21
It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
There was no name for the thing Tom Bates captured on video at the height of the notorious Australian bushfire season of 2002–3. Prior to that sweltering afternoon, there was no such thing as “pyro-tornadogenesis,” because such a phenomenon—a tornado generated by a wildfire—was not known to occur on planet Earth. Wildfires in both hemispheres often whip up small twisters known as fire whirls, but as impressive as they are to behold, and as dangerous as they are to be near, they are relatively small and short-lived events—more like dust devils than full-blown cyclones. What Bates saw and filmed from a suburban rugby pitch just outside Canberra, in southeast Australia, was different. It occurred during a historic week of lightning-caused fires that killed four people, injured more than four hundred, and destroyed five hundred homes west of Australia’s capital city.
On January 18, Bates and his neighbors in the Kambah neighborhood, about five miles southwest of downtown, were on high alert because local fires had advanced to within a mile and a half of their neighborhood. Looking northward that afternoon, toward the flames, Bates observed a large funnel cloud over Mount Arawang, one of several low, tree-covered peaks in the area that are laced with walking trails and surrounded by suburban homes.
Tornadoes are not unheard of in the region, but this one appeared to be rising up out of the fire itself, like an atmospheric Balrog. It was four in the afternoon, the ambient temperature was nearly 100°F, and the air was so dark with smoke that it appeared to be nighttime. The year 2003 was pre-smartphone, but Bates had the presence of mind to get his video camera and record what would come to be a new kind of fire. “I’ve never in my life seen anything like it,” we hear Bates say as the funnel takes shape above the burning mountain. He struggles to describe what he is seeing, not because he lacks the words, but because no Earthling has ever witnessed what he is witnessing now: “Holy shit…Ho-ly mackerel…It’s a big fireball. It’s gotta be rippin’ poor bastards’ houses up there.” Then, right before our eyes, Mount Arawang appears to detonate. The blinding flash, combined with the funnel cloud whirling above it, gives the impression of a nuclear blast. “Ho-ly Jeezus,” Bates gasps. “This is bad news…It’s like a big fireball tornado.”
It is now clear that this monstrous thing, which Bates has just named, is headed directly toward him. Australians, like Canadians, seem to have a gift for understatement, and, as the wind begins to hiss and roar through the camera mic, we hear Bates say, “This is rather frightening.” A moment later, tin roofing and other debris from the homes surrounding Mount Arawang begin clattering to earth all around him. Sticks and gravel are now flying in horizontal gusts. “I’m getting pelted with stuff. It’s stinging the daylights out of me,” he says, shortly before the video ends. “It’s just like being sandblasted.”
It was estimated later that, during the single blinding burst that caused Mount Arawang to briefly disappear, an area of roughly three hundred acres ignited in less than a tenth of a second. Tom Bates had managed to document the most dramatic instance of exterior flashover ever observed. The Canberra fire tornado of 2003 was rated an EF-3 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, with horizontal winds of 160 miles per hour, roughly equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane. As the first documented example of its kind, it was a milestone—another harbinger of twenty-first-century fire. But the Chisholm Fire, two years earlier in Alberta, had offered a preview. A funnel cloud was observed during that fire as well, and the resulting forest damage showed evidence of cyclonic action.
It took years of analysis for Australian fire experts to fully understand what Bates and his neighbors witnessed on that terrible January day. The term “pyro-tornadogenesis” did not enter the literature until nearly a decade after the event. A fire tornado, fire scientists would come to understand, is the delinquent offspring of a pyrocumulonimbus thunderstorm. While you can have a pyroCb thunderstorm without a fire tornado, you cannot have a fire tornado without a pyroCb. In this sense, a fire tornado is (so far) a wildfire’s most dramatic terrestrial expression (there are other extraordinary things that wildfires can do now, but they take place in the upper atmosphere). Both fire tornadoes and pyroCbs are generated by high-intensity wildfires burning in hilly terrain on exceptionally hot days that have been further energized by incoming high-pressure systems and, some believe, by massive infusions of superheated steam from rapidly burning forests. These events have the capacity to further amplify an already ferocious fire in shocking ways that human beings have no power to defend against.
