Key Takeaways:
- The new movie The Lost Bus is based on the true story of bus driver Kevin McKay’s attempt to save 22 children and three adults during the Camp Fire in Paradise, California.
- McKay hadn’t been a bus driver for very long before the 2018 fire erupted.
- With help from teachers Mary Ludwig and Abbie Davis, McKay saved all the passengers that day.
On November 8, 2018, a power line from the Pacific Gas and Electric Company in the Feather River Canyon, aided by high winds, ignited the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history. Known as the Camp Fire, the inferno consumed 153,336 acres of land, leveled nearly 19,000 structures, and claimed 85 lives over the course of two weeks. The fire caused an estimated $16.5 billion in damage, for which PG&E would ultimately agree to a settlement of $13.5 billion in restitution.
One of the towns most heavily impacted by the blaze was Paradise, California. By the time the fires reached Paradise, the winds were so strong—exceeding 50 mph—that aircraft were unable to release their flame retardant drops. They returned to their points of takeoff with fully loaded tanks.
The devastation wrought, the negligence that caused it, and the everyday heroism that fought against gridlocked roads and suffocating smoke to save lives were all chronicled in the 2021 book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by journalist Lizzie Johnson. Readers latched onto many of the stories of people who stepped up to fight back against the devastating flames, one in particular being the daring actions of Kevin McKay, the driver of school bus 963, and teachers Mary Ludwig and Abbie Davis.
Now, their story is the basis of the new movie The Lost Bus, starring Academy Award winner Matthew McConaughey as McKay and Academy Award nominee America Ferrera as Ludwig. The film is directed by Oscar nominee Paul Greengrass, who’s no stranger to adapting stories of remarkable heroism. His filmography including the true stories United 93 (2006), Green Zone (2010), and Captain Phillips (2013). The case of The Lost Bus is another instance where the real events at the heart of the movie are also compelling as the Hollywood adaptation.
At the time of the fire, 41-year-old Kevin McKay hadn’t been a bus driver for very long. “He worked at a Walgreens for a really long time,” author Lizzie Johnson told NPR. “It was a very stable job. And, you know, the entire time, he kind of felt this itching in the back of his head that he wanted to do something more. And so he had quit his good, well-paying job and got a job as a bus driver at the local school district in Paradise to save money as he was going back to college to get a teaching degree.”
The morning of the fires, McKay’s girlfriend, mother, and son, Shaun, had all evacuated to nearby Chico, a city to southwest of Paradise. “That freed me up to focus completely on this terrifying situation,” McKay would later tell CBS.
Others weren’t as lucky as the bus driver’s family. Twenty-two children at Ponderosa Elementary School were stranded, their families unable to get them before the fires spread. McKay was determined to help. Second grade teacher Mary Ludwig and kindergarten teacher Abbie Davis loaded the children onto bus 963 and did all they could to keep the children calm, as he tried to navigate their school bus through the blaze.
They didn’t know that it would ultimately take five hours to escape the fires. They didn’t know the journey would be roughly 30 miles. McKay didn’t even know, as Johnson tells it, if they were going to survive at all. “At one point, he had the teachers make a manifest in case the only thing getting pulled out of that bus were bodies,” she told NPR.
The conditions seemed apocalyptic as smoke crept through the bus’s windows and flames engulfed either side of the roads. “It felt like Armageddon,” Ludwig remarked, while McKay described the atmosphere as “like we’d be headed into Mordor,” the volcanic realm of the Dark Lord Sauron in The Lord of the Rings books.
While McKay drove, the two teachers routinely took roll and made sure the children knew where the exits where and how to use a fire extinguisher. Ludwig and Davis tried to contend with the creeping smoke by tearing their shirts into shreds, dampening them, and having the children breathe through them to diminish the damage from smoke inhalation.
The roads were littered with traffic accidents, and the bus was even sideswiped by a car at one point. “It sounded like someone was punching the bus,” McKay told CBS. In the chaos, he spotted a preschool teacher whose car had broken down as she tried to evacuate the city of Biggs, which had also been devastated by the blaze. McKay brought her onboard.
After five hours and 30 miles, the children were finally reunited with their families. Seven years later, McKay and Ludwig were on the red carpet at the Toronto International Film Festival for the debut of The Lost Bus alongside other individuals who played a role that day (Davis wasn’t one of them, as she didn’t want to participate in the film, according to Time).
In the immediate aftermath, McKay tried to downplay his heroism. “Safety is an important part of a bus driver’s role” CBS reported McKay stating, “and he must have paid attention to those classes.” Rather than think of himself, his focus was on the destruction wrought on his community. Seeing the fires all around, he said “That’s when we realized—it’s a silly statement, but Paradise is lost.”
Still, his colleagues declared him the “bus driver from heaven,” and now audiences are poised to learn the full extent of McKay courage under pressure as well.
The Lost Bus debuted in select theaters on Friday and begins streaming on Apple TV+ on October 3.
Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.
