The Lost Bus won’t inspire you to be a school bus driver.
Watching Matthew McConaughy and America Ferrera scramble through the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, probably won’t make you want to become a wildland firefighter either. The Camp Fire burned 18,000 homes and buildings, killed 85 people and left $16.5 billion in damage. Spoiler alert: Our heroes and a busload of cute second-graders survive (barely), but CAL FIRE’s finest, through no fault of their own, get their hardhats handed to them.
The new film streaming on Apple TV, however, might have an impact on the national debate over wildfire strategy. Thanks to its relatively accurate depiction of a new kind of catastrophe — extreme fire behavior that overwhelms both urban and wildland responses — The Lost Bus may help the general public refocus their responsibilities when building homes in a fire-dependent landscape.
“Especially for folks who don’t live in places where wildfires are common, most of their ideas about what wildfires come from the media,” said Montana State University scholar of film and television history Kayti Lausch. “When they read coverage of real wildfire, they instinctually relate that coverage back to what they know from the media.”
The Camp Fire has sprouted a thicket of books, movies, documentaries and podcasts. The Lost Bus screenplay was based on an account from the 2021 book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by Washington Post staff reporter Lizzie Johnson. McConaughy and Ferrera play real-life bus driver Kevin McKay and teacher Mary Ludwig, respectively.
“It wasn’t flame spread from the front. It was burning embers igniting spot fires all over hell and back.”
Jack cohen, Forest Service Fire Sciences Laboratory
On a red-flag day, November 8, 2018, a poorly maintained electrical powerline rains sparks on desiccated grass. Winds of 60 to 80 mph make aerial tanker planes first useless and soon unflyable. The resulting ember storm threatens then engulfs the canyon-walled community of Paradise. As the town of 26,000 evacuates, McKay and Ludwig load a class of children onto a school bus, and then barrel 30 miles through flaming neighborhoods to reach a safety zone and reunite families.
The Camp Fire went from early-morning discovery in the woods to a residential neighborhood inferno seven miles away in less than two hours. The movie accurately showed that kind of behavior, where wind-blown embers turn a specific problem fire into a chaotic, multi-threat catastrophe, according to Jack Cohen, a retired research scientist from the Forest Service Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula.
“It wasn’t flame spread from the front,” Cohen said. “It was burning embers igniting spot fires all over hell and back. I thought they did a pretty damn good job, given they’re movie artists without a good grasp on natural reality. They did a good job portraying what was going on, although the focus was on the [McKay] character and his interactions.”
Overcooked
The story of wildfire is literally built on stories; historic, apocryphal, mythological. From the little rescued cub that became Smokey the Bear, to Big Ed Pulaski saving 39 firefighters in a mineshaft during the Big Burn of 1910, to the tragedy of Mann Gulch’s lost smokejumpers, the narrative brims with brave champions challenging Nature’s fury. And in traditional storytelling fashion, the hero needs a villain.
Walt Disney made it blatantly clear in 1961 with a Wonderful World of Color Sunday night TV movie which convinced thousands of young boys that jumping out of a perfectly good airplane into a raging inferno was a legitimate career choice. In 48 minutes, A Fire Called Jeremiah illustrated the boot camp-like ordeal of qualifying as a smokejumper, followed by the adventure of bare-chested combat with blazing trees.
Along the way, there’s a flirtatious encounter with a perky fire lookout and some comic relief provided by Frisky the Squirrel (played in the movie by an obese chipmunk). Full disclosure: This reporter’s elementary school principal Leon Nelson got a seven-second uncredited role as a dispatcher relaying reports of Jeremiah’s ignition, which justified showing the movie to the entire student body in the school gym.
Disney himself lays out the drama in his opening monologue. While the forest fire scene in Bambi was fantasy, he says, what he’s about to display is real: “We’re going to watch a demon at work … When it gets loose in our forest, it’s the worst kind of bad magic.”
That kind of framing is a common movie move, according to MSU’s Lausch.
“Disney always had clear heroes and villains,” Lausch told Mountain Journal. “And he often made natural phenomena into a personified villain character. That gives it an emotional appeal you can’t get just writing a newspaper article about a fire.”
Unlike other fire-disaster movies such as Backdraft, flames in The Lost Bus aren’t made into a character menacing the cast. That became a problem for some movie reviewers, such as Manohla Dargis of The New York Times who complained that “when the villains remain as absent as they are here, it flattens the realism and turns genuine horror into a canned thriller.”
“Disney always had clear heroes and villains. And he often made natural phenomena into a personified villain character.”
Kayti Lausch, film and television history scholar, Montana State University
Movies often become the basis for a shared sense of what’s real. Jaws famously made millions of people believe shark attacks were common. Disney was occasionally notorious for peddling bunk, such as the White Wilderness “documentary” that convinced viewers arctic lemmings committed mass suicide by flinging themselves into the ocean. In fact, the scene showed captured lemmings being stampeded over a cliff above Alberta’s Bow River, something wild lemmings do not do. Yet even today, the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of “lemming” is “one who mindlessly conforms to what others are doing or saying even if it is silly, harmful, etc.”
