjacent street burned to the ground.
What policemen, what policemen?[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
Easy and everybody here--
MALE VOICE 2: I came up here in 1978.
My engine alone saved eight houses on Bush Drive.
You see a fire, you go put it out.
What happened to that?[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
What happened to that?
[AUDIENCE CHEERING]
It kind of disappointing, hurtful, frustrating
when you hear this stuff and know that you know,
I haven't seen my family in eight days.
We threw everything in the world at this.
But when you have a 150 square miles,
you're not gonna get a fire engine at every house.
There's 3,700 badge sworn personnel
in the fire department for LA County
and there wasn't one person at home.
FIREFIGHER: One of the stages of grief is anger.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
We just have to let people go through those stages
however they need to to grieve the loss of their home.
In northern California, they blamed the trees and environmental community.
And then in southern California,
they blamed the firefighters and the environmental community.
I remember after the Cedar Fire,
they were literally throwing rocks at fire engines.
In truth, the people who live in these areas,
they won't even pay the taxes to have more firefighters.
After the catastrophic fires in 2003,
there was measure on the ballot to increase taxes
to pay for more firefighters was voted down.
And many people don't realize who fights fires.
Forty percent of the firefighting force are prisoners.
So California for years has basically been using
slave labor to fight these fires.
There's just so many firefighters.
You can't have--
there's just no way they can save these communities.
It's not physically possible.
You can't do it with these monster storms
and I still don't think the public understands that.
Point fingers in other directions
other than yourself.
It's what they're all doing.
LUCY: It came out with the fires in Paradise and Malibu
had been started by electric companies.
LYNNIE: Everybody saying, "Oh, PG and E.
We should sue PG and E."
Let me tell you if it weren't for PG and E,
there would be no Paradise.
They're tasked with an impossible job of mus--
moving huge amounts of electricity
through wilderness areas.
And when it's already dry, static electricity from anything
can start a fire. [MIMICS STATIC] Anything.
LUCY: Like this gender reveal party
in the Arizona suburb,
the blue smoke lets you know that it's a boy
and his father was fined eight million dollars
for starting this 47,000 acre fire.
MALE VOICE: Start packing up!FEMALE VOICE: Huh?
MALE VOICE: Start packing up!
LUCY: So you're probably thinking that that was the only
gender reveal party
that caused a major multimillion-dollar fire.
But there's been another. The El Dorado Fire.
And it killed a firefighter.
And in 2020, the record-breaking mega fires were started by...
[THUNDER RUMBLES]
...dry lightning...
the weather, who do you blame then?
With all talk about the new normal,
I'm only realizing now
that the normal normal already had a lot of fires.
Take Paradise.
In the 20 years leading up to the Camp Fire,
there had been 13 major fires
and there've already been two since,
including the 2020 Bear Fire that burned
right up to the campfire scar and killed 16.
BRAD: My mom lost her house as a child.
When we were children, we lost our house twice.
Since I've been an adult, I've lost my house twice.
All to fire.
MIKE: You look at Malibu and Paradise.
Both these areas burn all the time.
There's nothing new here.
ED HERLIHY: A rush in forest fire that menaces
the swank Hollywood colony of Malibu.
LUCY: I found films about Malibu burning in the 1940s,
the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s.
REPORTER: Strong winds was blowing it southern.
The houses in the path of the fire stood no chance.
MALE VOICE: It was like a roar.
I never heard anything like that before.
It sounded almost maybe, war-like.
Millions-of-dollars-worth of houses burnt.
REPORTER: The approach of the Los Angeles Fire department now
is to prevent any fire however small.
GLENN: Yeah, I'm wondering if the '61 fire
was a one in a million chance that couldn't happen again.
Or could it be that someday when the Santa Ana is blowing
and the brush is tinder-dry,
the whole story would be repeated.
LUCY: Well, 57 fires have burned through Malibu
since he asked that question.
And it's not just Paradise and Malibu.
The Tubbs Fire in California's Wine Country in 2017 killed 22.
And everyone was so shocked
that it had happened where it had.
But a fire with exactly the same footprint
had burned in 1964.
And what we should be shocked at is that it hadn't stopped
the construction of thousands of homes
right in the line of fire.
HALSEY: I don't understand why you can have
literally hundreds of people dying and homes destroyed,
and we keep going back to what we're doing.
Actually what we do is we do more
of what we've always been doing.
LUCY: Twenty-two people were killed
in the 2018 debris flow caused by the Thomas Fire.
And the Thomas Fire came through here pretty hard.
LUCY: And I found a Woody Guthrie song from the '60s
and a John McPhee article from the '80s
that could have described the exact same incident.