Once this new, warmer, CO2-enriched atmosphere had proved itself capable of conjuring up a fire tornado, the question in 2003 was: Could it happen again? Australia is vast, drought prone, and, in places, heavily wooded, a combination that has generated the largest bushfires and the longest, most destructive fire seasons anywhere on Earth. It is fair to say that Australia rarely has a “good” fire season, but some are worse than others; the devastating fire season of 1973–74 blackened an area the size of France and Spain combined (nearly half a million square miles). The Black Saturday Fires in 2009 were some of the worst ever. February was so hot and dry that year—even for southern Australia—that fire officials in the state of Victoria declared the weather forecast “uncharted territory.” “There are no weather records,” said an official on ABC television, “that show the kind of fire conditions [predicted] tomorrow.” The ambient temperature in Melbourne that day—February 7—was 116°F, a record that broke the previous high (set in 2003) by 5°F. The searing heat was attended by gale-force winds; residents compared the experience of going outside to standing in front of a giant hair dryer.
The Black Saturday Fires, concentrated in the hill country northeast of Melbourne, destroyed more than two thousand homes and obliterated several small towns. One hundred and seventy-three people were killed. These fires, started variously by faulty power lines, lightning strikes, and arsonists, were, as of that year, the most lethal and destructive bushfires in Australia’s dramatic fire history. While none of them generated a full-blown tornado, a fire service pilot estimated head fire heights at a hundred yards, and a number of victims perished in their cars, overtaken by flames even as they fled at highway speed. But there was another killing energy released by those fires that moved even faster—at the speed of light. So otherworldly were the fire conditions on Black Saturday that animals and people were killed by radiant heat alone, from hundreds of yards away, as if they had been felled by a death ray.
Afterward, a Royal Commission was ordered to investigate the disaster. One of the recommendations made was for a new fire danger category, because “Extreme” was deemed insufficient to express what had occurred on Black Saturday. The new, more dire classification is “Catastrophic,” or “Code Red.” On its “Fire Danger” webpage, in a box labeled “What you should do,” the Rural Fire Service for the state of New South Wales has posted a list of directives. The directive for “Catastrophic” fire could not be more stark: “For your survival, leaving early is the only option.”[*1]
This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place—a fire planet we have made, with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past 3 million years.
In 2009, the year of the Black Saturday Fires, the Keeling Curve hit 390 ppm, a 40 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 over pre-industrial levels. By then, temperature records around the world were being broken on an annual basis, as fire seasons lengthened along with the lists of damage done and fatalities caused. Two thousand seventeen, the year after Fort McMurray burned, appeared to be a turning point. That year, atmospheric CO2 hit 405 ppm, a 45 percent increase over pre-industrial levels. It was not yet April before 2,300 square miles of grassland had burned across the Great Plains, from Kansas to Texas, killing thousands of cattle and at least seven people. That summer, every country in Europe experienced wildfires, including Ireland and Greenland—a first for that continent. More than a hundred people were killed in Spain and Portugal alone when the first pyrocumulus clouds ever observed there supercharged seasonal wildfires into firestorms. That same year, New Zealand experienced unusually intense wildfires while Chile and British Columbia, two huge coastal territories in opposite hemispheres, suffered the worst fire seasons in their respective histories. California, too, had one of its worst ever, including what was, then, the most destructive fire in state history: the Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa, a catastrophic blaze that destroyed nine thousand structures, killed forty-four people, and generated winds strong enough to flip cars.
In July 2018, 150 miles north of Santa Rosa, a wildfire near the idyllic Northern California town of Redding introduced something altogether new to the Northern Hemisphere. Flying into Redding that August was like flying into New Delhi: down below, as far as the eye could see, spread a lake of smoke. White clouds floated in the brown miasma like marshmallows in cocoa. Somewhere under there was a city of 92,000 souls, but it was impossible to tell from the sky. Poking through the murk, sixty miles to the north, was the peak of Mount Shasta, fourteen thousand feet high and yet oddly devoid of snow—a recent summer phenomenon. This was Northern California, a hundred miles south of Oregon, but it was as hot and dry as Nevada. Beneath the speeding jet, the smoke pall leeched southward for more than two hundred miles—all the way to Mendocino, where it merged with yet another gigantic fire, growing into what would be, if only briefly, the largest wildfire in California’s flamboyant 150-year history. As the plane descended through the smoke layer, the convoluted country came into focus, valleys and ridges in endless combination, most of them burned down to mineral soil. The skeletons of trees, their bark burned through to the now-lifeless cambium layer, groped at the air like black hands.
