Rebuilding Paradise Parent Guide

“I don’t sleep,” a woman says as she fights back tears. “That’s when the real nightmares take over”. Haunting her nights is the way her father died - in his wheelchair, trying to escape the flames that engulfed the town of Paradise in 2018. Tragically, her grief is widely shared. The Camp Fire killed 85 people and destroyed 18,000 buildings, leaving most of Paradise’s 26,000 residents homeless and traumatized.

Two years after the largest wildfire in California’s history, director Ron Howard has documented the arduous process of rebuilding a piece of paradise in Northern California. Mixing cell and dashcam footage from the fire with interviews with town residents, Howard creates a detailed portrait of a suffering yet resilient community. The documentary achieves a human touch by showing us the town through the eyes of its people. There’s Matt Gates, the police officer who watched his house burn down and whose 13 hour days keep him away from his wife and two young children. Woody Culleton, seventy-something and stubborn, praises the community that supported him on his path from town drunk to town mayor. And Michelle John, School Superintendent, has the staggering task of overseeing the assessment of eight burned or damaged schools, locating thousands of students scattered across the state, and making sure there will be a high school graduation.

Rebuilding the fire-ravaged community is a task of incredible complexity – demolishing ruins, managing environmental contamination, and gearing up the civic infrastructure for hundreds of building projects each year. Residents are understandably angry and anxious and the city administration is just as understandably stressed and overwhelmed. The state government also grapples with the city’s rebuilding and one of the most interesting moments in the movie is a debate over whether communities should be allowed to build in fire-prone areas. There are lots of issues here, big and small, and the movie does a good job of bringing them up, even if it can’t deal with them all in depth.

Rebuilding Paradise is a tale of man-made natural disaster – the fire was started by faulty electrical equipment owned by PG&E and aggravated by a five year drought related to global climate change. But it’s also a story of human resilience, cooperation, and ingenuity. While the larger issues are dealt with in the documentary, it’s the small human moments that really stand out – lighting a Christmas tree at the rec centre, watching the town’s high school graduation, seeing hope in a child’s face. While it’s obvious that Paradise can’t go back to what it used to be, it’s clear that it will once again be “home” for many of its people.