Even so, Tim, the only person who survived the fire, became a suspect. “We did not want to believe this was intentionally set,” CSPD detective Rick Gysin told the Colorado Springs Gazette in 2008, five years after the blaze. “You don’t want to think of humanity like that.”

However, investigators eventually came to the conclusion that the fire was a triple homicide. CBI tests on the carpeting, on Tim’s sneakers and jeans, and on pajamas belonging to both Sophia and Sierra had come back positive for xylenes—colorless, flammable liquids that could be used as accelerants in fires—which gave investigators reason to believe the fire was intentionally set.

On top of that, Tim’s recollection of the fire changed with each retelling. At one point, he said he’d walked to the garage and returned to a living room filled with fire; in another, it was heavy smoke. In one, he ran to a bedroom window to get air; in another, he was lining up his children to get out of the house. “What Tim Nicholls said didn’t make a lot of sense,” Derek Graham, part of the police homicide investigation team, told the Gazette in 2008. “That was a big red flag from the beginning.”

So she and her colleagues climbed one more flight of stairs, to a door that opened into the sixth and top floor. She remembered that this was where the older military records were kept, the ones from World War I, World War II, and Korea, but she hadn’t been up here since orientation. Now, as she pulled open the door, she saw the cardboard boxes neatly stacked on metal shelves as far as the eye could see.

They were on fire.

Had the group gone up a staircase on the periphery of the building and not the central one, Trieschmann likely would have seen only a thick cloud of smoke. Instead, she witnessed the earliest stage of a blaze that would occupy hundreds of firefighters for days.

It’s admirable for Skalski to be so unbothered by the criticism. Still, I press on. She, more than anyone, embodies the feds to the locals of Tuolumne County. Why, in her view, had the area been so ready to forgive the man rescued from the scene of the crime? “I think what people were surprised at was that it was a local person. Not even so much that it was a hunter, but that it was a local person,” she says. “We all knew how dry it was out there, so they’re like, ‘Why would you do that?’ I don’t know — that could’ve been a disappointment to find out it was somebody local as opposed to somebody coming from a city out there.”

Of all the explanations, Skalski’s rings most true. We say we tell stories to understand the world, but the ones we choose to believe often fit into our existing understanding of it. A local kid should’ve known better than to start a fire on the hot, dry afternoon of Aug. 17, 2013. A terrible accident with untold costs was too simple an explanation. And so, many other stories began to be told.

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As I report on the seemingly endless stream of wildfires, hurricanes, or floods experienced across the United States in recent years, I often think of the phrase, “A recipe for disaster.” It’s the sort of phrase that feels best said in a dramatic podcasting voice, but cliche as it may be, I’ve found it sums up these events much more accurately than the commonly-deployed “natural disaster.”

The term disaster itself comes from a combination of Latin words that roughly translates to “ill-starred.” This refers to the early belief that disasters were punishments from the universe or God. Over time, our understanding of disasters evolved and other explanations took root. Researchers shared the science behind natural hazards like earthquakes or tornadoes, knowledge that allowed us to track and prepare for them. We came to adopt the phrase “natural disasters” to describe particularly impactful bouts of these naturally-occurring phenomena, a term we still use today despite the fact that there is scientific consensus that humans have altered the natural world around us. 

The following stories dig into the “ingredients” of recent natural hazard-related disasters. Each piece traces back through time to unveil how policies, politics, or societal norms set the stage for the disasters they chronicle. The authors interrogate the role of fossil fuels and industry; of racism, classism, and colonialism. Ultimately, they offer an opportunity to learn from the past, and hopefully better prepare for the inevitable hazards to come. 

We Have Fires Everywhere (Jon Mooallem, The New York Times Magazine, July 2019)

The 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California, has been the subject of countless articles, documentaries, essays, books, and even an upcoming film feature. Much coverage of the wildfire has focused on the horrors of the evacuation process or the near-total devastation of the rural town. And while Jon Mooallem certainly spends time on both of these subjects, he also chronicles the path that led to that November day, including digging into Paradise’s previous brushes with wildfires and attempts to learn from those incidents and prepare for future fires. 

This was a perspective many other stories left out, the fact that residents and officials not only understood there was a threat but attempted to mitigate it. He presents those failed efforts against the backdrop of the broader landscape of PG&E’s infrastructure failures and the suppression-first firefighting policies, which, mixed with years of drought and warming temperatures, primed the forests surrounding Paradise to ignite in a conflagration that surpassed the idea of what a worst-case scenario could look like. 

