Sonoma County father-son team combat wildfires from a tanker plane and a kitchen

For 45 years, Bob Valette has been on the front lines of California wildfires. The 78-year-old flies specialized tanker planes that drop thousands of gallons of the hot pink fire retardant that’s become all too familiar to people living in fire-prone areas throughout the state.

As one of only a few dozen Cal Fire tanker pilots in the state, Valette is always on call during fire season, ready to take off from Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport at a moment’s notice.

Locals, however, know him best as Chef Dustin Valette’s dad, aka “Pops,” frequently found chatting up diners at his son’s upscale Healdsburg restaurant. The two Valettes, who are native Healdsburg residents, have a close relationship, so it wasn’t surprising that as a chef, Dustin has followed in his father’s footsteps. Sort of.

When fires roared through Sonoma County in 2017, and again in 2019, father and son both became first responders - on the ground and in the air - for their community. Bob would fly dozens of strategic missions pinpointing areas of the fire while Dustin served hundreds of meals to hungry firefighters.

‘Not a low-risk industry’

Growing up in a first-responder family, Dustin says he learned early on the kind of danger his father faced.

“It was always a little scary,” Dustin recalled. As a child, he spent a lot of time at the airport watching his dad fly to wildfires from the Mexican border to the Oregon border.

“It’s not a low-risk industry,” he noted, a point hammered into him at funerals he attended for his father’s comrades.

But he also learned how to handle an emergency. Dustin learned not to panic, but to make a plan and take time to get organized. He learned that people need direction, and when stepping in to help, communication was key.

“I learned how to react with a cool, calm head and to make a game plan, whether that’s confronting a fire or feeding people,” Dustin said. Armed with a cellphone filled with the numbers of top chefs throughout the county, Dustin rallied his peers to provide hundreds of meals to first responders in the early days of the 2017 disaster.

“When you’re asked to do 200 meals by tonight, having a quick text thread with who does what is pretty huge,” Dustin said.

The devastation was unfathomable

The night the Tubbs fire began in 2017, Bob Valette saw the glowing hillside and knew things were going bad. Trained to know the difference, by scent, between a grass fire, a structure fire and trees being consumed by flames, he went to the Santa Rosa airport in the early hours of the morning to get a vantage point atop a large water tank.

“I got there and just watched the fire. I saw the embers coming across the freeway and start to glow in Coffey Park. As soon as the sun came up, I went to work,” said Bob.

The senior Valette flies a specialized S-2 tanker plane that can drop up to 1,200 gallons of fire retardant on each flight. The converted military planes are precision flyers used by the state since the late 1970s to combat large wildfires when weather conditions permit. The 22 state-owned planes cannot fly when the winds are strong or smoke is too heavy.

‘People are gonna need help right now’

When Bob came into the airport for his first refueling, Dustin immediately called to ask how he could help.

Bob told Dustin the devastation was unfathomable. “You won’t believe what’s going on. There are going to be a lot of people who are displaced, with nothing. They don’t have a credit card, not a dollar bill, they can’t go buy a hamburger. People are gonna need help right now,” he said.

Dustin started doing what chefs do best: cooking.

“He was making dinner for people and getting it up to them before emergency services could gear up. He closed the restaurant, and had his whole kitchen crew taking care of people,” Bob Valette said.

“Communication is really key, and it was beneficial to know where the fire was. I called my dad five times a day, and it allowed us to know what the needs were,” Dustin added.

Rather than just randomly making food, Dustin made a plan. After talking to his father and to authorities, he focused on the needs of Cal Fire, smokejumpers and the Healdsburg Fire Department. In the first hours and days of the fires, he knew that internal structures to feed first responders weren’t yet in place. The time to step in was now, he said.

“It made sense for us to absorb the role of their kitchen,” Dustin said. Knowing that most firefighters are trained in the basics of cooking and to be self-sufficient, they also realized that taking even one firefighter off the front lines to spend the day in a kitchen was a poor use of their time.

“We wanted to make sure we weren’t overstepping, but we also didn’t want there to be gaps,” Dustin said.

Reprising a vital role

In both 2017 and 2019, Dustin focused on serving food to first responders until more formalized emergency systems got into place. He reached out to community leaders, his own restaurant purveyors, and most importantly, a network of other local chefs to take turns and pool resources.

“In 2017 it was just confetti,” Dustin said. “In 2019 we had a plan, and chefs all filled a role. It just made it more efficient.”

Each takes a quiet pride in their own contributions to protecting their county.

“My dad’s job is to fight a fire before it grows too big,” Dustin said, “and my job is to be there to help get (food operations) going. After about five or six days of the fire, all of the formal operations come in, including the infrastructure to make their own food. Once they have a formal division, that’s when we stop cooking,” Dustin said.

“We’re both just one of the tools in the firefighting industry. We’re where the rubber meets the road,” Bob said.