Five years after the 2017 North Bay firestorm: No one was left unscathed — or unchanged

“Just being part of the community was, basically, you’re witnessing a traumatic event,” she said.

Karin Demarest, vice president for community impact with the Community Foundation Sonoma County, recalled her reaction to a neighbor’s barbecue grill recently while she sat out on the back deck of her Sebastopol home.

“The visceral response to things like wind and smoke, they happen so quickly, like they don’t even pass through our brains anymore,” Demarest said. “It goes right to the nervous system, where we experience this physical response to things.

“My friends, my colleagues, we all experience it on a windy day, on a warm, windy day,” she said. “We’re all on edge.”

Successive wildfires proved too much for some, prompting them to leave their neighborhoods or the region altogether, said Kate Andersen, whose family’s home rebuild in Larkfield is nearly complete.

She said sounds of emergency vehicles headed up Mark West Springs Road — the escape route for thousands who fled the Tubbs Fire, many driving through flames — gets everyone’s attention. It recalls the final, deadly path of the blaze, as it broadened on either side of the road, taking 11 lives before descending toward Larkfield and Highway 101, where it killed 10 more people.

“There are those people that still just, like, they get a Nixle (public safety alert) and they want to crawl into a ball, they get so overwhelmed with anxiety,” Andersen said. “There are a few people like that. We just try to keep moving forward with our lives.”

Stratton said an individual’s personal history plays a huge role in how they react. A person’s financial wherewithal and social connectedness are key, as well.

Stratton lost her own Fountaingrove home to the Tubbs Fire and found a temporary home for her family through a professional association, from someone she didn’t even know. After the chaos and fear of evacuating their cul-de-sac and losing everything, she relied on her professional training to help her family deal with the trauma of the situation, though there were challenges nonetheless.

“It was certainly a turning of a corner for our family and for many people we know,” she said. “ … Just in the blink of an eye, your whole way of life is gone, and all the people you see on a daily basis have scattered.”

It was particularly hurtful to feel gouged by builders that she said bid for their rebuild well above their architect’s estimates — so much so that they decided after several years to move to Michigan to be near family there. A neighbor had overheard construction workers or contractors talking about how “they could charge whatever they wanted to” when it came to Fountaingrove “because we were stuck,” Stratton said.

It was jarring, and painful, to consider that those people were part of their community.

“If you’re willing and able to move forward in an excited fashion, rather than just a grieving fashion, you can go forward with happy anticipation of the change,” she said. But “I think there’s a lot of unspoken disappointment and still grief in that community.”

While the disaster was incredibly fast-moving, it was also a longtime in the making.

A new sense of vulnerability

Santa Rosa Fire Marshal and Division Chief Paul Lowenthal noted dangerous wildfires have been fairly common in California, “but Sonoma County kind of dodged the bullet for a long time.”

When the big one came, it was the most destructive fire in state history — until the November 2018 Camp Fire destroyed most of the Butte County town of Paradise the following autumn.

It also was probably the first experience with rampaging wildfire for most Sonoma County residents, said Lowenthal, who lost his own home in Larkfield.

“After that, it felt like any time a fire starts that it’s going to get to that level again, and there was a lot of concern,” he said.

“Everybody has been traumatized,” said Evonne Stevens, interim executive director at Redcom, the county emergency dispatch center. “There are people who have lost multiple houses. I’ve taken calls from people who lost a house in the Tubbs Fire only to lose a house in the (2019) Kincade Fire or the (2020) Walbridge Fire or the (2020) Glass Fire.”

Given that heightened level of fear, public agencies — who in 2017 had yet to adopt the kind of emergency notification systems that would have allowed more people in the path of the fires to be warned — now issue notices about nearly every fire, plume of smoke or even smoke impacts from distant areas.

Otherwise, “we have 185,000 people or whatever that all would be calling 911 to report that smoke,” Lowenthal said.

The region’s new sense of vulnerability also has had practical impacts. It’s altered how some plan vacations and shop for homes — though for some folks, the fact an area has burned recommends a property, while others shun anything in a high fire zone, Sebastopol real estate agent Martha Saly said.

For children and young people, a three-week school closure would be just the first in a series of setbacks that included future wildfires, power outages, extreme storms and the COVID-19 pandemic that have contributed to measurable learning losses and, for many, stunted socialization and depression.

And we look at land-use differently and evaluate new development with fire risk and evacuation capacity in mind.

It’s also made us part of an unhappy club, as more and more Western communities endure catastrophic fires.

Rogers, Santa Rosa’s mayor, for instance, recalled the local reaction to last winter’s Marshall Fire in Colorado, which started in drought-cured grasses in Boulder County and, in less than two days, destroyed more than 1,000 homes in two towns, until falling snow put it out.

“I noticed in my own constituents the impact that that fire had on them — just how upset they were knowing what that community was going through, just because they’d been through it,” Rogers said.

Citizen action

But even if the 2017 wildfires increased our angst, they also made us more in tune with our natural world and our built environment, and how they exist together, inspiring new levels of commitment and collaboration that seek to make our communities safer.

Climate change, once an obscure threat, rapidly became a clear and present danger, overwhelming in its ability to alter the scale and impact of known hazards.

For many, the wildfires prompted new focus on greenhouse gas emissions, their effects and related policy, as well as forest management and fuel reduction, driving bolder local investment in fire prevention and carbon reduction.