I remember being so struck by the ending of the piece after my first time reading it — simple sentences that were particularly prescient, knowing what we’ve seen in the years since. 

Still, even before the Camp Fire, many people in Paradise and around California had started to look at the recent succession of devastating fires — the Tubbs Fire, the Thomas Fire, blazes that ate through suburban-seeming neighborhoods and took lives — and intuit that our dominion over fire might be slipping. Something was different now: Fire was winning, finding ways to outstrip our fight response, to rear up recklessly and break us down. That morning, in Paradise, there hadn’t even been time for that fight response to kick in. And the flight response was failing, too. Those who study wildfire have long argued that we need to reshuffle our relationship to it — move from reflexively trying to conquer fire to designing ways for communities to outfox and withstand it. 

Earth’s New Gilded Era (Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic, October 2020) 

For years, heat waves have been among the deadliest extreme weather events in the United States, but it’s rare for extreme heat to be referred to as a disaster. There’s a growing movement to treat such sweltering stretches like we do hurricanes or wildfires, ascribing names or categories to them, to convey their seriousness. Part of the challenge in winning that battle, as Vann R. Newkirk explains in this article, is that the impacts of heat are so disparate. 

Newkirk tackled the subject after spending years on the disaster beat, including revisiting Hurricane Katrina in the deftly reported Floodlines podcast. In this story, he spans the globe to identify the throughlines of historic inequity that correlate with heat exposure. For many, heat waves mean days spent largely inside, air conditioning cranked up. It’s those who do not have that luxury — maybe their jobs require them to be exposed to the temperatures or their neighborhood and home does not have adequate cooling infrastructure — who are most impacted. 

When Americans think about climate change, they probably don’t have these kinds of consequences in mind—an uptick in stillbirths, or more Black children with asthma. Climate communication often tends toward the apocalyptic and the episodic, for good reason: Dramatic events are a good way to get apathetic people to care. But the destruction wrought by the heat gap in American neighborhoods is just as important as the high-profile cataclysms. That destruction is insidious and hard to follow because it plays out along existing lines of inequality and injustice. Comparable to its role in some chemical reactions, heat accelerates the logical outcomes of unequal human systems. In this reaction, heat is not necessarily a bomb that will suddenly vaporize civilizations. Here, its preferred pathway is decomposition, working slowly and steadily at severing bonds until two components are separate, if not equal.

The Abolitionists Born After Hurricane María (Edmy Ayala Rosado, Atmos, 2022) 

Edmy Ayala Rosado set out to write about the fifth anniversary of Hurricane María and the power of Puerto Rican people, she explains at the start of this article. Instead, she found herself having to make sense of yet another devastating storm. While 2022’s Hurricane Fiona was historic, it was in many ways not surprising, Rosado says, as Puerto Rico has weathered multiple significant disasters in the years since Maria. She includes political disasters in this list, noting throughout the piece that it’s impossible to strip politics from the impacts of these natural hazards. 

Blackouts and electrical issues certainly stemmed from the 2018 storm’s lashing winds, but they continue because of politics, Ayala Rosado argues. She chronicles the work of citizen-led grassroots groups that are tackling some of Puerto Rico’s most entrenched issues since the storm: electricity, food sovereignty, and accessing aid funding. Repeatedly, she returns to the structural and political problems that began long before Hurricane María, which were then laid bare and exacerbated by the challenging years that have followed. But she never loses faith in her community’s ability to withstand what happens next. 

Many of these efforts—although created in the darkness of one of the worst weather events in recent history—have helped local communities steer our reconstruction. They are doing it leveraging academic, historic, political, and ancestral knowledge. 

We Boricuas are showing the world a true and noble resistance to capitalism, neoliberalism, and imperialism. Though some may argue the colonial project seems to be working in Puerto Rico, we push back. We level the playing field for true sovereignty. We have turned our grief into action.

The Bear God Revisited (Emily Sekine, Orion Magazine, February 2020)

While studying geology in Japan, Emily Sekine explores the ways disasters become a part of culture. They’re woven into the stories we pass down, like the titular “Bear God,” and they can shape the way we live our daily lives, if we so choose. Sekine acknowledges the high risk of natural hazards Japanese people face on any given day, with the ground under their feet existing across four tectonic plates. But the “3.11 disaster” still remains singularly devastating, Sekine says, referring to the earthquake-triggered tsunami that also caused a nuclear accident. More than 15,000 people were killed and more than 400,000 were displaced. 