The Carr Fire, as it came to be known, ignited on July 23 near the hamlet of Whiskeytown, fifteen miles west of Redding, due to sparks thrown by a trailer wheel with a flat tire. Three days later, the fire roared into the city. The temperature that day was similar to Black Saturday, 2009: 113°F (tying a local record that was 13°F above the average high). Like so many California wildfires, the Carr Fire was driven by high winds drawn in from the coast, drought conditions, and a century of fire suppression in the state’s forests. On July 26, the Carr Fire forced the evacuation of forty thousand people in a matter of hours. Sixteen hundred homes, businesses, and other structures were destroyed. Five people died.
“It was unreal,” said a middle-aged woman by the airport baggage carousel, returning home after evacuating three weeks earlier. “It was like doomsday.”
Downtown, it was hard to tell; a fresh westerly was blowing, and it hid a lot of the evidence. A taxi driver explained that it was the first day without street-level smoke since the fires had ignited nearly a month earlier. It was still a presence, shrouding the surrounding ridges, but the sky was blue directly overhead, the shadows crisp on the pavement. So benign and ordinary was the scene that it seemed as if news accounts might have been exaggerated. They weren’t. “Everybody,” said the taxi driver, “knows someone who’s lost a home.”
You didn’t have to go far to see that whole neighborhoods were missing.
Every day, the world ends for someone, somewhere. Lately, this seems to be happening more often, not only because of fire, but because of the titanic energies unleashed by it. It took fifteen years of steadily worsening wildfires, but on July 26, 2018, the question asked by Australian fire officials—will the Canberra fire tornado ever be repeated?—was answered.
On the other side of the world, eight thousand miles from Canberra and ten minutes from downtown Redding, is Lake Keswick Estates, a compact neighborhood of modest, mostly single-story homes. Like a lot of suburban Redding, it is built in the WUI, the wildland-urban interface. Many of the residents there had been sure that the Keswick Reservoir, half a mile to the west, would stop the Carr Fire’s wind-driven advance. Seventy-three-year-old Sarah Joseph was one of them, and she had to gather herself before describing what leaped across the water shortly before 8:00 p.m. on that hundred-degree evening. “It looked like a tornado,” she said, “but with fire.” Like Tom Bates in Canberra, she was describing something that no one in her world had seen before. It arrived so quickly that Joseph had only minutes to gather up her cat, some photos, and a change of clothes before fleeing for her life.
Sarah Joseph managed to escape the fire and so, miraculously, did her home. But this is in keeping with the whimsical nature of tornadoes: their violence is capricious, meted out selectively, but at random, like a sadistic child crushing ants. All around Joseph’s home, entire blocks lay in ruins. A half mile to the east, on a broad, forested slope that felt almost rural save for the steady crackle of high tension lines overhead, Willie Hartman stood knee-deep in the ruins of her home. Hartman is a slight but sturdy grandmother with white hair and a warm demeanor, and, a month on, she was still coming to terms with the fire that had transformed everything, as far as the eye could see. Behind her, the metal porch railing drooped like a garden hose. Spotting a charred skeleton of furniture, she murmured, half to herself, “The lawn chair’s in the house.”
So was the mailbox. Nothing was where it should have been, or even what it should have been. The Hartmans’ living room, which had ceased to exist, once had a picture window of double-paned glass, but it melted. You could see it outside, a vitrified river flowing downhill toward her daughters’ homes, also burned to the foundations, many of their contents borne away on the incinerating wind that spun out of the fire and into their neighborhood minutes after skipping over Sarah Joseph’s home.
There is video, and it is terrifying: surging up out of a cluster of burning neighborhoods is a whirling vortex a thousand feet across, seething with smoke and fire. Its outer bands appear almost taut, undulating and distorting as if something were inside, trying desperately to get out. During its brief existence of approximately thirty minutes, the Redding fire tornado sent jets of flame hundreds of feet into the sky, obliterated everything it touched, and generated such ferocious thermal energy that its smoke plume punctured the stratosphere. The damage at ground zero, a three-hundred-yard-wide, half-mile-long swath of scoured earth, annihilated homes, and blasted forest that ended just south of the Hartman family compound, was hard to comprehend.
In the rising light of dawn was revealed the aftermath of an atmospheric tantrum so violent it looked as if the Hulk and Godzilla had done battle there. A pair of hundred-foot-tall steel transmission towers were torn from their concrete moorings and hurled to the ground, where they lay, crumpled like dead giraffes. A four-ton shipping container was ripped to pieces and heaved hundreds of yards across the landscape. All the houses south of the Hartmans’ were gone, stripped to bare slabs. Trees were torn limb from limb. In the branches of those that survived, where plastic bags might flutter, ten-foot pieces of sheet metal roofing were twisted like silk scarves. A camshaft, a flywheel, a kitchen sink, an oven door, and countless other objects were scattered through the charred forest. There was no glass anywhere. Grass, bark, and topsoil were gone.