But films can also introduce the public to nuanced ideas. In her movie review, NPR’s Linda Holmes recalled talking with someone in the theater who’d been through a wildfire and was shaken by the intensity of the film: “I don’t think the woman … needed this movie; she already knows. It’s for people like me, who have not (so far) had to know about evacuation zones and safe routes.”
Real Lessons
Movie critic Roger Ebert probably would have included The Lost Bus in his “bruised forearm movie” category. That’s the term he used for a film so intense, “you’re always grabbing the arm of the person sitting next to you.”
Streets clogged with cars and panicked residents fleeing as blocks of houses burst into flames make up most of the movie’s middle. Director Paul Greenglass has a track record of delivering high-tension stories drawn from real events, including United 93 and Bloody Sunday. His relentless pacing in The Lost Bus matched the recollections of professional firefighters.
Cody Nelson grew up in Chico, California, close to Paradise. As a wildland fire initial attack crew supervisor, he knows the challenges presented by the surrounding Sierra Nevada canyons. When the Camp Fire started, he was assigned to help the municipal fire department shortly after the blaze tore through the townsite.
“It’s as close as you can get to accurately portraying fire behavior,” Nelson said of The Lost Bus firefighting scenes. “I think they did a pretty good job.”
In particular, Nelson credited the speed of the fire’s spread in the movie scenes: “Does it really move that fast? The answer is yes.”
That’s not always the case. Nelson said his firefighting colleagues often think back to the 1998 film Firestorm for examples of how not to show a wildfire. A New York Times review noted “the techniques for staging large-scale movie conflagrations have only gotten sloppier since the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind.
“That’s the movie we joke about in fire,” Nelson said. “What’s happening there versus how fire behavior appears now — The Lost Bus is light-years ahead of that.”
To be sure, Hollywood did throw some magic smoke around the realistic flames. Experienced firefighters pointed out that the exploding propane tanks threatening the bus were more likely to vent their fuel than actually detonate. A scene of a person’s body catching on fire in the traffic jam was also improbable.
Nevertheless, the new movie offers several real-life lessons. In an interview, the actual Kevin McKay told The Guardian the Camp Fire’s chaotic spread confounded his escape plan. Moving away from the main fire seemed like a good idea, until he realized “those embers that were burning our heads were starting thousands of fires all over town.”
Midway through the movie, the incident command leaders realize their dilemma: The Camp Fire has transformed into a “mass casualty event.” They can’t stop the flames but they can save lives. And that exposes some crucial facts about wildfires.
“What we’ve got, when we do risk analysis, is that the only time these events occur is during extreme wildfire,” Cohen said. “That’s not coincidence. And when we have extreme or severe conditions that produce extreme wildfire, it’s not the big flames — it’s burning embers that create extreme vulnerability. The actual concept that higher density urban development is igniting and burning, independent of the wildfire, is a concept that’s very new.”
So new, in fact, the wildfire community hasn’t yet settled on a word for it. The advocacy group Megafire Action defines its mission as confronting “catastrophic wildfire” and the “megafire crisis.” But the scientific community defines “megafire” strictly by acreage — fires larger than 100,000 acres — without reference to lost homes or urban destruction.
“[‘Gone With the Wind‘] is the movie we joke about in fire. What’s happening there versus how fire behavior appears now — ‘The Lost Bus‘ is light-years ahead of that.”
cody nelson, wildland fire initial attack crew supervisor
In April, a consortium of 20 fire researchers published a paper titled “Megafire — You may not like it, but you cannot avoid it.” While noting “the term is too emotive for scientific use,” they added “we contend that abandoning the term is neither practical, possible nor beneficial.” In a related paper, they expanded the problem by noting that megafire is “an emerging concept commonly used to describe fires that are extreme in terms of size, behavior, and/or impacts, but the term’s meaning remains ambiguous.” After reviewing 109 studies dating back to 2005, the authors decided “megafire” meant a fire larger than 10,000 hectares (24,710 acres). Then they suggested adding the terms “gigafire (larger than 100,000 hectares) and terrafire (larger than a million acres).
However, size doesn’t accurately describe the problem. An urban fire department isn’t equipped to suppress thousands of simultaneous home fires over hundreds or thousands of acres. Wildland firefighters do work on such huge landscapes, but aren’t equipped or trained to suppress structure fires. Nor are they prepared for the extremely toxic environment of a subdivision’s worth of lithium car batteries, exotic plastics and garden chemicals going up in smoke.
