At 7:46 a.m. on November 8, 2018, the Camp Fire jumped the Feather River in Northern California. Driven by 40-mile-an-hour winds and months of desiccating drought, it moved so fast that bulldozers racing to carve a break in the forest never reached the line. Within four hours, the town of Paradise lay in smoking ruin. Eighty-five people were dead, nearly 19,000 structures had vanished, and a century of “no-burn” policy lay exposed as the true arsonist. Three hundred miles north, on a bend...