What tornadoes do best, it seems, is obliterate context. In their wake is left a catalog of violation so thorough and yet so arbitrary that it causes an existential derangement of a kind that makes you want to check your own hands to make sure the fingers are still there. Not far from one of the bare house slabs was a pickup truck wrapped around a tree; another was simply torn in half. Other vehicles were strewn across the barren ground, their roofs crushed as if they had been rolled repeatedly, the bodies burned down to the springs. Most of the doors, hoods, and trunk lids had simply been torn off; any that remained were blown inside out and pocked so thoroughly by flying gravel and debris they looked as if they had been attacked with hammers and shotguns.
Draped over the landscape and snaking through the trees were endless strands of two-inch transmission cable from the fallen towers. Built to carry fifty thousand volts, even a short section was too heavy to lift. Elsewhere, buckets, barrels, handtrucks, and stovetops were scattered willy-nilly, so badly damaged they were hard to recognize. Some of these things were wrapped around tree trunks so tightly they could only be removed with heavy tools. I saw a metal folding chair driven into a tree like an ax blade, and a steel tractor seat crumpled like a paper plate. Cast iron frying pans lay hundreds of yards from the nearest house, bent, with their handles torn off and holes punched through the bottom. Nothing, no matter how sturdy or how small, was left intact. Even the stones were broken.
Larry Hartman, Willie’s husband of forty-seven years, is a large, congenial man with a hydraulic handshake and a gift for problem-solving. Finding himself with a dozen bear-hunting dogs that needed regular exercise, he devised a mechanical carousel with twelve chain leashes that now lay upside down in a heap of unrelated wreckage. When asked what he would have imagined happened here if he hadn’t witnessed it himself, he regarded the utter ruination all around him, the spaces where outbuildings and other landmarks of his life no longer were. “A bomb,” he said. “Like Hiroshima.”
When you compare photos of the hypocenter of that historic nuclear blast with the excoriated ground just south of the Hartmans’ property, they are hard to tell apart. One of the Hartmans’ daughters, Christel, used to hunt bears with her father, and she inherited his formidable handshake. Christel recorded video of their evacuation on her phone, and it shows a fire surging over the hill, the way so many wildfires arrive in the WUI these days, but this fire is burning higher than the transmission lines. Peering into her phone, I could see the towers’ latticed silhouettes ghost in and out of the flaming wall like skeletal giants. War of the Worlds came to mind. “It made a roaring sound,” said Christel, “like a man.” She demonstrated and then said, “Only ten times that.” Across Quartz Hill Road, a few hundred yards from the Hartmans’, an elderly woman and her two great-grandchildren were burned to death in their trailer.
Captain Dusty Gyves, a twenty-year veteran with Cal Fire, California’s 130-year-old state firefighting agency, was shocked by what he saw five hundred yards southwest of the Hartman compound. After being lifted into the air, a two-ton pickup truck was subjected to forces so violent that it looked, said Gyves, “like it had been through a car crusher.” And then incinerated.
Inside that truck was a thirty-seven-year-old fire safety inspector named Jeremy Stoke who had cut his vacation short to help out with the evacuation effort. A husband and a father of two, Stoke was well liked, and there was a memorial to him on Buenaventura Boulevard where he was wrenched from this world. Flowers, a flag, and a nightstick had been assembled around a humorous portrait of Stoke holding a pistol, along with dozens of ball caps, T-shirts, and shoulder patches representing police and fire departments from all over California. Among the offerings were several lids of Copenhagen tobacco, a bottle of sunscreen for his cleanshaven head, and a handwritten note saying, “Rest easy, brother. We will take it from here.”