Observing the disaster from nearly a decade later, Sekine joins a preparedness workshop being offered to residents in Tago. After a brief topography lesson, participants fan out into the landscape, tasked with viewing the familiar landscapes of their neighborhood through disaster-focused eyes. What obstacles might prevent them from evacuating before the wave of a tsunami crests towards their path? What steps could they take now to prevent that from happening?

Like most of the reads on the list, Sekine’s essay draws from the benefit of hindsight, of being able to look back at a disaster and decipher what went wrong. So, I appreciated the inclusion of this meeting, of using that understanding from the past to take steps to mitigate what devastation a future earthquake might cause. 

One of the main appeals of living in and visiting the areas around Mount Fuji is the pleasure of soaking in the mineral-rich onsen, or hot spring baths. But, Tanaka-san told me, most people do not connect this experience with the ever-present threat of earthquakes and volcanoes. When people are relaxing in the onsen, he wants them to think about how these geological processes are connected. His point, as I understand it, is not to ignite fear, but to insist that people grasp the full and varied powers of the earth — the blessings as well as the dangers. 

The Really Big One (Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, 2015)

It’s impossible to talk about longform disaster writing without mentioning this piece, which brought the threat of a major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest into public consciousness. When reporting in Washington once, I was even presented with a carefully stapled paper printout of the article. Residents told me it had inspired — or, perhaps, frightened — their rural community to develop its own preparedness committee.

Schulz approaches the threat that lies under some of the West’s biggest cities from multiple angles, from the scientific to the sociological. It culminates in her predicting what the earthquake might look like on a societal level, from the grid collapses to the roads destroyed, and the personal level, from the way “refrigerators will walk out of kitchens” to the various ways homes might slide off their foundations and collapse. Ultimately, Schulz questions how we’ve come to a place where we’ve researched and studied and learned so much about this risk, yet taken such little action to prepare for it. 

The Cascadia subduction zone remained hidden from us for so long because we could not see deep enough into the past. It poses a danger to us today because we have not thought deeply enough about the future. That is no longer a problem of information; we now understand very well what the Cascadia fault line will someday do. Nor is it a problem of imagination. If you are so inclined, you can watch an earthquake destroy much of the West Coast this summer in Brad Peyton’s “San Andreas,” while, in neighboring theatres, the world threatens to succumb to Armageddon by other means: viruses, robots, resource scarcity, zombies, aliens, plague. As those movies attest, we excel at imagining future scenarios, including awful ones. But such apocalyptic visions are a form of escapism, not a moral summons, and still less a plan of action. Where we stumble is in conjuring up grim futures in a way that helps to avert them.

Great American Wasteland (Lauren Stroh, Longreads, March 2022)

Writing about her native Louisiana, Lauren Stroh speaks to the reader with familiarity, as if welcoming you into the sort of exchanges you hear on a front porch or in passing at a local diner. In Cameron Parish, those conversations for the past three years have centered largely around disaster. The town experienced two hurricanes, a winter storm, flooding, and tornadoes all in a less than two-year period, all during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid the deaths, destruction, and devastation, Stroh asks why. 

Why was the area so vulnerable in the first place? Why were bodies still being held in trailers months after the storms? Why was there not more aid and funding being sent to address this devastation?

While I described Stroh as welcoming to the reader, that’s not to say she approaches these conversations lightheartedly — she’s frustrated and angry, tired, and tough, and her voice is unflinching. Throughout the piece, Stroh shares snippets of her interviews, again letting the reader in to be a part of her conversations. Some of these are with officials; one with a suspect nonprofit leader. Others are with the residents who remain, the people who are navigating the maze of insurance claims and federal aid Stroh carefully lays out. It’s an analysis of how cascading disasters can bury survivors in bureaucracy, making it increasingly difficult for them to surface before the next one strikes, and the ways the same bureaucratic system can contort to let industry off the hook. 