It also catalyzed citizen action.

Regular people dug into emergency preparedness, evacuation planning, packing go-bags and creating defensible space. They also formed collectives to reduce risk and build their own capacity for self-reliance in community through programs like Map My Neighborhood, COPE (Citizens Organized to Prepare for Emergencies), Fire Safe Councils and other efforts.

“It’s really clear that the threat of a disaster in this community is real to people in a way that’s not real to people that haven’t experienced things,” said Sonoma County Community Preparedness Program Manager Nancy Brown, who joined the county in 2019.

Studies show people tend to underestimate what can happen to them, but having a wildfire — and more than one in our case — “smack dab in the face” has spurred some neighborhoods into action, each time lessening the immediate load on emergency responders and increasing participants’ potential for survival.

After the 2019 Kincade Fire, when people could see that neighbors who invested in creating defensible space around their home fared better, the impetus was more pronounced, Brown said. Some groups also are mapping neighborhood assets and homes with residents who might need help evacuating, as well as holding evacuation drills. They’re organizing fuel reduction efforts and communication plans.

“So many places in the country would die to see how much community support we have — people spending their own time to really assess their own neighborhood and make sure everybody can get out,” Brown said.

Taking action is also a healthy way to mitigate the stress and anxiety of post-fire life, said Santa Rosa marriage and family therapist Doreen Van Leeuwen, who helped form the Wildfire Mental Health Collaborative in 2017. That’s especially true when it brings people together to team up on emergency response, “so we don’t have that same element of banging on people’s doors (in a crisis), and we have a better way of communicating together.”

One preexisting group of Communities Organized to Prepare for Emergencies, COPE North Sonoma County, now incorporated as a nonprofit, “started out finding out who had chain saws,” Brown said, “and now they’re applying for half-million dollar fuels-management grants.”

Lisa Warner is one of those who answered the call to action after the 2017 firestorm. She helped launch the Mayacamas Fire Safe Council after much of her Trinity Road neighborhood was razed by the Nuns Fire, the largest of the North Bay infernos that October.

“I love where I live,” she said. “I feel so fortunate. But it comes with a big responsibility.”

Warner credited her own home’s survival to the fact it offered enough defensible space that an engine crew took a stand there as flames came up the canyon that night — or so she later learned. But in the aftermath, she discovered a great deal more about home hardening, evacuation planning and fuel management, as well as county operations and funding, and the importance of knowing one’s neighbor and working collaboratively.

“Before and after the fire: It’s a measurement of time,” Warner said. “It’s a different world, but there are so many good things that came out of it, that make us stronger as a community.”

Many civilians also have become avid weather watchers, mindful of humidity levels and fuels moisture levels, and especially observant of extreme winds and other features known as “Red Flag” conditions that pose a high fire risk. Red Flag warnings that once passed with little fanfare now get people’s attention in a hurry.

One more loss

Santa Rosa resident Darryl Layton, 82, said he’s “more conscious of the dryness and the drought” since the wildfires happened, and “more watchful, more wary, more jumpy” in general.

Lowenthal said the result of people taking an interest and taking responsibility for things like weed abatement and ensuring defensible space around their homes is in the city’s 2021 fire data.

If you exclude the megafires, like the Tubbs and Glass fires, the city had more acreage burn last year than it has in decades without any major structural damage beyond things like fences and a few outbuildings, Lowenthal said.

“It was huge,” he said. “It showed that it was working.”

Even during the September 2020 Glass Fire, when over 1,150 city parcels were within the footprint or directly affected, only 57 homes were destroyed or damaged, he said. Residential properties outside city limits sustained more damage, with about 300 homes lost in the unincorporated county.

When the Tubbs Fire hit, Pond, a longtime professor at the University of Hawaii, had recently retired from his role with a two-year-college accreditation agency. It was work that took him around Hawaii and the South Pacific, though his travels took him to farther flung places.

He still lives with his grandson, now 25, off Parker Hill Road in a rebuilt house.

It pains him to think of what he lost in the fire — the hand-carved regalia long displayed above his fireplace after he was named a Talking Chief in American Samoa, a great honor. There was a World War I-era Austrian officer’s helmet he found in a French antique store, a coin collection and the only picture he had of the grandmother who raised him.

And there were boxes of carved jade and jewelry carefully selected from his mother’s things after her death several months earlier that had yet to be distributed to various family members. She had owned a jewelry manufacturing firm, and he suffers from the thought that he failed in his stewardship of her possessions.

Pond’s recurring dream subsided for a while, but the long process of listing his lost possessions for the insurance company re-triggered it, as he mentally entered every cupboard, drawer and closet trying to remember what had been inside.

And now, he often finds himself reminded of something he’d forgotten he used to have.

“It’s just one more loss,” Pond said. “Here’s another loss.”

Coming next week: A tribute to those who lost their lives in the North Bay Fire Storm, and an investigation into how the money in the $13.5 billion Fire Victim Trust has been allocated.

Mary Callahan is a Santa Rosa resident and veteran reporter at The Press Democrat. She has been covering wildfires and their impact since the 83,000-acre Fork Fire in Lake County in 1996, watching them grow in speed and destructive force. She was part of the Pulitzer Prize winning team that covered the 2017 North Bay firestorm. You can reach her at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.