SACRAMENTO, Calif. _ The Bear fire looked like it would behave itself.
It had been burning for three weeks in the Plumas National Forest, the result of a mid-August lightning strike, but hadn't done any lethal damage. It was part of a complex of fires that was about 50% contained. Even a significant windstorm that threatened to push the fire across the middle fork of the Feather River didn't seem like a major cause for alarm.
All told, in the early morning hours of Sept. 8, the team managing the Bear fire appeared confident it could keep the fire under control. A team of firefighters on loan from Quebec was assigned to watch a potential trouble spot on the Feather River where the fire might jump.
Nonetheless, "we don't see the huge potential for it to come out of there today," said Jake Cagle, operations section chief with the California Interagency Incident Management Team, in a morning briefing posted to Facebook.
More than 30 miles to the southwest, in the tiny Butte County foothills community of Berry Creek, folks read news reports on the Bear fire but they, too, weren't overly concerned. No strangers to wildfire risk _ it goes with the territory when you live just a few miles from Paradise, home to the deadliest California wildfire ever _ they were certain the fire was simply too far away to pose a serious threat.
"We all thought we were OK," said Berry Creek resident Bobbie Zedaker. "It didn't seem like it was going to come toward us."
Within hours, the Bear fire became a monster.
Fueled by 45 mph winds, it jumped the Feather River with a ferocity that exceeded firefighters' expectations and their ability to stop it. That night, it obliterated most of Berry Creek, a few miles north of Lake Oroville, leveling house after house and killing at least 15 people. Zedaker lost her home on Hidden Springs Road and her 16-year-old nephew, Josiah Williams. The fire is the fifth deadliest in California history, and the most lethal since the 2018 Camp fire in nearby Paradise.
The rugged, fiercely independent mountain community was reduced to miles of cinders, ash, burnt-out vehicles, downed power lines and smoldering logs. Last Friday, when Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the region, a Sacramento Bee reporter and photographer couldn't find a single person in Berry Creek who wasn't a Cal Fire employee, a member of law enforcement or an animal control officer.
In the immediate aftermath of the fire, some elected officials wondered aloud why the U.S. Forest Service, which was working with state and local firefighting agencies, hadn't done more sooner. They argued that fire agencies could have tamed the Bear fire while it was still confined to the national forest and hadn't yet roared out of control.
But officials defended their work on the fire, which has since been renamed the West Zone of the North Complex Fire.
Bruce Prud'homme, a spokesman for the Forest Service, said fire crews were stretched thin by the dozens of major fires raging through California, including two significant fires in the immediate vicinity.
And when the winds kicked up the morning of Sept. 8, and the fire crossed the Feather River, "there was no way to contain it," Prud'homme said.
"No amount of air support, no amount of crews, no amount of dozers _ at that point the fire was unstoppable."
Shane Lauderdale, another operations section chief with the California incident management team, agreed: "One thing that fire fighters know they don't control is weather. We had some weeks of moderate weather, relatively speaking, and during that time we took advantage of the opportunity to do as much as we could on the fires. Unfortunately with the wind event ... anything that wasn't under control at that time became a problem for us."
