The 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California's Butte County was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. The blaze began on the morning of November 8, 2018 when hardware on a poorly maintained Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) transmission line in the Feather River Canyon failed during strong katabatic winds. Those winds rapidly drove the Camp Fire through the communities of Concow, Magalia, Butte Creek Canyon and Paradise, mostly destroying them. The fire burned for another two weeks and was finally contained on Sunday, November 25 after burning 153,336 acres (62,050 ha). The Camp Fire caused 85 fatalities, displaced more than 50,000 people and destroyed over 18,000 structures, and caused an estimated $16.5 billion in damage.
PG&E filed for bankruptcy in January 2019, citing expected wildfire liabilities of $30 billion. On December 6, 2019, the utility made a settlement offer of $13.5 billion for the wildfire victims as the offer covered several devastating fires caused by the utility, including the Camp Fire. On June 16, 2020, the utility pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter.
Background
Fire hazard studies
The footprint of the Camp Fire had experienced 13 large wildfires since 1999. In 2008, the Humboldt Fire and the Butte Lightning Complex burned 100,000 acres (40,470 ha) on either side of Paradise, destroying hundreds of buildings in the region. In 2005, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) released a fire management plan for the region, which warned that the town of Paradise was at risk for an east wind-driven conflagration similar to the Oakland firestorm of 1991.
In June 2009, a Butte County civil grand jury report concluded that the roads leading from Paradise and Upper Ridge communities had "significant constraints" and "capacity limitations" on their use as evacuation routes. The report noted a combination of road conditions "which increases the fire danger and the possibility of being closed due to fire and or smoke", namely sharp curves, inadequate shoulders, and fire hazards adjacent to shoulders, such as "fire fuel and steep slopes". The report also recommended a moratorium on new home construction in fire-prone areas. In September 2009, the Butte County Board of Supervisors called the grand jury report "not reasonable", citing improved building codes and fire prevention requirements as arguments against a moratorium.
Despite these reports, Paradise city planners did not include study results in new plans. In 2009, the town of Paradise proposed a reduced number of travel lanes on the roadways and received state funding from the California Department of Transportation to implement a road diet along Skyway, Pearson Road, and Clark Road, three of the town's main thoroughfares and evacuation routes. Paradise planners opted in March 2015 to convert Skyway into a one-way route during emergencies, effectively doubling its capacity. Despite this change, the roads out of Paradise were only capable of evacuating around a fourth of the population within two hours.
Pre-fire prevention efforts
Residential development into wilderness areas, known as the wildland–urban interface (WUI), requires increased state resources to safeguard these communities. To recoup associated costs, California imposed a special fee on property owners in WUI zones; the fee was largely unpopular, with assemblyman Devon Mathis stating "not one cent has gone to putting more boots on the ground". The fee was suspended and repealed by the California State Legislature in July 2017.
Initially, much of the fire-fee revenue funded existing fire programs; the process of building out new prevention programs was slow, but the revenue did fund projects such as secondary evacuation routes and fuel reduction zones. In August 2018, three months before the fire, fire safe councils in the Paradise region were given $5 million in grants from the fire prevention programs to pay for fuel reduction and education projects.
Despite years of fuel reduction funded by special fees, numerous wildfires ravaged wildland–urban communities. Investigations found that PG&E power line failures during high winds had caused many of the fires. Utilities have the ability to disable dangerous power lines; however, the nearly 100-year-old transmission lines required intentional manual effort. PG&E shut off residential power to some customers, particularly in Paradise, in the days leading up to the fire. Following the 2017 North Bay fires, PG&E adopted a policy that precluded shutting off lines carrying more than 115 kV due to the number of customers who would be adversely affected by such a shutdown.
Infrastructure oversight inspection
The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is responsible for inspecting PG&E's electrical infrastructure. The scope of the CPUC in relation to the scope of electrical infrastructure is unbalanced, however, and the CPUC has had difficulty fulfilling their oversight mandate.
A CPUC inspection of the section of the 115 kV Caribou-Palermo line at the origin of the Camp Fire had not been conducted in six years. Many of the electrical towers along the line are original to the Upper North Fork Feather River Project, which was constructed in the early 1900s. A 2009 inspection noted three-bolt connectors, used to join two conductors, were in need of replacement, which PG&E said had been done by 2016. In a 2011 audit, the CPUC found several thousand deficiencies, some of which PG&E disputed; it was not clear if the number of deficiencies on the Caribou-Palermo line were unusually high. A 2012 windstorm brought down five towers.
After the Camp Fire, the CPUC's Safety and Enforcement Table Mountain Division audited three years of the missing ten years of PG&E's records. Focusing on where the Camp Fire broke out, the audit found "the company was late in fixing 900 problems on its towers and other equipment, including two critical threats that regulators say languished more than 600 days before being repaired." In May 2018, the CPUC gave PG&E permission to replace the aging line, though the design did not include line hardening through high fire hazard areas.
Dry conditions
The winter of 2016–2017 saw above-average precipitation across much of California, ending a six-year statewide drought. One of the effects of the wet winter was the second spring in a row with an above-average grass crop. That winter was followed by that of 2017–2018, which was both hotter and drier than average, allowing for "fine fuels" such as grass to carry over from the previous year. A third consecutive above-average grass crop developed following a warm and wet March 2018. This was followed by the cessation of rain in late April, and a hot and dry summer in Northern California.