So when people move in, doesn't anyone mention to them
how the previous residents were killed?
I mean how many deaths do we have to have?
How many communities, how many thousands of houses
does it go before we even have a serious discussion.
LUCY: So let's do it.
Let's have that serious discussion.
Between 40 and 50 percent of all the new housing
in California in the last 20 years
is built in hazardous fire areas.
HALSEY: There's this funny term called "the WUI".
Stands for Wildland Urban Interface.
And WUI all it is is like where we live
next to wildland areas.
LYNNIE: And society is grown so much, it's pushing us
more and more on the fringes of these areas.
You're gonna see more catastrophic fires.
You're gonna see more dead people.
This is only the beginning.LUCY: How come?
'Cause there's a 100,000 towns like Paradise.
Right within driving distance.
This community I live in, if you drive around here,
you can look-- you wanna know what Paradise
looked like before the fire, drive on out to Sierra.
Right up the hill here.
Five thousand homes and there's only one way out.
There's a 100,000 people in this county
that would have to evacuate.
What if we're sitting here talking about 3,700 fatalities?
We were that close to having that type of incident.
I think about that quite a bit.
I've been in every major fire in the state since 1990
and you know what, I've never been to a community
that had that much meticulous planning.
We had planned for fires
and a fire very similar to this one happened in 2008
and we didn't have a real good system
for evacuation. So we came up with a new plan.
The town was divided into zones with all the lanes
going out of town. We practiced that.
To empty this place out as quick as we did, I was--
I was pretty happy with how that came out.
The plan worked, the plan worked well.
And it's because we practiced it.
I don't see how they can call wholesale fucking abandon
running, screaming down the street
leaving your car behind a success.
They should be thankful
the whole fucking town didn't die.
What we didn't anticipate is evacuating the entire town
all at once.
It is not possible to build a roadway system
that will take your entire population
all at the same time. No city has that.
Clearly, evacuation of 30,000 people
during a wind-driven forest fire is impossible.
Even just planning an evacuation gives people
this kinda false sense of security
that it's actually possible.
All these places, it's their wind tunnels.
They're very productive, they grow lots of vegetation.
And then we go, and we build a bunch of
little wood stick houses and then we burn them
and people go, "Oh".
MIKE: Behind all this is the lack of regional planning
to control development into hazardous areas.
Even people who live in developed neighborhoods
with green lawns not in sight of any brush or chaparral
or forests at all. Their neighborhoods can burn.
That's the new reality and it frankly,
scares a lot of people to death for good reason.
Could Los Angeles burn?
The urban fabric itself, absolutely.
Easily imagine a Laurel Canyon fire
that ended up on Hollywood or Sunset Boulevard.
These areas where fire's inevitable,
should be public lands. They should be parks.
Back in the 1920s, the most famous urban planners,
the Olmsted Brothers came to LA
and did this comprehensive study and they argued that
people who want to live in the mountains,
they should live essentially in cabins.
And structures of very little value
and not keep great possessions there.
Because fire is inevitable.
LUCY: Imagine that.
Carefree little cabins that you could just let burn,
but a hundred years on it's clear
that we didn't go in that direction.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING, CHEERING ]
MALE VOICE: Kim Kardashian addressed her and Kanye's decision
to hire private firefighters to protect their home
from the wildfires.[HELICOPTER BLADES WHIRRING]
We were fortunate enough and I know that
not everyone has this luxury available to them,
but we were able to get private firefighters.
A company that you can hire.
They saved our home, and you know,
that was such a blessing that we were able to do that.
There's a private for everything.[CHUCKLES]
Right, you can get a...But I do--
it's just like a-- it's an interesting issue
that you know, as climate change is happening,
as these issues are coming up,
is it going to be the people with money
that are able to protect their stuff?
BYOB. Bring Your Own Brigade.
Some people are wealthy enough to have their own brigades.
And it seems to be growing more and more every year.
There's more and more trucks we see.
I mean I've gone to a couple fires.
We pull up to our houses
and there's five other trucks on scene
and none of 'em are from the county or from the city.
They're all private.
In some cases, homeowners will be out saying,
"Hey, you know, fire's in my backyard,
but that's where we got that."
If you're not on list, the bad rap.
So that's kind of the difference between us and them.
You know, we're going to a specific house
to where they are going to all the houses.
HALSEY: So you're wondering why do we approve buildings,
and homes, and communities in places that are dangerous.
And all I can say it's fundamentally about money.
DAVE: Right now a County that's approving a new subdivision
in the Wildland Urban Interface,
they don't bear any liability for that decision.