Danny Lavergne, the director of Cameron’s Office of Emergency Preparedness, tells me it took 51 weeks for FEMA to get 201 people housed in mobile housing units after Hurricane Laura. For months they refused to place camper trailers in a flood zone before abruptly reversing that decision without reason or explanation. That’s how arbitrary bureaucracy can be. But it fucks up your life: For nine months, 201 people were homeless and waiting. They made do in loved ones’ living rooms, in their cars, in hotel rooms they had to drive in from situated far and wide across the state. People lived this way through the fall and into spring — throughout the pandemic in 2020, when at times Louisiana suffered among the highest caseloads in the United States, long before there were any vaccines. Cameron’s only hospital is still operating out of a tent with limited services. Lake Charles has no homeless shelter, and all the hotels and apartments in close vicinity were damaged or price gouged to match the demand for livable housing. In the meantime, while they waited on FEMA to coordinate temporary housing, do tell me — where exactly were these people supposed to go?

Colleen Hagerty is a journalist specializing in disaster coverage for outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and BBC News, among others. She also has a newsletter on the subject called My World’s on Fire. You can find her on Twitter @colleenhagerty.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy-editor: Peter Rubin

Could he help Huff’s team determine whether there was a genetic link between the felled trees in the Olympic National Forest and the wood that Wilke sold to the lumberyard?

To fight big-leaf maple theft more broadly, law enforcement would need samples from the species’s entire range. The creation of such a database would require hundreds of samplers fanning out across thousands of miles, and the Forest Service still lacked the resources for such an undertaking.

By Cheri Lucas Rowlands

As a child in Northern California, fall was my favorite time of year. My birthday is in mid-August, so I was always ready to tackle the next school year, and was excited because our hottest days, our true summer, had yet to come. But the past several years have felt different here, ever since the Tubbs Fire tore through Sonoma, Napa, and Lake counties in October 2017. This deadly, unprecedented fire blazed across canyons and hills, jumped the 101 freeway, and cut through the city of Santa Rosa without warning — destroying entire neighborhoods in the night and killing 22 people.

Growing up on the San Francisco Peninsula in the ’80s, the image of the Forest Service’s mascot, Smokey Bear, was ubiquitous, but while we were taught that wildfire was a threat, it was a theoretical danger to us. As I’ve gotten older, fire has mostly remained a disaster that has happened somewhere else. The fall of 2017, then, felt markedly different: from then on, fire was no longer confined to wilderness. It found its way into cities, to the Pacific coast, to places previously thought as safe. It forced us to wear N95 masks long before the pandemic. It turned our sky orange. It has made us question where in the West, ultimately, is safe from fires — and the effects of climate change. But, as the writers below know, that place does not exist.

Two years ago, Longreads writer Tessa Love published a beautiful braided essay on fire, home, and belonging. We ran it to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the Camp Fire, which ignited in Butte County on November 8, 2018, and obliterated the town of Paradise, near Chico, near where Love grew up. The Camp Fire remains the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, killing 85 people and destroying over 18,000 structures.

Love and I had been in the latter stages of editing her piece in October 2019 when fires sparked across Northern California yet again. One of these wildfires, the Kincade Fire, forced my family to evacuate our home in West Sonoma County. I guess this is where I’m supposed to say something like, it felt so surreal to pack up and leave my home while editing this essay on someone else’s experience with wildfire. But the truth is that when my husband and I became experts at packing go bags — and had memorized the zone lines on our local evacuation map — I no longer viewed fire as a mere possibility. It was a given, and something that directly affected our community. It had been the third year in a row that we had either evacuated our home or packed our valuables into our cars just in case, so no, it was not surreal. It was the new normal.

As we approach the anniversary of the Camp Fire, Northern California is recovering from a recent powerful storm. But the threat of fire this year remains, even as November brings cooler temperatures. Because when it comes to fire, there really are no seasons.

At the moment, there’s no shortage of reported features about wildfires; I’ve read some notable pieces recently, like Andrea Stanley on climate trauma and the need for long-term mental health support for communities like Paradise, Zora Thomas on what it’s like to be a hotshot firefighter, and Lauren Markham on how assisted forest migration can help save our trees. I’d also recommend David Ferris on the devastating CZU Lightning Complex, which burned in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties in fall 2020, and its effects on the region’s ancient coast redwoods, which are the tallest living things on the planet. For this reading list, however, I’ve selected six personal essays, including “California Burning,” the story that Love and I worked on together. Each piece uses the spark of fire to explore other themes, whether home and belonging, or idleness, or memory.

California Burning (Tessa Love, Longreads, November 2019)

Tessa Love grew up in Butte Creek Canyon, where wildfire shaped her life. She now lives in Berlin, and when the Camp Fire raced through the canyon and destroyed the town of Paradise in November 2018, she recounts what it was like to track the fire online, to watch it consume her family’s corner of the earth from the other side of the world. She also ponders destruction through the context of her own life, having escaped a five-year relationship and an ever-changing Oakland and Bay Area that she no longer identified with. I’m such a fan of Love’s writing — she poured all of herself into this piece — and I appreciate how she examines the reshaping and regrowth of a place, displacement and resilience in living things (including foxes!), and the process of burning things down and building them back up.