Stoke was one of five people killed that day, but when survivors tell of their escapes, it seems a miracle there weren’t many more. A local dentist, surprised by the flames in the nearby gated community of Stanford Hills, ran for her life through the woods. Disoriented, with no idea where to go, she and her husband followed the animals—deer, rabbits, and squirrels—as they fled downhill, toward a bend in the Sacramento River. Several of her neighbors were rescued by a patrolling helicopter. Another neighbor, a retired police detective named Steve Bustillos, was one of the last to evacuate their neighborhood. Bustillos is a compact, powerful man with dark eyes and spiked gray hair. While he did not fully understand what was brewing that evening a mile to the west, he had been in enough dangerous situations to know that he’d better not let his guard down. Steve’s wife, Carrie, who is tall and slender with wavy dark hair, had gone to visit family in San Jose, so Steve was on his own at the house, watching satellite coverage, tracking social media, and keeping an eye on the horizon. Neither Bustillos nor his neighbors ever heard an evacuation order for Stanford Hills; nor did patrolling firefighters appear to issue a warning. There were about fifty homes built along their serpentine, ridgetop cul de sac; prices started at a million dollars and went up from there. Many of the owners were retired, but they were all successful professionals—proactive planners who made a point of staying informed and looking out for their neighbors. Warning or no warning, most of them had been preparing for a possible evacuation. Steve and Carrie Bustillos had a pile of duffels stacked and ready in the garage.
“You could see the plume off to the west,” Steve Bustillos recalled. Like his neighbors, he assumed that the Sacramento River, which flowed out of the Keswick Dam eight hundred feet below the ridge, would be wide enough to stop the fire’s advance. Between the river, a half mile west, and transmission lines to the south and east, he figured that Stanford Hills was safe from most wildfires. This might have been true under ordinary circumstances, but at 6:00 p.m., the nearby Mule Mountain weather station registered a temperature of 111°F with 7 percent humidity.
“Then,” Bustillos said, “around 7:40 p.m., we saw the fire just move across the river. It was weird; it just hopped over.”
These effortless transitions—across rivers, highways, and firebreaks—seem to be happening more and more often. Steve’s neighbor Kate Baker, who lives at the end of their cul de sac in a palatial home with its own vineyard, knows something about firebreaks because her husband is in the heavy equipment business. Baker had spoken with a local dozer boss who worked the devastating Tubbs Fire in 2017. The dozer boss told Baker that he had overseen a fleet of D9 Cats building firebreaks down there, and that every firebreak had failed. “I’m zero for six,” he said. As it happened, he had also been building firebreaks on Buenaventura Boulevard, between Stanford Hills and the Hartmans’. Now, he was zero for seven. Tactics that worked twenty years ago, or even ten years ago, no longer seem to be as effective.[*2]
Once the fire jumped the river, there was nothing left to stop it, so after making sure an elderly neighbor got away safely, Steve Bustillos finished loading his truck. As he did so, he noticed a shift in the wind. “Air is flowing past me from the other direction”—toward the fire—he said. “It was like a vacuum. I was kind of dumbfounded. I didn’t really know what I was looking at. What I saw was: when you open an oven, or a barbecue—the heat waves. There was a wall of them as high as the power lines. There was no flame or anything and then, when it hit the back of the houses across the street, just a wall of fire ignited. I watched the palm trees next to me all the way to the backyard. Now, it’s full-on blowtorch-type heat and the wind is strong enough that I have to lean into it to stand upright. I can hear the air rushing out of my house, whistling out my garage doors.”
Bustillos was having the same sensation that Mark Stephenson had on Signal Road in Fort McMurray—as if the fire were taking an enormous breath before exhaling like a dragon. The huge, rotating plume of a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, such as the one looming over Redding on July 26, is the engine of an igneous storm, and, like all combustion engines, it needs oxygen, which it inhales from the surrounding countryside. Park Williams, a professor in the geography department at UCLA, explained what happens next in The Atlantic in 2018. “Sometimes, that channel of upward-flowing air can collapse in one small spot,” he told the journalist Robinson Meyers. “Then the hot air in the atmosphere plummets through the weak point. You get a very fast wind moving down toward the ground, and when it hits the ground, it spreads like jelly slopping across the floor.”
This flood of explosively hot air is what Bustillos saw—first as heat waves and then as spontaneously combusting trees and houses. This was exterior flashover in real time. (When I described this scenario to Park Williams, he said Bustillos was lucky to be alive.) Despite his careful preparation, it now looked as if Bustillos had missed his escape window. “My house isn’t on fire yet,” he said, “but everything else is, and there’s smoke and chunks of ash. I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere because of the heat and the smoke. I’m thinking I can try to drive through this, or wait and see what burns through and see if I can drive out then.”
When asked if he was as calm then as he appeared to be recalling it. Bustillos answered, “Oh yeah.”
Carrie interjected, “You know what he used to do for a living, right? Homicide detective? They amp down when we amp up.”