But when the fire comes, the cost of that decision
is borne by the insurer, by the families themselves,
by federal and state emergency responders.
So we have this disconnect between who bears the cost
of this decision and who, ultimately makes this decision.
And it's a problem.
DON: Following the fire, a lot of insurance companies
started sending non-renewal notices out.
Not even within the fire footprint,
I mean just anybody within the Wildland Urban Interface.
And it's not-- I know it's not just me, it's--
it's other land owners, we were facing
that same problem.
LUCY: After these fires, insurance companies
were dropping customers so fast that the state had to impose
a moratorium, forcing insurers to stay insuring homes from fire
through 2021.
But after that when these homes are no longer insurable,
what's going to happen?
DAVE: That's the path that we're on.
It's a march towards a future of uninsurability
in the Wildland Urban Interface.
We've got into a place in our own trajectory
as human beings where we're so confident
in our ability to control nature and natural events.
And so we've gotta be a little bit less hubristic.
CHAR: It's the city who I think oughta be held responsible.
Homes were okayed by the planning commission
and the zoning board. It's not the fire station's fault.
It's city hall's fault.
FIREFIGHTER: I will tell you this.
We're gonna do all that we can to help rebuild Malibu.
But we do have fire codes
and we have fire codes for a reason.
Because in the past, people have died, number one,
and it's for your safety.
Chief, we've got 3.6 million dollars in the ground
that we can't sell, we can't use,
we can't do anything on.
This is a disaster.
Who's going to put something into action now,
so that we can build our home?
MALIBU COUNCIL MEMBER: Is there any way we could help our residents
get their homes rebuilt quicker?
ZEKE: I understand that we need housing,
but to suspend all planning, just so we can build
stuff faster, that's fucking crazy.
We're just gonna burn those houses up, you know
and we'll be doing this again in 20 years.[SIREN WAILING]
CHAD: So we need to accept that there's gonna be fire
and we need to understand that the goal is to make sure that
when fire occurs, not if but when,
that homes don't burn down.[SIRENS WAILING]
CHAD: What the science is telling us
is that the only way to protect homes
is to make the homes themselves more fire-safe.
Most of the homes that are burning
are not burning from direct contact with flames.
They're burning from embers that are floating on the winds.
STEPHEN: What you have is a blizzard of sparks.
I think of it as a kind of incendiary locust.
And you've got a million of 'em swarming through this town
looking for some place they can burn.
So if there are points of vulnerability,
they are going to find 'em.
This thing was a blazing inferno over here.
I was just sitting on the porch
smoking a cigarette, watching it burn.
Poof.
I have five-eighths in sheetrock and a inch of plaster on this.
These are baked enamel steel frames.
And this is high pressure sensitive glass,
just not quarter inch plate
it's three-eighths inch heat-resisting glass.
I wasn't worried about this house one bit.
There were two houses here.
This was a pyramid, giant pyramid.
The pyramid just went... [MIMICS COLLAPSING SOUND]
Over here. Their dreams went up in smoke.
This is where the fire came from.
You can see how close it came, nothing to burn,
so the fire just went that way.
Same on the other side.
These houses were poorly designed.
Now let's have a mission house, let's have a Tuscan villa,
that's what everybody wants now.
They forget about the eaves and the little things
stick out that make it a Tuscan villa.
That's the first thing that goes.
It gets right up under the eave and blows into the attic.
So that's why these houses burn.
Basically, it's stupid houses.
CHAD: We gotta focus on the homes.
Let me give you an example.
The La Tuna Fire of 2017, this was a fire that was burning
as intensely as any fire you can really imagine
and 1,400 homes in the fire perimeter,
only five burned.
Why did only five burn out of 1,400?
Reason is is that there were annual requirements
to do defensible space.
Any time someone wants to do a remodel of their house,
they say, "Sure, that's fine, but now you're gonna have to
bring that old house up to date with a fire safe code."
We have over 99 percent home survival.
We should all stand up and take notice of that.
JODY: In Paradise, in 2008 the Wildland Urban Interface
design standards came into being.
Fifty-one percent of the structures
built after 2008 survived.
Nine percent of the structures built before 2008 survived.
And what that tells me is that those building standards
make a difference.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
BARRY: Thank you mayor and council members.
So this evening, we're gonna be making a presentation
on recovery projects and ideas for upgraded building standards.
We know what happened here.
Safety has to be at the forefront
of every discussion we have.
The first thing has to do with roof obstructions.
This is a pretty simple one.
It's important, because you do have debris on your roofs here
and with embers coming down they could ignite.
Gutters, we're saying that they're prohibited
except over entries and to prevent erosion.
And that gives you an awful lot of flexibility.
