For these three Sonoma County residents, fleeing fires becoming old hat

Susan Cooper stood outside her house on Shady Creek Court in Rincon Valley around 10 p.m. Sunday, inspecting the sky.

“I saw that cherry glow,” she recalled. Even though her neighborhood was only under an evacuation warning, she remembers thinking, “I should go.”

The Glass fire was advancing swiftly, and Cooper had last seen that malevolent shade of red three years ago, the night of the Tubbs fire. After conferring with a neighbor, she made the call to get out.

She had clothes in a suitcase, still packed from a recent visit to her daughter in San Rafael. The daughter would be seeing her mother again, sooner than she thought. Since fleeing the Tubbs fire, and in subsequent evacuations, Cooper has learned to keep important items — medications, passport, food for her two dogs — in a central location.

She tests herself, every so often, by posing the question: If I just had five minutes to get out, what would I grab? After playing out that scenario in her mind “over and over,” she said, “your response becomes more orchestrated.”

One thing she must remind herself, each time she evacuates: “Remember to bring a bra”

Like so many of the 68,000 people in Sonoma County under evacuation orders, Cooper is by now an old hand at evacuating, at “calmly and quickly” gathering what is important to them, and then fleeing, as far as they know, for their lives.

Yes, it helps to have done it before, said a half dozen repeat evacuees interviewed for this story. And yes, it gets old.

’A hot mess’

Harried and stressful though it was, Monday morning’s evacuation for Will Abrams and his family was a Zen-like exercise compared to the night of the Tubbs fire. When their smoke alarm went off around 1:30 a.m. on Oct. 9, 2017, their house on Riebli Road already was on fire. Tree branches, engaged in flames, had fallen into the driveway. His two children, then 9 and 6, were frantic.

Abrams and his wife were much calmer when they woke the kids up around 1 a.m. Monday. As the family crawled west in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Highway 12 in Abrams’ pickup truck, and the fire grew larger in the rearview mirror, the parents tried to keep their children looking forward.

“Once they saw the flames,” he said, “it was not good.”

They ended up at his brother-in-law’s house in Berkeley. To stay “COVID safe,” Abrams said, they slept in the truck.

Abrams has been a relentless advocate, since the Tubbs inferno, for fire reforms, such as improved warning systems and the creation of fire-safe rebuilding codes.

So he was frustrated — and worried — early Sunday morning, when it took 25 minutes to cover the three blocks from their rental home on Branch Owl Place, in the Skyhawk neighborhood, to Highway 12, where traffic “was at a dead stop.”

A management consultant who has worked under former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, he has put forward proposals on alert warning systems. Reluctant though he was to engage in “Monday morning quarterbacking,” Abrams said Monday, “what we just saw, again, was just a hot mess of alerts and warnings coming from all different directions” — sometimes saying contradictory things.

Abrams has lost track of the number of times he and his family have evacuated. “Four or five,” he said. On Monday, they checked into the same Berkeley hotel they used after the Tubbs fire. He wasn’t sure how long they’d be there, or, he added, “if the house is still going to be there when we get back.”

After emphasizing the deep respect he has for first responders, and the city and county officials working to keep everyone safe, Abrams spoke of his “high degree of frustration, because here my family is again, driving out of the flames and saying, ’What the hell are we doing here?’”

Asked if he and his wife had considered bailing on Northern California, he said, “It’s a constant discussion.”

What it boiled down to, he said, is that “my instinct is fight, not flight.”

Supervisor not going anywhere

Sunday night was Susan Gorin’s second evacuation. Three years ago, hers was one of two Oakmont homes destroyed by the Nuns fire. While that house isn’t yet rebuilt, Gorin and her husband, Joe, are renting in that senior community in east Santa Rosa.

Gorin, chairwoman of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, made the decision to leave before evacuation was mandatory, after hearing from “people in the county” the fire was coming her way. While she finished packing, Joe hopped on his bicycle, weaving through jammed traffic in the neighborhood to check on his mother, also an Oakmont resident.

It took her an hour and 45 minutes just to get out of Oakmont. By the time she got to the Novato hotel where she and Joe are staying, it was 3 a.m.

The traffic jam was a concern, she said, as was a possible “discontinuity between the city of Santa Rosa and the county.”

But on Monday morning, she was in no mood to be critical. “The good news,” she said, “is that people did evacuate.”

Asked if she ever toyed with the idea of pulling up stakes, moving to a place that required fewer emergency evacuations, Gorin said, “Well, I think a number of folks are now making that decision, and exploring where they might go. Ironically, many were thinking about Oregon.”

“Well, Oregon’s on fire.”

The answer, she concluded, is no. Gorin isn’t going anywhere. “We have family here. And I have a job here.”

An anniversary to remember

Sunday was a special day for Dr. Rob Nied: He and his wife, Kris, were celebrating their 23rd anniversary.

They had plans to go out to dinner, but canceled them after the Glass fire, which seemed a safe distance from their Skyhawk home, spawned a second blaze that spread with alarming speed and turned the sky that shade of red that took Nied back three years, to the night they lost their Fountaingrove home.

Nied, a team doctor for the Golden State Warriors, was standing outside with a neighbor on Owl Light Terrace in Skyhawk, when he noticed that red sky.

“I remember this,” he said. “This is what it looked like three years ago. This is not good.”

At that point, an orange ember floated down from a nearby ridge and landed in a tree. When that tree caught fire, Nied turned to the neighbor and said, “That’s it. We’re done.”

For his evacuation three years ago, Nied was too judicious, too slow a packer, removing pictures from the walls, wrapping them in towels to prevent breakage, placing them carefully in a suitcase.

“This time we just started stuffing things into duffel bags, then stuffing the duffel bags into cars,” he said Monday.

The Nieds are renting in Skyhawk, having decided not to rebuild in Fountaingrove. He’s spent the weekend clearing that burned out lot, whacking weeds and picking up trash left behind by contractors building around it.

The point, he said, was to get it all cleaned up, “so we can sell it.”

Considering the area’s dramatic increase in wildfires, since the Tubbs inferno, he’s not sure how quickly or even if, that lot will sell.

Even before the Glass fire made it’s blitzkrieg dash toward Santa Rosa, Nied and his wife had pretty much decided to leave the area. Since taking that plum job with the Warriors last year, he’s been commuting from Santa Rosa to San Francisco, which is where they’ll probably move.

They’ve stayed so that their daughter Sophie could finish up at Maria Carrillo High School, where she is now a senior. Between power outages and fires, Rob Nied figures, she’s missed several months of school since 2017.

They had to be light on their feet early Monday morning. The family who’d invited them to stay in their house, in the Castlerock neighborhood, were themselves evacuated.

So they ended up with the same family, that had put them up in the wake of the Tubbs fire, in an undamaged part of Fountaingrove.

On the night of the Tubbs fire, they’d stayed at the Sheraton in Petaluma. Nied recalls standing in line at the front desk at 3 a.m. with several other physicians. “We were lamenting the fact that none of us had brought a nice bottle of wine.”

On his way out the door Sunday night, Nied grabbed a bottle of Kosta Brown, an excellent pinor noir.

Upon arriving at the home of their friends, they sat around the kitchen table at 2 a.m. and drank it.

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.