A river carved a canyon and that canyon is carved in me. From childhood, I’ve known each of its curves like I know the shape of my own body. Every tree, every cavern, every structure. Every bend in the river, every story buried behind the seen.

When I come home six weeks after the fire, I find my geography unstitched. It’s a disorienting drive up the winding canyon road. Each burned lot, each fallen tree, undoes the map in me.

Love and the Burning West (Sarah Berns, Shondaland, June 2021)

One hot July, 21-year-old Sarah Berns was out fighting a fire with the Forest Service, digging firebreaks. As the flames approached the crew, falling embers singed her forearm hair, the air grew dense, and at that moment, she thought she was about to die. “Please don’t let me die a virgin,” she thought. After that near-death experience, Berns decided to take matters into her own hands — literally. She spent the rest of that fire season building a bed made from logs in the national forest, one fit “for a life-defining event,” and hauled it to campus back east, determined to have sex before graduation. Her essay is a fresh and unexpected coming-of-age read on fire — and finding oneself.

When that fire had closed in on me the summer before, I fixated on sex as the thing I hadn’t yet experienced. But really I was terrified of dying before I could find something — find the woman I was to become, on my own terms.

A Talent for Sloth (Philip Connors, Lapham’s Quarterly, September 2017)

In this meditation on nature and solitude, Philip Connors describes his routine as a fire lookout not in California, but in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, overseeing nearly a million acres of fire-prone wilderness. For the past decade, Connors has spent several months of each year in a glass tower on a 10,000-foot peak, which allows him to see as far as 180 miles away on a clear day. Only 500 lookout towers in the U.S. remain, mostly in the West; he describes the quiet moments he spends atop his perch, watching birds, observing clouds, writing and reading, and — of course — spotting fires.

A new fire often looks beautiful, first a wisp of white like a feather, a single snag puffing a little finger of smoke in the air. I see it before it has a name. Like Adam with an animal before him, I will give it one, after I nail down its location and call it in to dispatch. We try to name the fires after a nearby landmark—a canyon, peak, or spring—but there is often a touch of poetic license involved.

Autumn Inferno (Nicole R. Zimmerman, Cagibi, October 2021)

“It’s fire season in California. October, my birthday month. Fall was always my favorite. But that was before.” Nicole R. Zimmerman’s essay in the most recent online issue of Cagibi hit close to home for me. She divides her observations by year, detailing her and her partner’s experiences during the Northern California firestorms of 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017: the Walbridge, Glass, Kincade, and Tubbs fires. As I recall my own timeline during these fires, her details stick to me: how the elderly residents in Oakmont, a senior living community, were dressed in pajamas and robes as they were evacuated at one in the morning. Or how her friends, unable to escape because a fire blocked their only exit, raced down a hill through burning woods to jump into a swimming pool. Beyond her encounters with fire, there’s also a deeper personal layer, revealing a longtime estrangement from her mother, which makes the piece all the more poignant.

My mother’s rental home, situated at the southern edge of the encroaching flames, stood among some three thousand residences in the mandatory evacuation zone. Although we live just thirty minutes away, I have never been to her house—not this one. I typed her address into the live fire map. A black dot marked its location. I clicked the plus sign to magnify her street, which was surrounded by a plethora of red dots, each marking hot spots. When my wife entered the room, I pointed at the computer screen, speechless. It was Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. Kristen cradled my head to her chest as my tears rained down.

Location Not Found (Angella d’Avignon, Real Life, February 2019)

About 95 percent of the structures in Paradise, and the neighboring community of Concow, were destroyed from the Camp Fire. How do you map a loss like this? In “Location Not Found,” Angella d’Avignon tours Paradise from the comfort of her screen, months after it burned to the ground. In Google’s Street View, businesses and restaurants eerily stand and seem frozen in time, as if the digital version of the town still hasn’t caught up with the destruction. She searches the Cal Fire database, where you can search an address for images of damage, and describes the devastation: a melted garage door, skeletons of appliances, the vestiges of an American flag wrapped around a charred pole. She browses outdated Yelp pages — the virtual equivalent of abandoned, boarded-up storefronts. I enjoy Real Life’s commentary across topics, whether death or friendship; d’Avignon’s thoughts on voyeurism, loss, and digital ghost towns is no exception.