Defensible space and related to that
is a five-foot setback around any structure.
That 5 feet of fire break
is the most important area around your home.
The council isn't taking any action tonight.
We want to hear what you have to say about these ideas.
Green, you put on things you like.[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
Red, you put on things you don't like.
It'll help us to know what you think.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
JIM:
Well, I am a believer in the first five feet.
That is what research has shown to be one of the most,
if not the most critical factor in whether a home burns or not.
All right. All right.
FEMALE VOICE:
I thought that would be popular,
because leaves do stick up there in the gutters.
They are a fire hazard and it costs nothing
not to have them.
LUCY: It was less than a year before this
when 85 people were killed in this town
and there's already been that other fire that killed 16.
And there'll be more fires soon.
But the proven safety measures, they were not proving popular.
This town is going to be so fucking expensive
to live in when this is done.
You're not gonna be able to build anything here
that'll cost less than half a million dollars.
You're in the forest.
If the forest catches on fire, my ass is sorry you're burning.
[WHIRRING]
BRAD: You want a cookie?
Always good, ma. Here you go. Bite.
That'll make you feel better in a little bit, Mama.
Okay.All right.
The pot cookies and stuff they help you better
than anything, huh?That's right.
He was gonna put me on some kind of a pill
and I says, "Doctor Alfteen, you know I don't take those."
He says, "Well, have you ever tried marijuana?"
He says, "You know, it might do you some good."
When I told Brad that Brad had made sure
I got started on marijuana.
And it worked.Oh my, yes.
LUCY: There's a piece of trivia about Paradise.
It is the largest municipality without a sewer
and I've been wondering will we ever get it together
to deal with our own crap?[SIREN BLARING]
ZEKE: It' just like kinda Western anarchy that reaches
a scale of complexity where the system no longer works.
Paradise strong![TRUCK ENGINE REVVING]
[TRUCK HORN HONKING][INDISTINCT CHATTER]
TRINA: It was the gold rush
and the mining and extraction eras.
A lot of the economy of California was built on that
grab and go. Get as much as we can and then get out.
STEPHEN: We know how to keep houses from burning.
We solved the urban fires.[CROWD CHEERING]
STEPHEN: Yeah, you can do everything for your house,
but if your neighbors don't do it for theirs,
you're still at risk.
Kind of a libertarian contract that Americans think
they would prefer if it breaks down.
Fire is that other contagion, wearing masks is like
controlling embers, aerosol dispersion,
defensible space, well, it's social distancing.
The difference is that we don't have a vaccine
that will eliminate fire.
Herd immunity comes at a community level
when you have enough people to provide protection.
[CROWD SCREAMING]
MALE VOICE: I totally understand why people want to rebuild
but I just have this sense of dread
that they're gonna lose it again.
This hesitancy to tell people who are in crisis that
we're gonna put some obstacles in your way.
It's not really doing people any favors in the long run.
LUCY: Maybe because I grew up in Europe,
ideas like American liberty at all costs, manifest destiny,
self-immolation under the mantra
of personal freedom seem insurmountably foreign to me.
[GUNSHOTS]
[BUZZING]
BRAD: Get out the way when that happens.
Got Mom's 90th birthday today.
Smile, Mama.
You look so pretty.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
MIC: The drinks are flowing.Ah.
The music's rolling inside and out.
Oh good.
Everything's good, Mom.Wonderful.
Usually when she doesn't know what she wants.
She wants a cookie.
Just give her half of one.
She said she was uncomfortable.
Well, that'll help, yeah.
RO: You know, it's a day by day thing
and some days are better than others.
But you know, when we have something
to look forward to like Mom turning 90.
FEMALE VOICE: Happy birthday, Nan.
Hey, thank you, sweetheart.
All right, last bite.
I was all, "You already got your cookie for the day,"
she's like, "I hope that wasn't the last one for the day."
I'm like, "It wasn't."Geez, Ma.
Should I have a shot for you?Go ahead.
My house burned, of course.
Now I live here at Bradopolis.
[CHUCKLES] Yeah, I got trailer through insurance.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
You don't regret any of it, do you?
NORMA: No.Right on, Mama.
You know, I love talking to you, Ma.
Up you go.
I have had three cookies.
Are you okay?Oh yeah.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
JODY: Welcome to the meeting of the Paradise Town Council.
It's great to see all of you here.
I think you're all here for
that's the building code changes.
We intend to vote on each potential change individually
And we're first gonna start with public comment.
A lot of these things are taking away
from individuality of the town.
You're telling me if I can't have bark,
and some plants, and rose plants around my house.
I think I understand now what you want.
I was thinking about it.
