Coffey Park residents rejected the role of victim after Tubbs Fire

The scorched earth that had once been their front yard looked like hell, so Richard Lane and his wife Alison did something about it. Not long after their house on Crimson Lane in the Coffey Park neighborhood went up in flames, they planted a dozen or so plastic pink flamingos in the dirt.

That flamboyance of birds — yes, that is the proper collective noun for a group of flamingos — struck a whimsical, offbeat note amid the charred remains of the neighborhood.

That was the plan. As a former protester and longtime grassroots organizer who made his living choreographing sword fights for theatrical productions — he literally wrote the book on swashbuckling — Lane is a master of the defiant gesture.

After growing up on Long Island, he moved to New York City in the 1980s to pursue acting. On a lark, he signed up for a class called “Fencing for Actors” — a decision that led to his three-decade career in the art of stage combat.

“Over 30 years,” he estimates, “I probably choreographed ‘Romeo and Juliet’ 75 times.”

Running through that tragedy, as Lane well knows, is the idea that the “star-crossed” lovers are at the mercy of fate, their misery preordained.

That is not the story of Coffey Park. An ethnically diverse neighborhood bounded by Highway 101 to the east and farmland to the west, it featured mostly two-and three-bedroom homes built during the 1980s by developers like Art Candiotti and Tux Tuxhorn. While it’s often described as working class, as Santa Rosa native Gabe Meline wrote in 2018, the history of Coffey Park “shows a demographic climbing the rungs of the economic ladder.”

That embodiment of the American dream turned into a nightmare around 2 a.m. on Oct. 9, 2017, as embers and flames borne by gale force winds from the northeast crossed the 6-lane freeway and into Coffey Park, where the fire consumed 1,422 homes.

Today, an absence of mature trees is the only clue that an inferno tore through here five years ago. Setting aside the 40 or so lots whose owners chose not to rebuild, says Jesse Oswald, Santa Rosa’s chief building officer, “Coffey Park is 99.9% done.”

True, it is a compact, flat, easily accessible neighborhood in northwest Santa Rosa. Many of its residents had at least some insurance. Those factors abetted its swift comeback.

But the main reason for the resurrection of this plucky, polygon neighborhood is that the people who live there flipped the script the fire handed them. They rejected their roles as victims and had the grit and agency to take control of their fate.

Such defiance and resolve has been on display throughout the North Bay in all the wildfires to beset it in recent years. But nowhere has it been more concentrated, or effective, than in Coffey Park.

Emerging stronger

Rather than retreat into their individual anguish following the inferno, residents banded together and leaned on each other. By organizing, sharing knowledge and resources; by hectoring, browbeating, sweet-talking and otherwise persuading city officials and politicians to help them, this group of survivors served as the driving force behind a remarkably speedy recovery.

“Through trauma we’re ripped open, but often times a stronger, better version of ourselves can emerge,” said Dr. Adrienne Heinz, a Healdsburg-based psychotherapist who is also a research scientist at the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress at the US Department of Veterans Affairs and Stanford University.

Post-traumatic growth is “not the expectation,” she qualified. “There are people who have too many cumulative burdens and struggles to be able to experience something like this after something terrible.”

Others, however, can bounce back, “with the right system of support, whether it’s their family or community or place of worship.”

Or, perhaps, with Wine Wednesday, the beloved Coffey Park institution founded by middle school teacher Tricia Woods, who had the idea to organize weekly hump-day gatherings to imbibe, yes — but also to bond and commiserate with the only other people in the world who knew exactly what they’d been through.

Referring to studies done with cancer survivors, Heinz spoke of the “deeper appreciation for being alive when they come out the other side.”

Each day feels like more of “a blessing and a gift,” Heinz said. “It deepens your relationships with others. You have this connection that is more visceral and authentic after you’ve gone through something terrible, together. There are possibilities in life you might not have imagined.”

Paying it forward

Anne Barbour could not have imagined that, after 33 years in the grocery business, she would become an expert on debris removal, contractors, insurance and myriad other rebuild-related topics. She had no inkling, before joining the neighborhood support group Coffey Strong, that she would spend hundreds of hours restoring the neighborhood’s entryway, or spend five months wrangling — along with similarly heroic Sasha Butler and Steve Rahmn — “right of entry” agreements from 42 homeowners, many of whom had left for parts unknown, in order to rebuild the burnt, crumbling Hopper Wall, which lined both sides of the main drag through Coffey Park, and stood for nearly 3 years as a grim reminder of the disaster.

Barbour is now a Northern California coordinator for United Policyholders, an advocacy group that takes the side of fire survivors who find themselves struggling with unexpected gaps in their insurance coverage.

In this job, which she’s held since 2020, “I can take what I learned at Coffey Strong and keep paying it forward.”

Nor did Richard and Alison Lane foresee that their backyard pool and palm trees would be replaced by what they now call TUFF, the “totally unexpected food forest.” It is thriving thanks to their 5,000-gallon rain-capture tank, to name just one of several water-saving technologies they learned about at a post-Tubbs Fire Santa Rosa water workshop.

For each of them, getting back home was but one dividend of all that organizing and advocating. It is a common refrain in Coffey Park that the bonds they’ve forged, the friendships they’ve made, are far more stout than before the fire.

For 18 years, recounted Elizabeth Palmer, who lost her house on Canary Place, she and her husband, Mike Harkins, would wave and smile at their neighbors, Billy and Nanci Adams, but never got to know them.

Following the fire, both couples moved to Sebastopol while their homes were rebuilt. They started having monthly dinners together.

"Now we see them all the time," said Palmer, "and all I can think of is how much fun we could have been having all those 18 years."

