Original subtitles

[BIRDS CHIRPING]

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:

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:

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]

[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!

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]

[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