We could all buy a hot water heater
and cut a door in it
and we'd have an insulated fireproof house.
FEMALE VOICE: The new homes will already be more fire-safe than before.
I didn't hear people begging for higher building codes.
Please let people return and build the homes they want to build.
A majority of people, I have dealt with
are under insured if insured at all.
You have a lot of people
who may not be able to come back.
That would reduce this town's property tax revenue
by a tremendous amount.
That would affect your police department,
your fire department, and your schools.
FEMALE VOICE 2: Paradise is an individualistic town
that's part of the charm and the quirkiness
and we don't need consistency or uniformity.
FEMALE VOICE 3: So shame on you and don't price out
a large percentage of us Paradise residents
who love the ridge and we want to come home.
We don't need to be some kind of experiment
for the rest of the world. Let people come home.
'Cause if people come home, we all didn't go away.
[AUDIENCE CHEERING]
And we that, we're gonna move onto the presentation.
Good evening, council members and mayor.
I think it's important as we report, you remember
that how homes were destroyed and why homes were destroyed.
We're gonna show a short video of what we experienced that day.
As you watch if you can see how important
some of the safety factors that will be discussed tonight,
how important they are on survivability
of the structure.
So for those of you that said that's unrealistic,
because it's in a laboratory, I have a quick clip
from one of our employees.
This is in Paradise at 9:45 in the morning.
I had wanted to make sure that it's fresh in everybody's mind
exactly what took place and there has to be
a little bit of responsibility of that resident making
their structure safe for themselves, their neighbor,
and the community.
Some of this has to go back on you and I.
You can't say, I'm gonna move to the foothills,
where there's trees, brush, and grass
and not know there's a potential for wildfire.
You just-- And not know that you're gonna have to do
something that increase the likelihood of you
and your structure surviving if one breaks out.
If your home doesn't burn down and your neighbor's home
doesn't burn down, their neighbor home
doesn't burn down, evacuation route stays open,
you can get out of town faster.
You know, there's a compound in effect
to good development standards.
Any questions?
If we could do only one thing
to be more fire safe,
what would your recommendation be?
That five-foot area around your house
is extremely important.
That would be the number thing out of all of this
that I would say that would defend your home the best
and have the most impact.
FEMALE VOICE: Thank you very much.
And now, we'll move to item number one.
Interior sprinklers required in all homes.
Crowder?No.
FEMALE VOICE: Schuster?No.
FEMALE VOICE: Zuccolillo?No.
FEMALE VOICE: And Mayor Jones?No.
FEMALE VOICE: Roof obstruction shall not allow
for the collection of debris.
Does anyone want that one?
That one is no also.
Minimum 10-inch roof overhang required, direction is also no.
Garage or storage shed required. So that one is a no also.
LUCY: It was illuminating to be there in the front row.
That's me in the white jacket.
What a civics lesson.
If this is a process for making change to keep us all alive,
I think we're in trouble.
Because these are the proposals that the council members
had told me they thought would save lives.
And here they are voting them down one by one.
This is how hard it is to make a change.
And here comes the most important proposal,
five feet of defensible space around the home.
JODY: So this is a different way of looking
at what our houses would look like.
It's not the way we were raised
or the way we saw our houses before,
but it's another one that doesn't cost extra money
and makes a huge, huge difference.
FEMALE VOICE: Roll call vote. Vice mayor Bolin?
GREG: Aye
FEMALE VOICE: Council member Crowder?
I would like to see some sort of greenery allowed.
STEVE: You have people who go around and know
a fire-resistant plant from a non-fire resistant plant.
It's--MALE VOICE:
STEVE: I just don't know that that's possible.
I don't get it.
JOHN: Remember, non-combustible doesn't mean
you can't have green grass.
You just have non-combustible material
up against your house within five feet.
That's the concept behind it.
Well, I agree with the majority of it,
but I'm thinking there's gonna be
issues and there's gonna be enforcement issues with the--
with the plants.
So I'm gonna say no.
FEMALE VOICE: Council member Schuster?
I have to say no as proposed.
FEMALE VOICE: Council member Zuccolillo?
MIKE: I don't know think we have the plant police,
going around and you know, measuring people's plants
off their buildings. In its current form, I'd say no.
JODY: Okay. It fails.[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
Thank you all for all of your input.
Have a good evening. We're adjourned.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
LUCY: So this is what the fires reveal.
Just as with climate change, we know what the problems are,
we know what the solutions are,
but we're not getting it together to implement them.
MIKE: Fire is a natural light force.
But the mass fires, the fire storms that we've seen,
they changed this.
We're headed off in a direction we don't understand.
