Paradise is still closed and it is an eerie place. There is a mandatory evacuation
order still in place which means only the media and some power crews are being
allowed in. After this fire the largest and most voracious in California's
recent history tore through 230 square miles of bone dry forests, whipped up by
high winds. It destroyed 10,000 homes both here and in settlements further up
the ridge. As you say 79 people have been confirmed dead but that missing list, the
number of unaccounted, sits now at around 700. Now we've spoken to one young woman who
believes her mother is dead and we also spoke to the last man standing in this town that he loves.
The climate is good, it's nice and peaceful,
everybody's got a smile on their face, a nice good morning for everybody. Yeah I wouldn't call paradise for nothing.
Lift your gaze in Paradise and the
canopy looks like it always has but at ground level the intimate
wreckage of thousands of lives is on display. Stairways that hang midair,
backyard playgrounds melted and cars that nobody will drive to work or the shops again.
It went fast all of this went fast from the time we saw the fire
till the fire was over there, 20 minutes everything was on fire.
Brad Weldon is one of only a handful of the town's 27,000 residents who stayed
and survived. He fought the flames with two garden hoses and the help of a friend's son.
The real scary part where you were having to hose yourself down to
keep from burning up was over so.
- And you did that?
- Oh yeah one time both of us
really oh yeah turn the hose on yourself lay down on the ground put the hose on
yourself because the fire was coming right at us.
This is what it looked like from their house that morning.
- Well it was a complete fire storm and the fire
came through here so fast it was like a blowtorch. It was so much black smoke it was like
midnight out here.
- As they fought the flames Brad's mother waited inside.
She's blind, she can't see, she can't walk around and so she just had to stay and
be patient.
- The noises must have been terrifying.
- Scared her to death
yeah she was really scared but she's a tough old girl she hangs right in there.
- Sounds like it runs in the family. Brad's convinced if he'd tried to leave
his mother would not have survived, suffering the same fate as hundreds
still on the town's missing list.
- Missing list is mostly people in their late 70s,
80s, 90s most of them this was a huge retirement community. There was no
warning, there's no public sirens none of that stuff around here, there was
absolutely no warning for most of these people half of more still in bed and that
went through and ate them. And they didn't even know.
- The list is on display
at evacuation centres like the encampment outside the Walmart in nearby
Chico. Currently it runs to nearly 700 names but local officials insist it's a
rough list printed in the hope some who were wrongly included will come forward.
On the day of the fire in Paradise in their house in the center of town
Victoria Taft, elderly and disabled, wouldn't leave.
She thought her daughter was overreacting.
Yeah we had fought for that time incident and I wasn't reacting well to
it all and I it wasn't going to be that bad and whoever she called you know they
didn't know about it either so and we didn't get any notification
the whole time. She thought society was better and you know the authority would tell her.
- Things would work?
- Yeah
- Seeing the scale of the fire as she escaped
Christina says she called the authorities every 15 minutes begging
them to get her mother out.
She had blindness from glaucoma and some neck and
back problems, she couldn't drive and I had told them that and you know they
just said, really, 'we had 500 calls like this' and sent it all to the police line.
Those who are missing loved ones can register at local relief centres but it's been a
frustrating process for Christina. It's been six days since she gave a DNA swab
to match human remains found at the house she believes are her mother's.
Well they took her off the missing list, what people told me and I did check today and
she's not on there but then they won't call me about it
and they don't put it on the deceased list so I'm kind of like waiting.
- How would you describe your feelings at the moment? I'm guessing a lot of grief but
also a lot of yeah a lot of anger?
Yeah a lot of anger, sadness, loss there's guilt and shame and
of course everyone says you know it it wouldn't be smart to wait but you
know everyone I'm talking to you almost waited until the flames
were in the yard
- Those life-and-death decisions, whether
someone would have survived had they left sooner, had the roads been clearer,
had there been a better warning system or better preparations: all hang in the
air in Paradise. For now forensics team continue to sift the ashes for remains.
One official told me the fire was so intense they're looking for pieces of
bone no bigger than a 50p coin. But this almost impossible task is only the
beginning to a search for answers over what happened here and how it's possible
that in America's wealthiest state hundreds of lives may have been erased
without a trace.
So we've spoken to the county about that concern expressed by residents about a
lack of warning. They say they're still collecting information but they believe
that system was working. They had a system in place alerting residents by
text message but you had to sign up for that message
in order to get it. Others say that there were some police
officers knocking on people's doors but the county says because of the speed of
the fire they simply weren't able to reach everyone. They've told us that no
single system is a 100 per cent perfect,
they say there weren't enough, certainly weren't enough, fire engines in the town.
When it comes to how relatives are being treated, relatives like Christine, they
say that they are confident that people are receiving all the assistance they
need. But in the aftermath of this there are certainly questions not only for the
county to answer but for the state and federal governments about their forest
management and
California has become a cauldron of climate change with these
mega fires and ongoing drought. Rains are actually forecast here tonight which is
good news in the sense that it will put out what's remaining of the fires but it
also means that there is a risk now of flash flooding and indeed of mudslides
given that the town has been reduced to ash. It also makes all the more difficult
this painstaking search for the remains of hundreds of people who may have died
in Paradise.
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