This was Paradise: ‘How do you quantify everything...

PARADISE, Butte County — A settler named this place in 1864, at the end of a hot and dusty day of travel. As oak land gave way to pine, he took a deep breath of the cool mountain air and said, “This is paradise.”

Or that’s what people say happened, anyway. Every little town has its stories, even Paradise, though it didn’t become a town until 1979 when it was incorporated. It was a quiet community, nestled on a wide ridge in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada — a little-known place recalled only for its proximity to bigger places. Sacramento: 90 miles, Chico: 12, Oroville: 25.

Until the Camp Fire leaped into this town of 26,000 people Thursday morning.

Parents had already dropped their small children off at Paradise Elementary School. Seniors were eating scrambled eggs and taking their prescription pills at assisted living facilities. The five town council members had already driven to their offices. Normal tasks on what seemed a normal day.

The Camp Fire struck with a ferocity that shocked wildfire experts.

Twenty-three people were confirmed dead and more than 100 were missing as of Saturday, making the fire the third deadliest wildfire in California history.

It was also the most destructive blaze in state history, toppling the Tubbs Fire from the spot only one year after it blitzed through Santa Rosa. But unlike there, in Paradise, the blaze overtook the entire town, leaving few buildings standing.

By Saturday, 6,453 homes and 260 commercial buildings in and around Paradise were confirmed destroyed. The entire Town Council was suddenly homeless, and so was half of the police and fire force.

Now, everyone knows Paradise. TV crews with their big lights and firefighters in their protective gear drive its decimated streets. In Chico and Oroville, where evacuees fled, people talked about it in hushed horror. The place is a smoldering ghost town and its reservoir dried up.

“This event was the worst case scenario,” Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said at a press conference Friday in Chico to a roomful of journalists and fire officials. “It is the event we feared for a long time.”

But to understand what was lost, you have to understand what made Paradise just that to the people who called it home.

***

The Maidu tribe called Paradise home first, long before the town was named that. In 1848, after gold was discovered, prospectors followed, and then their families. Atop a wide ridge between deep canyons, it was beautiful and remote — still is.

Only two paved roads snake in and out of town. A decade ago, nearly 10,000 people had to evacuate during the Humboldt Fire. The Paradise Ridge Fire Safe Council was formed soon after. They knew a blaze could come here, so they met on the second Wednesday of every month to plan evacuation zones and gather information for brush-land and home assessment brochures. “Ready Raccoon” was their mascot, because they wanted people to be ready.

Paradise was a place people retired to, but more recently, younger families had begun moving in because of its affordability. The town had at least one of everything you needed — a name-brand grocery store, plenty of gas stations, hobby gift shops run by retirees. More than 20 churches, too.

People from unincorporated areas like Magalia and Concow — also fire-scarred — would come here to shop. Just this month, the town’s outdoor ice skating rink opened, attracting people from Redding, a seemingly distant and cosmopolitan city.

This year, the town got its own Starbucks. That was big news. On Tuesday, only five days ago, residents passed a half-cent sales tax to fund safety. That was bigger news.

Now there’s no one to pay it.

What is worse — losing everything? Or owning one of the few homes that survived, and moving back to a place where virtually nothing exists? Local leaders keep coming back to that question.

“Ninety-five percent of the town is gone,” said town council member Michael Zuccolillo. “The remaining 5 percent of buildings are barely standing. I felt like I was living in a bad dream. It was unrecognizable. I had to keep asking, ‘Where are we?’ All the landmarks are gone. Block by block, nothing. Anybody who had a house in Paradise probably doesn’t anymore.”

***

The Camp Fire sparked around 6:30 a.m., near Camp Creek Road off Highway 70. The sky turned yellow first, which was alarming, but residents here are used to smoke. Northern California had been on fire all summer. In July, darkness had cloaked the sun for days as the Carr Fire roared in Redding.

Then everything went black.

The Butte County Sheriff’s Office issued a red-alert to 23,682 contacts over email, text and phone call. More than 1,038 people calls clogged the 911 line, and more than 600 requests for welfare checks were made. As the Camp Fire roared into Paradise, the California Highway Patrol reversed the in-bound lanes on Skyway Road and Highway-32.

Officials had planned for this — 11 evacuation zones and more alerts. But the Camp Fire moved faster than humans can, burning nearly an acre per second.

Chaos ensued. Cell service cut out in much of the town. Headlights barely pierced the midnight smoke. Residents sheltered in the Walgreens and K-Mart parking lots, waiting for county buses to rescue them. Some drivers abandoned their cars in the gridlock of traffic, running down Skyway Road or pushing their loved ones in wheelchairs down the sidewalk.

At the Feather River Hospital, patients waited to be safely evacuated. They clustered around the helipad as flames licked closer. Doctors and nurses set up buckets as temporary bathrooms, because the building’s water was cut off.

In the hospital parking lot, probation officers and sheriff’s deputies waited with vans, until the roads cleared and they could evacuate the patients. At least one patient died there, waiting, said Butte County Supervisor Doug Teeter.

Teeter, who waited at the hospital to be evacuated along with other residents, could barely think. Shortly before, he had watched a bulldozer push aside a line of cars abandoned by terrified residents who then fled by foot. The bulldozer needed to open the road for more evacuees.

“The power was off in the hospital, and there was so much smoke,” Teeter said. “No one wanted to be there. We have 75-year-old people shoved three across in the back of probation vans. Hospital workers were bringing out snacks and triaging people. I didn’t know my own family’s fate. It was very somber.”

A mile away, on Rockford Lane, Teeter’s house — the one his grandfather built — went up in flames.

***

Everyone in Paradise knows each other, and that made it both better and worse. There was comfort in recognition and fear in understanding.

Butte County Sheriff Honea, 47, was helping direct traffic near Skyway and Elliott roads with his 26-year-old daughter, Kassidy, who had joined the Paradise police force six months ago. A call crackled over his radio. Some of his deputies were trapped.

“I’m gonna go, people are trapped,” he told his daughter, wanting to say so much more. Would he see her again, he wondered. “I love you, kiddo.”

“I love you, Dadd-o,” she said.

Soon after, the wife of town council member Zuccolillo pulled into the intersection where her husband was helping direct traffic. His three small children were sobbing in the backseat.

“What do I do?” she said.

“Keep going downhill,” Zuccolillo said. “Get out.”

Her taillights flashed as she crested the road, and vanished, leaving Zuccolillo behind.

***

The estimates of the devastation are still coming in. They started out small: Only several hundred homes. Maybe a thousand. No — more than 6,000. The people of Paradise knew it was going to be worse with each new report. They saw their town burn.

“This is really a wipe-out,” Zuccolillo said. “I can’t describe it any other way. I don’t know how to quantify it. How do you quantify everything being gone? Restaurants are gone. We have lost half of our grocery stores. Where will people eat? Where will people get gas? How do you live in a place like this? I don’t know how else to put it.”

As he left for the last time, dodging downed power lines and trees on Skyway Road, he saw Paradise for one last time. Building after building. Every structure on fire.

But, also the town’s essence.

How on Johnny Appleseed Day, the Paradise Ridge Chamber of Commerce baked one thousand pies, and on Gold Nugget days, they celebrated the discovery of a 54-pound gold nugget, the largest in California’s gold rush history, with costumes. How everyone is friendly and knows each other, in that way that seems clichéd, but is actually true.

How this isn’t paradise anymore.

Lizzie Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email ljohnson@sfchronicle.com