We're like passengers on a runaway train
who doesn't know where the tracks
actually lay ahead.
LUCY: In the Christian imagination, hell is fire pits.
It's being burned alive.
These are the very worst things we could imagine.
When we came up with the idea of hell,
it was fire that we imagined
and that's what we're creating for ourselves.
And of course, it's the vulnerable
who suffer the most.
LUCY: So tell us about this structure here?
What is this?This is my home
I started building this four days after the fire--
five days after the fire.
LUCY: Even in Malibu, people are homeless and hurting.
I don't even remember much of the last few months.
LUCY: Do you-- How's it been?And it's--
A blur, really.
I've got what I was able to save packed in the truck.
It's a broken shelter. [CHUCKLES]
It gets cold.
There are drafts in certain places.
So I'm just not set up and I don't wanna be a burden.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MAEVE: Firefighting is definitely not for the faint of the heart.
We do see a lot of fatalities, we see a lot of injuries.
We see a lot of terrible things in this job.
It's pretty hard to just come home,
pretend none of that happened.
My husband's a firefighter like me
and we separated, because of the stress of our jobs.
I was surviving on two to three hours
of sleep a nights for a year and a half.
I felt like there was a pretty significant period
of time where I lost my mind just trying to hold it together.
JOHN: We're away from our families
all summer long.
There's never a break, there's no end in sight.
Work 50, 60, 70 days, get a day off
and go right back on.
The problem isn't going right back on,
it's, "I might go another 70 days."
FRANK: They retired me out post-traumatic stress disorder.
Three little kids are just sitting there...
and...
yeah, after that it was the next shift
I was coming in for, I couldn't wake up.
I guess my body was just telling me,
just, "I don't wanna go to work."
So I came, I said, "I don't feel right,
I just don't feel right."
MALE VOICE: We don't talk so much about the PTSD and the suicides
that causes the firefighters to take their lives.
FIREFIGHTER: And I told my wife the other day, I go,
"I feel like my brain's not firing right."
Our brains are just done. We're just mentally exhausted.
FIREFIGHTER 2: The problem is the ones
that are really hurting the most
often don't say so and then they do something,
it's too late.
"Hey man, are you thinking about doing yourself?"
"Yeah, I am."
I've probably had that six times. "Yeah, I am."
"How about if I help you? Can I help you?"
Not one of those six did themselves.
JASON: It's a long emotional road
and every day I talk to people
who are very much struggling emotionally with each day.
JIM: One of my goals was never ever to seriously injure
or kill a firefighter in the line of duty
and unfortunately, I failed on that note.
Fire killed five United States Forest Service firefighters
at a home that they were defending.
Yeah, that's just one of several.
FIREFIGHTER 2: One of our firefighters Cory Iverson was caught.
His strike team leader Mark Barb ran through
the burning flames and through the brush.
Cory was already dead, but Mark fell on him
and covered him with his body,
so that Cory didn't burn anymore.
That's a reason I wanna protect our firefighters.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[DOGS BARKING]
BRAD: Well, she'd been praying every night that she would die.
That "Come take me", she was ready.
And she passed, took her last breath.
So she was home.
We have a little tradition, I'm putting fruit trees
all the way around the property.
And a handful of ashes from my mom and my wife
will go in each tree all the way around.
My mother would join the rest of the angels,
protecting the house most definitely.
They're our loved ones, they all will stay.
Better put this thing right on outback.
[MAN SINGING IN NATIVE AMERICAN LANGUAGE]
DON: On November 8th, when I saw the fire itself,
I stopped on the side of the road and watched it.
It reminded me of the first fire stories.
The first fire story is a story of fire
that sweeps across the landscape.
It's the one that destroys everything,
then you have nothing left, you're devastated.
And I thought our society is experiencing
the first fire stories that indigenous peoples know about
and then learn to use fire.
And so we as a society need to learn that lesson ourselves
to come back to the second fire stories
which tell us how to use fire.
This is old land, been in use for thousands
and thousands of years.
What we're doing out here is restoring life.
RON: We call this "cultural burning".
Cultural means to cultivate, so when we're using fire,
it's a tool that we're using to restore the land.
DON: One of the reasons why indigenous people burn
historically, was to protect their village areas.
Burn around 'em, because almost all the structures
were made out of the wood.
So by burning the area was to protect around those things.
RON: After we burn, that nutrient
will bring new life back.
A lot of people had this concept that this was a wilderness
that was purely untouched.
But in fact it was highly manipulated.
LUCY: Was I wrong to want the fires put out?
I realized I was one in a long line of Europeans
who'd landed in California and misunderstood the place.
