PARADISE, Butte County — Greg Woodcox pleaded with his friends to leave everything behind and flee. The firestorm that would become known as the Camp Fire was bearing down on their rural home. They had only seconds to get out.

The morning of the fire, he was visiting a dog park when he spotted the flames coming toward town. Feeling the intense winds and watching the fire explode in size, he got in his sport utility vehicle and began warning people about the nearing monster.

After alerting his adult son and ex-wife at their separate homes, he headed to the end of Edgewood where his paraplegic friend lived with his mom.

“I said, ‘Get out! You’re going to die if you don’t get out!’” Woodcox recalled. “I did everything I could do. I dragged one of them to the car.”

He led the caravan of vehicles, which included more neighbors, down the small roadway, but one of the cars got stuck and the others following it were hemmed in as Woodcox continued down the road. When he turned around, it was too late. Fire had overtaken the cars, with glass shattering in loud pops, he said.

He figured he was next, so he turned to the flames, said a prayer and prepared to meet the God he’d recently started believing in.

“I saw a fox was running for his life, so I said, ‘No Lord, we’re coming, too,’” he said.

When he got to the stream at the bottom of the ravine, he began to panic as the water turned from chilly to the “hottest hot tub I’ve ever felt,” he said. He remembered learning to steady his breathing through martial arts training and relaxed himself as the fire roared overhead “like a freight train.”

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