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Sometime before 7 A.M. on November 8, Kit Bailey, an assistant chief with the , got a call about a new wildfire that sounded ominous. , an old Northern California gold-mining town notched into the windy and wooded Feather River Canyon.

Bailey, a 57-year-old German-Irish man with gray hair and a handlebar mustache, knew the area well. During a 39-year career that included stints as a hotshot, smoke jumper, and a chief officer on a Type 1 team, he’d fought many “stubborn fucking fires” in the canyon. Tucked into the Sierra Nevada foothills, the place had always provided ideal habitat for blazes, which could stay fueled for months by the grasses and pines clinging to the gorge’s steep walls.

—named for a tributary of the Feather River—didn’t stay confined for long. A northwest wind blowing at 40 miles an hour pushed flames into a grassy swale on the canyon’s north slopes. Within minutes, 700 feet of hillside turned to ash. Soon the fire vaulted into a stand of ponderosa pines on the plateau north of the Feather. Smoke and heat tugged burning needles off branches. Then the wind snatched them up, and a blizzard of flaming matches was suddenly cartwheeling thousands of feet into the air. The needles landed a mile or more ahead of the main blaze, and new hot spots bloomed. The fire leapfrogged north and west, burning an area the size of Central Park every eight minutes.

Concow, one of dozens of unincorporated communities in the Sierra foothills, sits on a lake that was just four miles downwind of Pulga, and houses there were burning by 7:35 A.M. Awakened by flames in their driveways, some families jumped into the lake to survive. They spent hours on a small island, shivering through hypothermia in the reflection of burning homes. Many of the community’s 700 people were severely burned and at least eight died, including 48-year-old Jesus Fernandez. Smoke killed him outside his house, likely while he tried to catch his dog.

Meanwhile, the fire sprinted on.

“Go hard,” Bailey’s chief told him when he called for an update. Bailey drove north, his speedometer quivering into the nineties. His main concern was that the fire would do exactly what it was already doing: dash across the plateau where Concow sat, hurdle the west branch of the Feather, and land in the pines on the next plateau to the north. This area was home to Paradise, a town of almost 27,000 retirees and families. It contained 20 churches and an equal number of mobile home parks, a Kmart, a KFC, a hospital, and nine schools that served 3,500 kids—many of whom were just now climbing aboard school buses for the day.

In the months before the Camp Fire broke out, Northern California was experiencing similar conditions that led to the terrible , where wind-driven blazes destroyed 8,920 homes and killed 44 people.

Dry grass was a culprit in both disasters. On a research farm about 30 miles south of Paradise, scientists from the have, since 1978, measured how much grass or fine fuels grow every year—a critical factor in how quickly a fire spreads during dry months. Both 2017 and 2018 saw banner crops of grass, but with important differences in how they germinated and were nourished by rain.

Last year’s grass boom happened because of the wettest winter the Sacramento area had seen in 122 years. The 2018 crop emerged thanks to one damp month. Coming on the heels of a winter that provided far-below-average snowpack, March and April were warm and relatively wet—peak growing season. The grasses rioted; last spring, the U.C. Davis team harvested a bit more than 5,500 pounds of grass per acre, almost twice the normal amount.

Then conditions worsened drastically. The last measurable rain was on May 25, and July was the warmest on record. The spring’s green grass turned brown and crispy. According to Brent Wachter, a Northern California forecaster who specializes in fire-related weather monitoring, the Sierra foothills became “a tall mat of woven fire starters.”

Even before the Camp Fire, wildfires had caused historic damage. By November 7, they’d burned an astonishing 1.3 million acres in Northern California alone—about 15 percent of the total land burned nationwide in 2018. That figure included a record-setting blaze that , along with , 90 minutes north of Paradise, , and created a little-known meteorological phenomenon known as . Those occur when the hot air lifting off flames creates a vortex when it’s hit by the prevailing breeze.

Then came the fierce dry winds. By late October, the high-pressure system that scorched California throughout the summer had drifted out over the Pacific—a seasonal trend that usually signals relief. But in the first days of November, that air slid east and south over Oregon before tucking in behind California’s Sierra Nevada on November 7. Next it shifted west. Around midnight, this huge balloon of warm, dry air bent over the crest of the Sierra and deflated, sending winds howling down the long western slope of the mountains and toward the Sacramento Valley.

The exact cause of the Camp Fire remains under investigation, but defective power lines may have provided the spark. Not long after 6 A.M. on November 8, a Cal Fire crew stationed at nearby Jarbo Gap drove into the Feather River Canyon after a fire was reported near a malfunctioning line—a common cause of wildfires, especially in extreme winds. Less than 15 minutes later, at 6:33, the crew’s captain, Matt McKenzie, was standing on a small dam on the Feather, looking north at a glowing spot on a ridge he couldn’t reach. There was no road access. The fire was already burning ten acres.

“This has got potential for a major incident,” McKenzie told a dispatcher. He called for as many additional firefighters as could be found. But even if air tankers, engines, and hotshot crews had all been pre-positioned just moments away, it wouldn’t have mattered. Not in those conditions.

Gary Glotfelty, a wiry 75-year-old retired firefighter who lived on Paradise’s northeast tip, was just finishing his coffee on November 8 when his phone rang. It was the caregiver for his disabled 42-year-old son, Cody, who lived in a group home in the middle of town. They were now evacuating to the KFC, the caregiver said, a predetermined safety zone.

This worried Glotfelty. He left his wife, Rhoda, at home and rushed to pick up their son. But this wouldn’t be the usual four-minute trip. By 8:30 A.M., just two hours after the fire started, every side street in Paradise was packed with cars funneling onto the three roads that exited town to the west. The first major traffic jam was reported around 9 A.M. on Clark Road.

Most people had heard of the fire through texts or calls. Some heard about it from the police, who were driving through town, using loudspeakers to tell residents to “Ge