ZEKE: The real roots of our forestry and fire crises
are in idea of white supremacy.
You know, our European ancestors when they encountered
the native people they couldn't imagine
that these people they were meeting might have
advanced scientific knowledge of how to manage the landscape
that was based on thousands of years of experimentation
and observation.
The native people who lived here rely directly on the land
for everything about their lives.
There were management objectives that they achieved using fire.
Like more acorns or let's move the branches up higher on trees,
so we can see people sneaking up to kill us.
TRINA: I told my grandpa what I was doing
a few years ago and he said,
"Oh, you're trying to do what I was trying to do."
Forest thinning and work with other tribes and other communities
and it's generation after generation
of tribal knowledge being available,
but the larger society not willing to look at that
as a viable answer.
The fire can be our friend or it can be our enemy.
And we need people, fire has always been our friend.
[MAN SINGING IN NATIVE AMERICAN LANGUAGE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
BRIANNA: We got stripped of our natural right
to be able to burn
and now it's getting harder to teach the next generation
what a good burn is, not to be afraid of fire.
Burning this feels so natural and it's like I had this fire
inside of me also that was dormant
for such a long time, got laid down, got put out
and now I'm that I'm putting fire back on,
it's also like reigniting the fire
that I had inside myself.
DANNY: It's really the only way that you could really manage
big areas.
There's only so much thinning and piling, fuel breaks,
and stuff we could do when you know fire
is the most cost effective and easiest way of doing it
with the least amount of resources
TRINA: It's actually harder to get a fire started
than people might think.
Add a little wind.
Today's a really good day for burn conditions,
because of higher humidity, lower temperatures,
and this area isn't heavily fueled.
This is what we're talking about, a low intensity fire.
Very, very short flame lengths.
So if you can imagine back a long time ago,
this would just be a family thing
and it was kind of in our family,
where we would just spend a good part of the day
just doing this, standing around talking, visiting.
And it just brings itself out.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
STEPHEN: Temperate Europe is a real anomaly in the world,
because it doesn't have a pattern of wetting to dry,
and those parts of the world that have those conditions
don't have natural basis for fire,
and they're pretty small parts of the world.
So Europeans didn't like fire,
they didn't see any natural purpose to it
and they just saw it as bad behavior,
as a kind of lawlessness that needed to be controlled.
LUCY: And of course, the impact of European arrogance
has not been constrained to the USA.
FIREFIGHTER 1: Cultural burning is not just about
aboriginal people, putting, dropping matches
in the country and burn a country.
FIREFIGHTER 2: It's very technical
and there's a lot of science and layers, and layers,
and layers of knowledge.
FIREFIGHTER 1: It's bad enough that our people have lost
their own identity through being dispossessed from their land,
but because of mismanagement of country, even now countries
losing it's own identity through these invasive grasses
and shrubs taking over areas where they're not meant to be.
ZEKE: And we kind of need to flip the script
and start telling a different story about fire
in the landscape that doesn't cast it as a villain,
that casts it actually as the tool.
STEPHEN: For almost all of our existences as species
we managed to live with fire well.
We've lost that.
We have a sense that we have to dominate it,
control it, some kind of Promethean image.
But fire has been on this planet for 420 million years.
As long as plants have been on land,
they have burned. We are not going to stop that,
we can't afford to stop it.
So what fire does is it takes in oxygen
and then gives off water vapor and carbon dioxide.
When it occurs within us, we call it "respiration".
Occurs in cells.
When it occurs in the open landscape,
we call it "fire". But it's the same chemistry.
We are the fire creature...
and we use that to make the world more habitable.
This is what we do, you know other animals knock over trees
and dig holes in the ground. We do fire.
And the hearth fire, is the very essence
of domesticity and family.
I mean if we lit a fire here,
we would all be standing around it.
[SCREAMS]I am in the middle.
No, I am.I am!
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
Oh, make out your own with a hose.
Fire is a good thing, to stay warm?
Yeah.BRAD: Yeah.
Getting ready to plant the vegetables.
Over here we just started cleaning the garden out
and then now the orange trees all getting in bloom
and the lemon trees and it'll smell so good.
On the anniversary of my wife's passing,
Roni came up to talk to me and we sat and talked
and we've been together since.
And it's been great, and peaceful, and wonderful.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
Almost ready.Oh, praise you, baby.
It's only at 98 degrees,
we got about another 30 degrees to go.
Oh.
He's a wonderful man.
They broke the mold when they made him,
'cause they don't make 'em like that anymore.
Roni lived right over there.
See that burnt down piece of tin over there,
that was Roni's house.
So we lived that far apart and I didn't know she liked me.