“The recent destruction in Los Angeles occurred despite the deployment of 4,700+ firefighting personnel, six air tankers, 31 helicopters and 1,002 engines,” said Megafire Action CEO Matt Weiner in a March 6 congressional testimony. “If some of the best trained and equipped agencies at suppression in the world cannot stop fires of a certain magnitude, less equipped regions throughout the country don’t stand a chance.”
Nevertheless, President Donald Trump cited exactly that kind of urban disaster in the first sentence of his June 12 executive order calling for a unified wildland fire service: “The devastation of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires shocked the American people and highlighted the catastrophic consequences when State and local governments are unable to quickly respond to such disasters.”
January’s Los Angeles wildfires caused an estimated $65 billion in damage, and are considered possibly the most expensive fire disaster in history. Federal responses such as the Fix Our Forests Act focus on things such as creating a unified federal wildfire force, fully suppressing all wildfires, and investing in new firefighting aircraft and other technology. But the experts on the scene have since testified those changes won’t affect the kinds of fires that incinerated huge swaths of Los Angeles County or destroyed Paradise.
“There are not enough firefighters or fire engines to adequately defend every structure in the path of the fire, and there never will be,” said Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Moroney in interviews with CBS Evening News. Moroney described the thousands of golfball-sized embers flying into homes “like snowfall from hell,” adding they didn’t come from burning vegetation “but by the homes that were burning.”
Alternative Route
Nearly all the forests of the western United States developed in what’s called a “fire-dependent ecosystem.” That means they need regular burning to stay healthy, and regular fires are about as irresistible as ocean tides. While catastrophes like the destruction of Paradise make up just 2 percent of each year’s wildfire events, it’s those fires that make the news with their unstoppability.
However, keeping homes from igniting in the first place has much more potential for reducing disaster than fighting wildfires, according to a growing pile of research. Fire-adapted forests evolved to burn. Human-built houses can evolve to not burn.
“We had zero choice over the Camp Fire as a wildfire,” Cohen said. “But when it got into urban development, it’s a structure fire. We have choice over that. We have tremendous choice in reducing vulnerability to failure.”
This is where the physics of ignition becomes important. Imagine holding your hand near an oven burner. Eventually, the radiant heat from the burner will cause pain. But touch the burner, and the pain is instantaneous. That’s conductive heat.
“There are not enough firefighters or fire engines to adequately defend every structure in the path of the fire, and there never will be.”
Anthony Moroney, Fire Chief, Los Angeles County
Radiant heat from a burning forest even a few feet away from a house is unlikely to ignite the wood structure. But an ember from that fire floating through an open window and landing on a shag carpet will quickly catch fire by conductive heat. And that ember might have originated from a burning tree miles away from the wildfire perimeter.
“There is a lack of recognition for all the ways home ignitions can be initiated without big flames being around,” Cohen said. “There’s this perception that it’s a fire issue rather than an ignition issue. We still focus on vegetation management 100 feet away. We largely don’t focus on the vulnerabilities around a house.”
Similar patterns appeared in other recent urban wildfire disasters. Cohen noted how Boulder, Colorado’s Marshall Fire spread through grass on December 31, 2021 and ignited residential development through fences. Aerial photos Cohen analyzed from a 2021 investigation of the Lytton Fire in British Columbia showed the community was “burning just 40 minutes after the fire discovery was called in and continued to burn from six to 12 hours after the wildfire had ceased any influence at the community boundary.”
In response, organizations such as Wildfire Risk to Communities have issued advice to homeowners about how to evaluate their exposure to wildfire and what they can do to protect their homes. Park County around Livingston has a higher wildfire risk than 91 percent of counties in the United States, while Bozeman’s neighboring Gallatin County is worse than 84 percent. Teton County, around Jackson Hole, Wyoming, has a higher risk than 88 percent of U.S. counties.
The recommendation, however, is not more aerial tankers or hotshot crews, but stronger building codes, land-use planning choices and ignition-resistant home improvements. After demonstrating how some Los Angeles houses were saved by residents while others ignited from unattended embers, Moroney described how the urban wildfire strategy has evolved.
“In the past, we’ve always told people when the evacuation order comes, you must leave,” Moroney said. “Now, with proper home hardening and defensible space, you can stay behind and prevent your house from burning down.”
Toward the end of The Lost Bus, actual video of the town shows its neighborhoods burned to their foundations. The movie’s incident commander gives a press conference. After crediting all the hard work, he steps away from the podium but then returns. “We’re being damn fools,” he says. “And that’s the truth.”
“He was talking about mounting massive suppression efforts that largely don’t work,” Cohen said. “We’re spending huge amounts of money and not being very effective. In the wildfire world, we have this control attitude that’s dominated by people obsessed with a failed approach of control. We’re trying to control what we can’t control, and can’t be bothered to focus on what we can control. We will never be able to scale up wildfire policy for fire-adapted ecosystems as long as we have vulnerable communities.”