The Adams remain deeply grateful to Harkins, who stayed behind as the flames approached the neighborhood and everyone else — quite sensibly — evacuated. Harkins knocked on doors to make sure people were awake, and leaving. He helped his elderly neighbor Maria, a wheelchair user, into her van, ensuring her safety. When he wasn’t hosing down his house — which eventually did catch fire and burn to the ground — and the homes on either side of him, Harkins was stamping out spot fires in the bushes along the Adams’ fence.

People learned much about themselves during and after the calamity, often discovering previously untapped reserves of courage, patience, generosity and other qualities.

An inspiring number of those involved with the Coffey Park rebuild have, like Barbour, harnessed the skills and talents acquired and honed during those trials to help more recent fire survivors.

Last week, for instance, Oswald and Clare Hartman, Santa Rosa’s director of planning & economic development, met by Zoom for the second time with Colorado officials, who’d reached out last January for help in the wake of the Marshall Fire that razed 1,100 homes in Boulder County in late 2021. Santa Rosa is widely considered the gold standard for how to respond to a catastrophic wildfire.

“We relish every opportunity to share our lessons,” said Oswald, who’s had similar meetings with his counterparts in Paradise, Santa Cruz, Malibu and other burn zones. “We really do see it as an honor, and an obligation.”

So have former Coffey Strong board members Barbour, Jeff Okrepkie, Pamela Van Halsema and others journeyed to places like Paradise, to counsel and comfort fellow survivors.

“We’re good at what we do because we’ve been through it,” said Okrepkie, “and we wouldn’t take it lying down.”

Tilting at windmills

Richard Lane was limping slightly when he arrived at the Paradise Ridge Winery in Fountaingrove on Oct. 9, the fifth anniversary of the Tubbs fire. The winery was hosting a party described by its co-owner, Rene Byck, as a thank you to the community and celebration of its resilience.

Referring to his limp, Lane joked that he’d “sprained an ankle chasing Cathy Yanni, trying to get some answers.”

Yanni is the administrator of the Fire Victim Trust, a large fund established out of PG&E’s bankruptcy to compensate victims of wildfires that were caused by the utility’s equipment. Many victims have been frustrated by slow pace of claims payouts.

While the Fire Victim Trust is more the domain of his friend Will Abrams, a Tubbs Fire survivor and utility reform advocate, Lane has also hurled himself into lobbying for various pieces of legislation easing the pain of fire survivors — most notably and recently, Assembly Bill 1249, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sept. 29, which states that settlement claims resulting from infernos including the 2017 North Bay Fires don’t count as taxable income.

Lane’s latest labor of love is creating a groundswell of support for H.R. 7305, introduced in Congress last March by Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena. That bill would also prevent settlement claims from being taxed — but at a federal level.

Where does his passion for activism come from?

This keenness to right wrongs, correct injustice —“It goes back to what inspired me as a kid, whether it was Robin Hood, D’Artagnan or Don Quixote. Just point me at a windmill, and I will tilt at it,” said Lane — who found a new purpose, incidentally, for all those pink flamingos.

Once contractors started rebuilding his house, the birds were no longer safe in his yard, he reasoned. What to do them, then?

Right around this time, a string of Coffey Park residents rose in the morning to discover that their front yards had been taken over by pink flamingos.

“We knew exactly who did it,” said Barbour, inclining her head toward Lane, who explained, “It’s called ‘flocking your neighbor.’”

You are the cavalry

Twenty feet away on the winery’s patio stood Van Halsema, an ex-president of Coffey Strong who is now director of community and digital programs for the nonprofit After The Fire. Whether she is starting a church in Santa Rosa or running a national grant helping public libraries develop community-centered maker programs, she is a reflexive and highly effective helper.

Van Halsema was instrumental in assembling the 126 organizations that attended After The Fire’s 3-day Wildfire Leadership Summit at the Hanna Institute in late September.

Citing a theme that ran through the event, Van Halsema said that, in the aftermath of a disaster, “it’s not like you wait for the cavalry to come. Like, ‘Oh, FEMA’s going to come and save us.’ What really matters is people having that agency, that initiative.”

As After The Fire CEO Jennifer Gray Thompson put it, “You are the cavalry.”

In fire-ravaged communities that were recovering “in a healthy way,” added Van Halsema, “the local folks were organized, and the public sector was willing to sit down with survivors, roll up their sleeves and cooperate.”

She might as well have been describing Coffey Strong, whose founder was handed a microphone and asked to say a few words to the guests at Paradise Ridge Winery.

‘Fire family’

“We don’t need an event or a day to remember what happened to us,” Okrepkie told the gathering, as the sun dipped below the hills in the west. “This is an ongoing process for all of us.”

While he is still traumatized by the Tubbs Fire, he allowed, “I don’t like calling it PTSD. If you went through what we went through and DON’T have post-traumatic stress, then you probably have a disorder.”

After founding Coffey Strong and serving as its first president, Okrepkie announced a year ago that he would run for the City Council seat being vacated by his neighbor, Tom Schwedhelm.

But he stayed far from politics on this night, addressing the gathering as if speaking to fellow members of a support group. Which, in a way, he was.

Describing those present as his “fire family,” he noted that in this rebuilt version of Coffey Park there are “far more front porches, far more big, picture windows looking out on the street, so you can see your neighbors, see your friends.”

Some could see, on a Sunday morning about two years ago, a jolly posse walking north on Crimson Lane, led by Barbour, including Steve and Michele Rahmn, Jim and LuAnn Scally and their son Cameron, all of them bearing pink flamingos, which they proceeded to plant in the yard of Richard Lane.

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.