Current official impact. CAL FIRE reports 153,336 acres, 18,804 structures destroyed, 754 damaged and 85 civilian fatalities. The listed cause is Power Lines. These are fire-wide figures, not a Paradise-only tally. CAL FIRE incident record.

What happened, and what was measured

Fire, warning and evacuation chronology

1. 8 Nov · 6:33 a.m. CAL FIRE records the start near Pulga Road and Camp Creek Road.
2. 8 Nov · 7:13 a.m. The Butte County after-action report records the first Pulga evacuation notice.
3. 8 Nov · morning. Wind-driven fire and embers advanced toward Concow and Paradise; notification, traffic and direct fire exposure evolved on overlapping clocks.
4. First 24 hours. NIST reconstructed rapid progression with long-range spotting; evacuation routes lost usable capacity through congestion, closures, debris and burnovers.
5. During evacuation. NIST documented temporary refuge and rescue when full egress was not possible.
6. 25 Nov · 8:00 a.m. CAL FIRE records containment. Later impact, cause and life-safety reviews continued.

Known At — no hindsight

Cause and investigation history

CAL FIRE’s current incident page lists Power Lines. The Butte County District Attorney’s public investigation describes a worn C-hook and hanger assembly at PG&E transmission tower 27/222, conductor support failure, arcing and molten material reaching vegetation. This is a public criminal-case investigation record. The separate questions of inspection history, regulatory compliance, legal responsibility, subsequent spread and individual losses retain their own evidence requirements. Butte County public report.

Notification: issuance is not receipt

The County after-action report identifies mass-notification failures. The California State Auditor found that Butte’s principal alert, evacuation and shelter plans dated from February 2011. Its report states that Butte attempted a Wireless Emergency Alert early in the fire but the software failed to send it; no WEA message was issued during the Camp Fire. The county’s warnings were in English only. An alert request, transmission, device delivery, human receipt and protective action are separate events. These findings do not establish how many lives a different plan would have saved. County AAR · State Auditor chapter.

Evacuation, traffic, refuge and rescue

NIST’s NETTRA reconstruction connects the fire timeline to notification, traffic, burnovers, refuge and rescue. A mapped road is not a fixed evacuation capacity: smoke, fire, debris, collisions and abandoned vehicles may reduce the safe clearance interval. Thirty-one documented refuge areas and 198 rescue or assistance events show an emergency layer when full egress was no longer possible. The record does not infer a counterfactual fatality total. NIST TN 2252.

Forensic Reconstruction

1. Documented transmission hardware failure supplied the ignition mechanism near a canyon-to-community pathway.
2. Strong winds, dry fuels and terrain accelerated early spread.
3. Spotting generated ignitions ahead of the principal front.
4. Vegetation fire transitioned into interacting structure, parcel and vehicle exposures.
5. Warning, movement and traffic decisions occurred under severe time pressure.
6. Congestion, obstruction and burnovers reduced usable route capacity.
7. Responders used temporary refuge and rescue when safe movement beyond the hazard was not always possible.

Evolution of Knowledge

The incident’s reported area, impacts, cause and response understanding matured at different speeds. Earlier values remain part of the historical information state; superseded does not mean false. NIST’s later integrated observations connect fire progression to life safety in a way unavailable to first-day responders. A future revision should add source-version timestamps for each material change rather than silently rewriting the past.

Fire DNA — public comparative signature

This summary describes documented mechanisms, not a severity ranking or a numerical 24-dimension vector. Unsupported dimensions remain Unknown.

Material claim register

Reported denotes a statement in a named official source. Derived and interpreted statements require separate traceable transformations. Numerical TB-ECI scores are pending a reproducible review of source independence, fit and uncertainty.

Contradictions, unknowns and limits

• Population estimates vary by geographic and analytic scope; they are not averaged.
• Main-front arrival, ember ignition, structure ignition and burnover are different events.
• Alert issuance or request does not prove delivery or receipt.
• NIST refuge and rescue totals count documented events, not every informal event.
• USGS spectral change supports post-fire spatial analysis, not minute-scale arrival time.
• Technical ignition evidence cannot alone establish criminal responsibility, civil liability or all subsequent loss.

Primary sources

1. CAL FIRE — incident record
2. NIST TN 2135 — fire progression
3. NIST TN 2252 — notification, evacuation, traffic and refuge
4. NIST — investigation and publications
5. Butte County — After Action Report
6. Butte County — Corrective Action Plan
7. Butte County DA — public investigation
8. California State Auditor — Report 2019-103
9. CPUC — wildfire investigations
10. USGS — Landsat and LCMAP products

Record governance and citation

Version 1.2 · 28 September 2026. Permanent record ID TB-WBB-USA-2018-CAMP. Quality: DOCUMENTED; numerical evidence scoring and fuller source-version mapping remain open. Review when an official incident, NIST, ignition or notification record materially changes. This public export contains no private CORE data.

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