Paradise received only 0.88 inches (2.2 cm) of rain between May 1 and mid-November, when it typically received more than seven inches (18 cm). The U.S. Drought Monitor had logged Butte County in the "Abnormally Dry" category beginning in late June. By November 8, Butte County's lower elevations had gone more than 200 days without receiving one-half inch (1.3 cm) of rain. The energy release component (ERC), a metric for the dryness and flammability of vegetation, was above average all summer. As summer turned into fall and significant rain had not materialized by early October, ERC levels were well above average, and on the day of the start of the Camp Fire, they were setting records for the date. The National Fire Danger Rating System had four reporting stations in Butte County. On November 8, all of them reported fire danger ratings of "Very High" or "Extreme".
Katabatic winds
At the time of the fire's ignition, an upper-level atmospheric ridge (an elongated region of high pressure) was positioned off the coast of California. Its placement, allowing for northerly atmospheric flow, created an east–west pressure gradient. At the same time, a shortwave trough (a smaller-scale 'kink' of low pressure embedded in the flow) was moving over California, acting to intensify the pressure gradient. This created katabatic winds in many valleys in the western Sierra Nevada. Such winds form when the cool, high pressure airmass in the Great Basin spills through the narrow canyons that cut through the Sierra as it moves towards the warmer, low pressure airmass closer to the coast. The National Weather Service (NWS) described this as a "common synoptic pattern for strong winds and very dry conditions".
The NWS office in Sacramento issued a fire weather watch on November 5, which was upgraded to a red flag warning on November 6. The warning was effective for the night of Wednesday, November 7, through the morning of Friday, November 9, and it called for relative humidity levels in the single digits and wind gusts of up to 55 miles per hour (89 km/h). The meteorologist-in-charge at the Sacramento NWS office called it "a significant red-flag event and one of the stronger ones of the season". PG&E informed 70,000 customers, residents of Paradise among them, that the utility company was considering shutting off their power to lessen the fire risk from downed power lines. PG&E eventually decided that conditions did not warrant it. The planned outage would not have prevented the Camp Fire's ignition, as the company did not de-energize transmission lines.
The downslope winds that formed on November 8 were particularly intense through Jarbo Gap, an area where air squeezes through the Feather River Canyon from the northeast. These "Jarbo Gap winds" commonly developed in the autumn, and in the fifteen years prior to the Camp Fire, records showed 35 days with wind gusts higher than 100 miles per hour (160 km/h).
Gusty winds at Jarbo Gap began at about 7:00 p.m. on November 7 and increased over the next two hours. By 4:00 a.m. on November 8, a remote automated weather station east of Paradise was recording sustained 32-mile-per-hour (51 km/h) winds and 52-mile-per-hour (84 km/h) gusts. By the time of the Camp Fire's ignition, the Jarbo Gap weather station was recording 18-mile-per-hour (29 km/h) winds out of the northeast with 40-mile-per-hour (64 km/h) gusts. The relative humidity level was 23 percent.
Ignition
The Camp Fire was caused by the failure of a single metal hook attached to a PG&E transmission tower on the company's Caribou-Palermo transmission line, which carried power from hydroelectric facilities in the Sierra Nevada to the Bay Area. The tower, a little under 100 feet (30 m) tall, was built on a steep incline on a ridge above Highway 70 and the North Fork Feather River near the community of Pulga.
The tower had two arms, each with a hook hanging from a hole in a long piece of metal. The hook held up a string of electrical insulators. The transmission power lines were suspended by these insulators, away from the steel tower itself so as to prevent electricity arcing between them. One of the hooks on the tower (about three inches (7.6 cm) wide and one inch (2.5 cm) in diameter) had been worn down by rubbing against the metal plate that it hung from, to the point where only a few millimeters of metal remained.
At 6:15 a.m. PST on November 8, a PG&E control center in Vacaville recorded an outage on the company's transmission line in the Feather River Canyon. The hook—which was about 7/8ths worn through—had snapped under the weight of the power line and insulator string that it supported, which weighed more than 142 pounds (64 kg). No longer held up, the energized power line struck the transmission tower. This created an electric arc between the power line and the tower, which reached temperatures estimated at 5,000 to 10,000 °F (2,800 to 5,500 °C) and melted metal components of the conductor and the tower. The molten metal fell into the brush beneath the tower, setting it alight.
Progression
November 8
At about 6:20 a.m., a PG&E employee driving eastbound on Highway 70 in the Feather River Canyon spotted the fire and radioed his colleagues at Rock Creek Powerhouse; they called 911, who in turn transferred the call to the Cal Fire Emergency Communications Center (ECC) at 6:25 a.m. Additional calls to 911 followed, describing the fire as about 100 by 100 feet (30 by 30 m) in area, underneath the electrical transmission lines on the north side of the North Fork Feather River.
By 6:31 a.m., Cal Fire had notified firefighters at Fire Station 36 (located near Concow/Jarbo Gap) of the fire. By 6:35 a.m., two fire engines had left the station and were en route via Highway 70. They stopped above Poe Dam, on the opposite side of the Feather River, to survey the fire. At 6:44 a.m., the fire captain made an initial report to the Cal Fire ECC, describing the fire's inaccessibility and prospective growth.