A harrowing, must-read piece of journalism

And what it takes to create it.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made. 

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Johnson tells the story of a school bus (not the one pictured here) that had to evade the California Camp Fire to reach safety. (Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)

It’s been a little while since I found myself utterly absorbed in a piece of narrative journalism. This story, an excerpt from a new book by Washington Post reporter Lizzie Johnson, had me so riveted I forgot that I’d been sitting down to write an entirely different post for Chills.

Nearly three years ago, Johnson’s then-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle called to ask if she could head to an area in northern California to cover a wildfire that had just ignited. Within two hours, it lit the small town of Paradise on fire, becoming the deadliest wildfire in California’s history.

“The fire moved so fast that it consumed the equivalent of a football field every second,” Johnson tweeted on Thursday.

We heard a lot in the news about the horrific Camp Fire, in which 85 people died and an area the size of Chicago burned. Of course, most reports came from the relative outskirts of the flames, or after the fact. The journalists who ran toward the disaster did their jobs and put themselves in danger as they worked as closely as possible. But in order to tell a story so that readers can feel and smell it — in this case, the terror, the heat, the desperation — it really helps to be a firsthand witness, which, in Johnson’s story, would have meant being on a school bus full of kids trying to flee the fire.