“I used to work the busiest sides of San Jose,” Steve said. “Every Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, it was just full-on chaos: stabbings and shooting and car chases. When you do that stuff—instead of getting all worked up, you slow it down and you start to work through what I call ‘the Process’: How’m I gonna solve the problem? You can’t do it when you’re all flustered. You take a step back; your breathing changes, your perception; you kinda look at the big picture. So, that’s what I’m doin’: I’m thinkin’ this isn’t the time to drive; we’ll see what happens. Because things are fully engulfed, and I don’t know how long they’re gonna continue to be fully engulfed.”
Steve recalled that the wind subsided somewhat then, but this was relative; the fire was burning on both sides of his cul de sac, and the heat was generating its own local winds. Meanwhile, the tornado, now fully developed and over three miles high, was just a half mile to the north. It was moving eastward at the speed of a street sweeper, grinding through a sparsely inhabited stretch of forest between Stanford Hills and Keswick Lake Estates, where Sarah Joseph had recently evacuated. There is only one road out of Stanford Hills (a common feature of suburban subdivisions), and that is Buenaventura Boulevard, which happened to run perpendicular to the tornado’s path. Steve called Carrie and reassured her that he was okay and was going to drive out. By now, he was all but certain their house wouldn’t be standing when they returned. He stayed on the phone with Carrie as he got in the truck and headed for the entrance gate. It was a few minutes past 8:00 p.m.
Steve’s truck, a GMC Sierra Duramax with a camper shell, was a big one, and it was filled with many of their personal belongings—everything from clothes, photos, and their daughters’ keepsakes to computers, cameras, and Steve’s guns. Fully loaded, the truck weighed close to five tons. It never occurred to Bustillos that weight would determine whether or not he lived through the next five minutes. Turning left out of the gate, Bustillos made his way slowly through the smoke, past half a dozen fire trucks idling by the gates of the Land Park subdivision, another gated community. This was a puzzling sight, given all the houses on fire, but there wasn’t time to speculate, and he hung a right onto Buenaventura.[*3] Heading north now, Bustillos had half a mile left to live. Just ahead of him, somewhere in the smoke, the fire inspector Jeremy Stoke and his Ford 150 pickup had just been heaved through the air. A hundred yards farther on, a bulldozer operator was being flayed with burning gravel. Less than a mile to the west, another bulldozer operator had just been burned over and killed.
But in the gathering dusk and smoke, safe inside his big truck, it looked to Bustillos as if the fire had already passed through: the forest floor was bare, the trees smoking and devoid of leaves. About forty feet above the ground hung a ceiling of thick smoke. He still had Carrie on speaker as he passed a lowboy trailer by the side of the road, and then, on the opposite side, a tractor trailer. Ahead of him on the right were a couple of bulldozers, brought in by the dozer boss who was zero for six in Santa Rosa. Then, Bustillos looked to his left. Over the speaker, Carrie heard her husband of thirty-two years say, “Oh shit.”
“And then the window blew out of the driver’s side of the truck and there was just ash and debris,” Steve told me. “I’m calling it ‘fire and brimstone’ ’cause that shit was just rolling around in the cab with me. I’m scooping it off of me, and then I looked over my shoulder, and everything in my shell was fully engulfed already.”
At this point, Bustillos stopped the truck and devoted himself to the small, whirling fires igniting inside the cab. Embers, sticks, and stones were blowing through his window with terrific force, peppering his face and shoulder; the heat was unbearable. He grabbed a canvas carry-on bag and tried to protect himself. “As I was doing that,” said Bustillos, “the truck was lifting. I had both feet on the brake. I’m still seat-belted in. Then, the truck kind of came to rest. The hair on the side of my head is singeing. I’m sitting there wondering, ‘What am I gonna do next?’ And I look to the right—at the right front fender—and I’m seeing full-on flames. Something’s ruptured and the diesel fuel’s on fire.”
Bustillos understood then that he was going to have to abandon his truck, but this meant exposing himself to the full force of the burning tornado. He was dressed only in shorts and a T-shirt. “My electric locks don’t work,” he said. “So I use the button, cracked the door, put my foot down in the door, took the seat belt off, and then I started lookin’. I’m lookin’, and I see a dozer off to my left and I say, ‘Okay, that’s where I’m goin’.’ I grab the bag I was using as a shield, and I grab a backpack. I make it over to the front end of the dozer, and it’s running. I don’t want to get run over so I look up—all the windows are blown out, and nobody’s sitting in it. Stuff is flying around; it’s just pelting me—little chunks all on fire.”
