Yesterday I watched the film The Lost Bus 2025, which depicts the true events of the Camp Fire in California in 2018, when the fire hit the town of Paradise.
The film was very tense, and after watching it I became curious to see how this event actually compares with the extensive wildfires in France this year.
The comparison in terms of the area burned is interesting in itself. The Camp Fire in California ultimately burned approximately 62,000 hectares. The enormous wildfire in Gironde this year affected approximately 40,000 hectares, about two-thirds of the area burned by the Camp Fire. And when all the wildfires in France this year are taken together, approximately 72,000 hectares had been burned by mid-September.
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| The Lost Bus movie 2025 |
But the scale of the Camp Fire was not just about the area burned. The fire quickly affected the communities of Concow, Paradise and Magalia, triggering the evacuation of around 40,000 people. Paradise itself had a population of approximately 26,700 before the fire. The Camp Fire ultimately claimed 85 civilian lives and destroyed more than 18,000 structures.
“Every year, the fires get bigger. And there’s more of them. We’re being damn fools. That’s the truth.”, said Fire Chief Martinez (Yul Vazquez)
The Camp Fire also had a very specific character. It was not simply one continuous fire front moving through the landscape. The fire was caused by a failure in the power lines, and strong winds then carried burning embers far ahead of the main fire front. This caused additional spot fires to break out in Paradise before the main body of the fire had even arrived.
I think this is exactly what the film captures so well. There was not simply one clearly defined fire front in front of people; the fire could suddenly appear in different places all around them. Some of these spot fires were several kilometers ahead of the main front.
And this is where the comparison with this year’s fires in France becomes interesting. The French fires were enormous in terms of their overall area, and some of them spread extremely quickly, but the Camp Fire illustrates a somewhat different type of danger: an extremely fast-moving fire that, through burning embers, was able to “jump” across parts of the landscape and start new fires directly within populated areas.
After watching the film, I was therefore surprised that the difference in the actual area burned is not all that large. A single wildfire in California managed to burn approximately 62,000 hectares, while the total area burned by wildfires in France this year is expected to be around 72,000 hectares.
But it is precisely the way the Camp Fire spread that gives the film its extraordinary tension. It is not just a story about a huge wildfire. It is a story about a situation in which fire suddenly appears all around you, and the time you have to make a decision is measured in minutes.
