On that frantic morning, TK Huff was calm. The 71-year-old amputee sat in his wheelchair, pointing a garden hose at what quickly became the deadliest wildfire in California history.
Nobody knew at the time, early on Nov. 8, how bad it would be. When his family called at 7:15 a.m., Huff said he would leave. But he never made it out.
All around, fires were breaking out, and men and women — most of them elderly, many of them disabled — were doomed: Flames soon overtook 74-year-old Richard Brown’s beloved log cabin in the Sierra Nevada foothills. On the edge of neighboring Paradise, a blaze prompted the Feather Canyon Retirement Community to evacuate its residents — all except 88-year-old Julian Binstock, overlooked in the chaos.
It was just the start of a day that was almost unfathomable. An entire town was burned off the map of California. Nearly 14,000 homes were incinerated.
All told, 85 people would perish. The oldest was 99; of the 73 bodies that have been identified, 59 were 65 or older. One hundred days later — with the aid of public records showing the locations of victims’ deaths, CalFire mapping of the fire’s progression and dozens of interviews — their stories can be told. How they lived, how they died.
And how a fire that started at 6:30 a.m. in the tiny town of Pulga would become the nation’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire in more than century.
The flames spread through the back of Concow, where Huff lived. This was no ordinary fire, with fronts marching steadily forward. Wind gusts of at least 50 mph blew hot embers a mile or more, creating multiple fires at once and igniting areas the size of football fields every few seconds, said CalFire spokesman Scott McLean.
Huff and his wife, Margaret, who died in August, knew the risk of wildfires. Their house, high on a wooded ridge, burned down in 2008. But this was the house where three generations gathered for Easter egg hunts, for Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners, and pretty much every weekend of the year. With no internet or cell reception, the focus was always on family.
So they rebuilt.
Huff was stoic and strong, a farm laborer who worked in the fields his whole life; he lost a leg in a potato harvesting accident in 2001 but didn’t let his disability hold him back, said his daughter-in-law Pearl Lankford, whose own house in Paradise burned down along with the homes of eight family members.
When the fire arrived, just after sunrise, Huff’s instinct was to save his house.
“We told him, ‘You need to evacuate now,’” said his granddaughter Jordan Huff, 22, who lived in Paradise.
“He was putting out the flames in his backyard in his wheelchair,” she said. “There was no distress in his voice.”
Soon after the family’s call at 7:15 that morning, the house phone went dead. A CalFire simulation shows that by 9 a.m., flames had overtaken Green Forest Lane, where Huff lived.
His remains were found in the ashes of his house. The only thing still standing was his wheelchair, near the back fence with the garden hose.
By then a separate fire about a mile away had destroyed the log cabin built by Richard Brown, the unofficial mayor of Concow, a Vietnam veteran whose mom and stepdad had a winery in Paradise — which is how he came to name his daughter, Chardonnay Telly. She recalled her dad as relentlessly upbeat, a man who loved to tinker with old cars that inevitably broke down in the middle of nowhere.
His remains would later be found under one of those vehicles, on his beloved patch of land.
About the same time, more than two miles to the west, on the eastern edge of Paradise, the Feather Canyon Retirement Community was hastily evacuating its more than 100 residents. In the chaos, they somehow overlooked Julian Binstock, 88 — something that rarely happened in a life that took him from Brooklyn to Harvard University to the entertainment business, where he would become a vice president of Warner Communications.
At the retirement community, where he had moved with his wife Elisabetta a decade ago, he was known for his sense of humor. Each year, he won the award for “Funniest Resident”; he kept up his reputation by asking his children for jokes to try out on his neighbors, said his daughter, Christina Lamb, of Southborough, Massachusetts.
By 9 a.m., the community was gone, and so was Binstock.
Lamb, her two siblings and children would spend a frantic week looking for him in evacuation centers and hospitals, but he had died in his residence.
She doesn’t fault the retirement center. “It’s the fire’s fault,” she said.