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What Nobody Tells You About California Fires

Great writers reveal details others don’t and show how to write unforgettable stories about disasters

Janice Harayda
Lit Life
6 min readJan 11, 2025

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Award-winning journalist Lizzie Johnson and “Paradise” / Penguin Random House

Five years ago, Hurricane Sally tore through my town after making landfall as a Category 2 storm with wind speeds of 105 miles per hour. An oak tree fell on a house across the street, slicing it half.

The storm knocked out power in town for five days, and as we waited for the lights to come back on, a neighbor and I talked about an obvious question: Why hadn’t we received an evacuation order? It wasn’t as though nobody understood the risks of hurricanes. Katrina had ripped up a long concrete pier in the center of town.

My neighbor and I are both journalists who keep an eye on the news, and we were sure we hadn’t been told to leave. As we spoke on the phone, she searched online for why the town had sent no evacuation alert. She was startled by what she found.

“You won’t believe this,” she said. “There was an evacuation notice for us. But evacuation was only ‘recommended,’ not ‘mandatory.’ ”

It turned out that the local authorities hadn’t advised everyone to leave, only people who lived on or near the water, as my friend and I did. And you had to go to the town website or Facebook page or call to find…

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Lit Life
Lit Life

Published in Lit Life

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Janice Harayda
Janice Harayda

Written by Janice Harayda

Critic, novelist, award-winning journalist. Former book editor of the Plain Dealer and book columnist for Glamour. Words in NYT, WSJ, and other major media.

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