Fire in Paradise

Rarely is the bad thing about a documentary that its too short, but in this case it felt like the story was cut off quite abruptly. A well made doc though, compelling story and relevant interviews.

These first person accounts were most interesting but the documentary has a subtext that climate change is the reason for so many destructive forest fires in California. Only part of one sentence mentions the real reason for these disasters and that one sentence tries to diminish it. Forest fires are natural and lighting starts them as they are a part of the natural ecosystem. However, in California so called environmentalists have put through laws which allow the build up of dense waste material on the forest floor for years, which in the past nature addressed with natural burning. Due to these forced buildups, when the ignition spark finally comes such fires are supercharged and almost impossible to control. The climate in California is the same climate that weather researchers have recorded for many decades. And, as in the past, there are dry spells and high winds that are natural for the region. A change to a more sensible pragmatic forest management concerning waste buildup on the forest floor, like was in place decades ago, would make forest fires in California manageable again.

Fire in Paradise is a devastating recount of a wildfire that bulldozed through the small town of Paradise, California in 2018. In this documentary, individuals who lived through the event share their firsthand experiences of being a teacher in a school bus full of children getting stuck in a sea of traffic on the road to evacuation, a mother camping out in a building surrounded by exploding propane tanks with her kids, or serving as a volunteer firefighter working to save those who were left behind. Footage reveals the horrifying conditions that the people of Paradise had to go through during their escape from the fire and the completely flattened neighborhoods and buildings that many residents will never be able to return to.

This 2018 wildfire, officially known as The Camp Fire, spread in an unusually rapid way, compared to other wildfires, covering 153,335 acres, and killing a total of 85 people in the two weeks that it burned for. The fire ignited due to an old, poorly-maintained electrical transmission. This region of California had been facing a wind storm and a drought at the time that the fire started, and a firefighter interviewed in Fire in Paradise states that the California humidity levels had greatly decreased in recent years. At its' peak, the fire was able to spread at a rate of about 80 football fields a minute, quickly trapping residents of the area and creating mass panic as traffic jams arose on evacuation routes. The neglection of transmission tower conditions is a surprisingly prevalent issue and highly irresponsible, unsustainable, and, as seen in this documentary, dangerous issue with electric companies. Issues like this can create an increased potential for wildfires, risk that has already grown as global climate change causes the temperature to rise and the humidity to drop in many areas. By creating more cautious maintenance standards for gas and electrical companies, we can take away some factors in this problem, but the most change would come from recognizing and taking direct action towards the issue of global warming.

Fire in Paradise was a harrowing portrayal of an event that many people have seen through news broadcasts or articles, but seeing and hearing stories directly from people who experienced it firsthand gave me a visceral reaction. This short documentary had me captivated and in awe throughout each survivor's story as well as the footage from during and after the fire's destruction. From an outside perspective it is impossible to comprehend the fear and devastation that these families and individuals lived through, but I think that this documentary may be as close as one could get. I would recommend this film to everyone and believe that this documentary is very important to watch, as fear is often a necessary force to inspire people to make change.

Towards the end of the documentary I saw a skeleton in a car, but it may not have been real. To my knowledge, all cadavers were removed as soon as they were found. Nobody was allowed back into Paradise until everything had been inspected, which took a couple of months. If they were joking about the skeleton being there, it was in very poor taste.

I was tearing up the whole time. It's a heartbreaking point of view from a few victims caught in the horrific "camp fire" fire. There's videos from phones and dash cans and I was on the edge of my seat and tearing up. I definitely recommend watching this.