The deadliest wildfire in written California history traumatized a region. The scars it left on the landscape and in survivor’s memories will take decades to heal. Parceling out blame for the blaze has become a local obsession.
Rather than a proverbial, moustache twirling villain, Journalist Mark Arax, in a lengthy cover feature earlier this month in California Sunday Magazine, found multiple causes, some stretching back to the Gold Rush. Marc Albert begins the conversation by asking how the unrelated causes intersected.
A former reporter with the Los Angeles Times, journalist Mark Arax is the author of In My Father’s Name, The King of California and West of the West. His latest book, the Dreamt Land: chasing water and dust across California, a Los Angeles Times bestseller, was published earlier this year.
His in depth article on the Camp Fire, Gone was published August 4th in California Sunday Magazine. You can find a link to his story, here.