It took the fire I guess to openin' my eyes
to all this is just replaceable.
Love is all you got. Family is all you got.
So that's what's important.
We can always start over.
Always.Yeah.
Don't need to all the time.[CHUCKLES]
LUCY: This is very special.
Yeah.Yes.
Really good, really good. Life is really good.
[LAUGHS]
THOR: There's change and how we handle it.
How we internalize and feel about the change.
It informs who we are, who our personality,
who our character is. What do you see behind is?
Hello?
Now gone.
Wow, what a gift.
PICO: Maybe it's good to remind ourselves of how we many things
we can't control.
I was spending most of my time
reading these burning house poems,
that are very, very common in Japan,
because fire and impermanence sit at the heart
of that culture.
There's a poem, "My husband down,
now I can see more clearly the rising moon."
That clarifies your perspective, and it makes you remember
what you care about, and it takes the clutter
out of your head and out of your life.
DON: The wind patterns and the migrations of the birds,
the order of flowering of certain plants,
those kind of things are all the landscape
communicating with you, but in modern society
people tend to just uproot and move places
And they rely on their technology.
TRINA: Once people realize that the place that they're in
has its own voice if they take the time to start
to learn that language of that place,
then that place will respond to them in a different way.
And they will understand that place in a different way.
And that's when it becomes really, really beautiful.
DANNY: It doesn't take a college genius to figure out
how to treat Mother Nature right.
Mother Nature was pissed.
Little more respect.Yup.
Treat the land with respect.
Get rid of all that plastic crap you been playing with.
The shopping bag almost destroyed this place.
I mean they're everywhere.
BRAD: Shopping bags.Diapers
BRAD: Bottled water.
LUCY: You and three others thinking that
you guys have something--Well, something-- We-- Some of us are on the same page.
LUCY: None of us wants hell on earth.
None of us wants our home to burn down,
but what does it take to agree with people
we're not supposed to?
We are environmentalists, okay.
We love our environment, okay.
HOWARD: The Native Americans back in ancient times,
they'd leave in the winter and when they left,
they'd set the place on fire.
PETE: And that's where the old ranchers learned it from.
Something's wrong.Yeah.
That's why the alternate ways-- Maybe we need to go back
a hundred years and say, "They did it right, okay
and we've mismanaged it."
LUCY: There's been an update from Sierra Pacific Industries.
Remember those young tree plantations
we visited and I got upset where the fire had burned
through so quickly on its way to Paradise.
They've decided not to replant them.
That all burned in 2008 and here you know,
ten years later it burned again.
So obviously there's some work that could be done there
to help, you know, keep that from happening again.
We learned a lot after I saw what happened over there.
DON: We thought this would be a good anchor point
for bringing the fire back into this landscape
and so after they send it, then we came in
and put the fire on the ground to manage the fuels
and hopefully, within the next few years,
we'll be able to come back and we do another burn
to maintain the fuel densities
and the diversity of species that we have out here.
STEPHEN: Fire even has a kind of moral presence
indirectly, because it forces people to choose.
As the old signs in theBible of the Trying Fire.
The fire will try each of us and determine
of what sort we are.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
[ALL LAUGH]
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
My mother wanted me to wear this, so.
I know, yeah, let's go. The wedding party is here.
Oh shit.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
VICAR: Bradley, do you take this woman to be your wife,
to love and to honor her, to comfort her,
to learn and grow with her for as long as you both shall live?
Of course.
Do you take this man to be your husband,
to love and to honor him?RONI: Absolutely.
[GUESTS CHEERING]
By the power vested in me,
you guys are now husband and wife.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
["“WE HAVE IT ALL"” PLAYING]
♪ There was fire around us So I should have known why ♪
♪ The touch of his hands Were as cold as his eyes ♪
♪ So don't you tell me We weren't hypnotized ♪
♪ Whoa oho
♪ The print was so small, I didn't understand ♪
♪ He cut our thumbs and placed A feather in our hands ♪
♪ Told us we would see all Our dreams and plans unfold ♪
♪ Oho
♪ Our hearts we have sold
♪ For diamonds and gold
♪ But hey, baby, take a look
♪ We have it all
♪ All my life I've been heading for hell ♪
♪ But never had I thought I'd drag you down as well ♪
♪ I just couldn't resist What he was trying to sell ♪
♪ Oho oho
♪ Our hearts we have sold
♪ For diamonds and gold
♪ But hey, baby, take a look
♪ We have it all
♪ Hear me
♪ Can you hear me
♪ I am calling out to you
♪ For the last time
♪ Hear me
♪ Please forgive me
♪ I am calling out to you
♪ For the last time