Left behind in the truck was Steve’s cell phone. At that moment, Carrie was sitting on a curb in San Jose, 250 miles away, still on the line. She could tell by the sounds that the truck was on fire. “I had about two minutes of open mic,” she said. “I heard all the popping of the truck—all that fury.”
By then, the tires and fuel tank were exploding. Steve’s loaded pistols were firing off at random. “I just kept talking to him,” said Carrie. “I said, ‘Hey, if you can hear me, you’re gonna be okay; we’re gonna get through this.’ ”
They had been through so much already—not just Steve’s dangerous job, but Carrie’s battle with cancer three years earlier. “And then the call failed,” she said, “and I knew the phone was destroyed.”
Carrie had no way of knowing if Steve was still in the truck or not. In the killing heat and wind, beset by flying gravel and embers that stung like hornets, Bustillos maintained his composure and used the dozer’s blade as a kind of blast shield, moving around it as the wind direction changed. He then crawled in between the blade and the dozer’s treads, burrowing into the dirt like an infantryman under fire, trying to keep the bag and the backpack between him and the worst of the flying debris. “I hunkered there,” he said, “and this is where I kind of lost time—because of the adrenaline and everything going on. At some point, all of a sudden, it calmed down and the temperature dropped—I’m gonna say, three hundred degrees—I mean, the difference between opening your oven and getting blasted to shutting the oven.”
With the tornado apparently past, Bustillos took a moment to gather himself. Then, he crawled out from under the bulldozer and stood up. He was severely burned, but so full of adrenaline that he didn’t notice. “I’m looking across the road,” he said, “and I see this foil blanket up over this guy, and he’s running, shouting, ‘Get me outta here! Get me outta here!’ ”
It was the bulldozer operator. Because California’s forests are so fire-prone, bulldozers are equipped with safety glass and fire-retardant curtains, and their operators are supplied with fire shelters. The windows and curtains had failed, but the fire shelter—a kind of foil-lined cocoon—had saved this operator’s life. Moments later, a Forestry truck appeared; it was burned and pocked with dents as if it had just emerged from a war zone. The driver, a Forestry supervisor, spotted the dazed and smoking men and stopped. Bustillos climbed into the truck unbidden. He found himself behind a young firefighter who didn’t appear to register his presence. Staring straight ahead, the young man was in shock. The supervisor drove Bustillos and the dozer operator back to the cluster of fire trucks by the Land Park subdivision. From there, Bustillos and the operator were taken downtown to a nearby trauma center. En route, Bustillos borrowed a phone and called Carrie. Mercifully, she’d had only a few minutes to fear the worst. After a quick examination, Bustillos was helicoptered to the burn unit at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. In addition to being bruised for reasons he could not fully recall, Bustillos looked as if he had been rolled in red-hot gravel.
About half the houses in Stanford Hills burned to the ground, but the Bustillos home survived. It was an irony, at once merciful and cruel: in their truck, now a smoking shell sitting perpendicular to Buenaventura Boulevard, were all of Steve and Carrie’s most precious belongings, including jewelry, passports, and a significant amount of cash. Anything that hadn’t burned had melted, including Steve’s firearms.
Bustillos and the bulldozer operator compared notes later. If Bustillos had driven down Buenaventura a few minutes earlier, he would have met the same fate as Jeremy Stoke. The dozer operator, like Stoke, had borne the full brunt of the tornado. According to Bustillos, the bulldozer, which weighed more than fifty thousand pounds, was dragged across the ground. The operator told Bustillos that the only way he could get it to stop was by engaging the ripper tine—a massive hook used for tearing up packed earth and pavement.
Forensic analysis of the scene on Buenaventura concluded that the tornado’s wind speed was somewhere between 140 and 165 miles per hour, and that “peak gas temperatures likely exceeded 2,700°F”—the melting point of steel. In other words, Bustillos had endured the equivalent of an EF-3 tornado, combined with a blast furnace. He and the dozer operator had been inside the same thing that the Australian Tom Bates had filmed from the Kambah Park rugby pitch in Canberra.
EF-3 is considered “Severe” on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. However, judging from the totality of the destruction between the vehicles on Buenaventura and the downed transmission towers five hundred yards to the east, much of the damage seems consistent with an EF-4 (“Devastating: Well-constructed houses levelled; structures with weak foundations blown away some distance; cars thrown and large missiles generated”). Given the size of the trees uprooted and broken in half, and the way their bark was stripped off with the surviving branches abraded into points and facets, the damage was consistent with a Category 5 hurricane. The addition of metal-melting heat seemed gratuitously biblical.