Paradise is not a post-industry ghost town but one abandoned and leveled by a wickedly fast wildfire exacerbated by climate change. So when the past happens overnight, how will technology decide to reflect the new (or newest) reality? How quickly can you update a disaster site?

Objects of Fire (Tessa Love, The Believer, June 2021)

When you’ve lost everything, is it even worth grieving a single object? “A thing may not be a life,” writes Tessa Love, “but a life is built of things.” I wanted to end this list with another piece from Love — a compilation of oral histories on the belongings that people left behind as they fled their homes. Poems written by Devi Pride’s father, stuffed inside a book, which she never had a chance to read. Irreplaceable postcards that Amy Thomason received as a child from her dad, when he was on tour in Europe. The last photograph taken of Mike Richard’s great-aunt Esther, who was a nurse in both World Wars. Or the silverware of Peggy Bailey’s grandmother, a spiritual woman who had taught her a lot about death. Love publishes 10 stories in all: a small sample yet lovely archive of life.

I was very close to my father’s mother, a spiritual woman. She taught me a lot at a very young age about who we are as humans and spirits. How we understand death. … After she passed, I inherited her silverware. That didn’t make it through the fire. I had several of her beautiful antiques, but nothing affected me in the same way as her silverware. I was touching it; I was using it in the way she used it. Every day it was a treat to pick it up, eat with it, wash it, and think of her. When I touched it, I felt, Ah, there she is. It was the same in the car with my grandson. I knew my dad was speaking through him. There he is.

Last July, an apartment in the Grenoble suburb of La Villeneuve caught on fire and quickly became an inescapable inferno of flames and smoke. Two young boys stood on the balcony, desperate to escape, but with no way out behind them. They had to jump. 

In her description for the BBC, Myriam Lahouari examines the seven men who stood on the ground ready to catch them. These men were strangers to the boys, and to each other, but shared in their bravery — catching a child flying through the air like a cannonball is no mean feat, and several received injuries requiring surgery in the attempt.

Ten-year-old Sofiane is much bigger and heavier than his brother. Mouhsine, a former security forces officer with the Royal Palace in Rabat, looks up and tries to estimate. About 40 kilos, he guesses. He knows the force will be much more difficult to absorb.

Guelord is to his right, strong enough, Mouhsine reckons, that between them they can lock together to brace against the impact. He grabs the 29-year-old’s arm.

The men are worried – they can’t see Sofiane. But he soon reappears through the thickening smoke. He climbs through the open window to sit on the sill. His feet dangle over the edge, and he looks down at the ground.

The men wait. It seems like an eternity but it’s only a few seconds. Finally, he levers himself over the windowsill, hangs, then lets go. 

His right foot strikes Mouhsine, his left foot Guelord. Both fall under the impact. Mouhsine screams in pain. The bone in his wrist looks deformed. Guelord realises he has broken his thumb. Walid has fractured his wrist, Lucas his hand. Bilal is thought to have broken a finger.  

But Sofiane is unharmed. “He landed directly into our arms,” says Walid.  Elyasse weeps in relief. “The two children were unscathed – it’s a miracle,” he reflects.

“We didn’t have much time to discuss and decide, everything was done by instinct,” adds Mouhsine.

The seven men are all from the local area, and their efforts, along with the dozens of other residents involved in the rescue effort, highlighted a real sense of community. Not many people realize that this camaraderie exists in La Villeneuve, an area with such a bad reputation that the address has become “so stigmatized that its young residents struggle to get a job.” Does this suburb deserve this image, or did “the catch” prove it to be something different? There is certainly a troubled history here — the men who saved the boys are all immigrants — on an estate that ten years previously erupted in violent rioting that provoked an anti-immigration speech by then French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

In the summer of 2010, a man from La Villeneuve was suspected of stealing from a local casino, and was killed in the police shoot-out that followed. His death triggered three nights of looting and arson in the area. A few days later Sarkozy made a hard-hitting and widely criticised security speech in Grenoble.

“We are seeing the consequences of 50 years of insufficiently controlled immigration, which have ended in the failure of integration,” he said. “We are so proud of our integration system. Perhaps we need to wake up? To see what it has produced. It worked. It doesn’t work any more.” 

He called for foreign-born residents threatening the police to be stripped of their citizenship.