The Perfect Storm | Rebuilding Paradise
The reality is that it was November 8th, and we hadn't had any kind of significant rain. It had always rained before trick-or-treating, right? I mean, right? And now, and now we're in these patterns here where we don't see rain until, you know, into November.
That morning, the wind cranked up, and you know, you're kind of waiting, like, what's coming next? In this particular case, it was a fire eight miles away, throwing up a column full of embers and the darkest, blackest, calm smoke I've ever seen. Then a 40-mile-an-hour wind took that over the top of Paradise in perfect alignment, dropping it on the town of Paradise.
So, it really was the perfect storm. We lost some thousand acres of land. There were multiple fires burning for at least a week, probably more. We just tried to save what we can save and help people along the way; it's about all we could do. It didn't matter if we had a thousand fire engines lined up on the ridge that day; this was going to happen. Everything lined up perfectly that day for this to happen.