It raises the question: What should you call something that behaves like a tornado but is made of fire? Many wildfire scientists bridle at the term “fire tornado”; they prefer “fire whirl,” but “fire whirl” seems inadequate to describe something that can do what the Redding fire tornado did while building a weather system seventeen thousand feet high. In 1978, a meteorologist named David Goens devised a classification system that placed fire whirls of this magnitude in the “Fire Storm” category, along with the caveat that “this is a rare phenomenon and hopefully one that is so unlikely in the forest environment that it can be disregarded.” But Goens wrote that more than forty years ago, and a lot has changed; for starters, the possibility of a fire tornado can no longer be disregarded. The language, too, is evolving to accommodate these recent changes: “Natural fire never did this,” explained the Cal Fire veteran Dusty Gyves after surveying the damage in and around Redding. “It shouldn’t moonscape.”
It is alarming to consider that this annihilating energy came out of thin air, born of fire and fanned by an increasingly common combination of triple-digit heat, single-digit humidity, high fuel loads, dying trees, and the confusion of battling winds that swirl daily through the mountains and valleys of the North American West, and so many other fire-prone parts of the world. That this phenomenon may represent something new under the sun has become a subject of earnest debate among fire scientists and meteorologists. With the exception of the 2003 Canberra fire tornado, there is no record of a fire tornado of this magnitude occurring in a residential setting.
Heading west out of Redding on Route 299 takes you past Whiskeytown, where the Carr Fire started, and into steep country dotted with old mining towns where “gulch” becomes a common suffix. None of the hamlets in these funnel-shaped valleys had burned, due either to the whims of the fire or to heroic stands taken by Cal Fire, Forestry, and volunteer fire departments. The surrounding forest was a different story. Most of the trees that grow across these ridges and canyons are adapted to fire, but there are limits. After the Carr Fire, everything from ridgetop to canyon floor was burned as far as the eye could see. It wasn’t just the smaller and more flammable pine, oak, and manzanita; mature redwoods stood now like broken columns in a blasted temple. Some of the stumps, ten and twenty feet high, were still on fire a month later, smoking like pagan censors as they filled that silent, empty forest with a strangely evocative perfume.
Painfully clear is the fact that there is no way for firefighters to combat these superheated, firebreak-leaping fires—with or without a tornado in their midst. Water has little effect on a high-intensity wildfire, and fire retardant drops are about as effective as firebreaks. Among the structures burned near Redding was a fire station. There was a time not so long ago when a fire like this one, which forced the evacuation of forty thousand residents, destroyed more than fifteen hundred structures, and burned nearly four hundred square miles across two counties, might have been a monstrous anomaly, but now such fires are becoming the norm. Simultaneous with the Carr Fire was the Mendocino Complex Fire, the largest ever recorded in California. As of August 2018, seven of the most destructive wildfires in the state’s already fire-prone history had ignited within the previous twelve months alone. Collectively, they caused more than one hundred deaths, destroyed twenty-five thousand homes, and nearly bankrupted PG&E, the state’s largest power company, whose poorly maintained transmission lines were blamed for many of the fires. There is no respite in sight: since then, most of those record-setting fires have been knocked out of the top ten by even bigger fires. The colossal August Complex Fire, which burned an area larger than the state of Rhode Island in 2020, was more than twice the size of 2018’s Mendocino Complex; it took four months to contain. According to Cal Fire, nine of California’s twenty largest fires have occurred just since 2020. “The fire season used to run from May to October,” a Cal Fire deputy chief named Jonathan Cox told me. “Over the last decade, it’s changed to year-round—and also to twenty-four hours.”
The impact on firefighters is exhausting and dangerous: when the Carr Fire first broke out, many local firefighters worked around the clock—for days, just as their counterparts in Fort McMurray had done. The changes in fire behavior have, in turn, changed the role firefighters play in these events. “Firefighters are never going to not engage,” Deputy Chief Jonathan Cox told me, “but now firefighters are having to retreat sooner.”
Redding offered a good example of what that looks like: “It shifted from a firefighting effort to a life-saving effort,” Cheryl Buliavac, a Cal Fire spokesperson, told me. And that was even before the tornado formed.
“Fires are making their own behavior,” Cox said. “The anomalies are becoming more frequent and more deadly.” Even among anomalies, the Redding fire tornado was in a class of its own. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “ ‘Extreme’ is an understatement.”