Noah BergerIt started as a beautiful fall day in Northern California. It was Nov. 8, 2018, and just two hours north of Sacramento sat the quintessential small town of Paradise, where residents were going about their normal business — kids were at school, shops were open, people were busy at their jobs. But the sky changed. Gusty winds and dry conditions coupled with sparks from a faulty power line ignited what would become the deadliest fire in California history. Director Ron Howard tells the terrifying, heartbreaking, yet hopeful, story of the residents of Paradise in his film Rebuilding Paradise airing on National Geographic Sunday, Nov. 8.
The first 10 minutes of the film aren’t easy to watch. The scenes play out like a pulse-pounding nightmare, as Howard uses raw footage shot by residents to take viewers into the heart of the town.
“It’s probably the most harrowing sequence that I’ve ever been involved in, as a director,” Howard said. “And you know, I didn’t shoot or stage a frame of it.”
As the sky turned black and “all sorts of stuff” started falling out of the sky, calls from residents started to flood emergency lines. Within about two hours the fire spread from 200 acres to 18,000 and engulfed the town. A frantic, massive evacuation left residents with little to no time to escape — many fled with only the clothes on their backs. In the end, 85 died in the fire, 50,000 people were displaced and close to 19,000 structures were burnt to the ground.
Howard’s story, however, isn’t one centered solely around the devastation; it’s one that shares the community’s difficult yet inspiring road to recovery.
“I’ve never experienced anything like what I witnessed there on the ground,” Howard said about visiting Paradise about 10 days after the fire, a town in which his mother-in-law had lived the last four or five years of her life. “Being surrounded by that level of destruction really does take your breath away, and words, they don’t suffice. And then conversations with the people who’ve just recently been through it are sobering and uncomfortable in the extreme. But one of the things that I found is that many people did want the catharsis of talking about it. They did want to share their videos with us. And when they began to recognize that we didn’t want to make a film just about the crisis, we wanted to make a film about the people and what it was going to require to cope with this, whether it was leaving, staying, rebuilding, whatever it was. … It was really a life experience for me, an eye-opener, and I’m grateful to have had the experience.”
Rebuilding Paradise airs on National Geographic Sunday, Nov. 8 at 9/8c
