Santa Rosa man loses home, animals, but survives harrowing fight against Glass fire

Daniel Sanchez didn’t know the skin on his ears had started to blister as he sat down at the edge of a pond on his property. Smearing mud on his arms and face to keep cool, he watched as the Glass fire burned the home he’d owned for the last 30 years to the ground.

“You could feel the heat coming from it,” he said.

It was a moment of relative stillness after hours of exhausting work in chaos, running back and forth from his home to the wine cellar and a guest unit, armed with a 200-foot fire hose, laboring to defend his property from flames that would burn more than 600 homes in Sonoma and Napa counties. But Sanchez said he felt a kind of release.

“Some really cathartic sense of relief to know I did everything I could to save it,” he said.

Sanchez was used to shedding sweat in an effort to care for his home on Holst Road in the hills east of Santa Rosa. He and his wife, Betsy Vannoy, had turned it into a sanctuary for animals, including the four miniature donkeys they considered members of their family and, in years past, a half-dozen emus that had been rescued from slaughter. A large tile planter that still holds what’s left of the flowering crabapple tree in their front courtyard is the work of his hands.

That spirit of independence and responsibility, he said, drove Sanchez to pursue his ultimately unsuccessful fight to save his home from fiery destruction the night of Sept. 27.

It’s not the type of decision endorsed by fire and law enforcement officials, who repeatedly urged people to leave immediately when ordered to evacuate throughout the first week of the Glass fire. The risk of people being hurt or killed, they said, overrules what might be gained by saving structures.

Sanchez walked away alive. He and Vannoy have since returned to their property on Holst Lane several times in the last week to survey the damage, search for their lost animals and consider what decisions they’ll make about their future. Amid their losses, the couple is deeply grateful for the help they have received from organizations that have offered them aid, including clothing and food. One, Sonoma CART, short for the Sonoma Community Animal Response Team, has played a key role in reuniting them with one of their beloved donkeys and finding a place for him to live while they ponder their future.

’A losing battle’

Sanchez got his first glimpse of the fire on the night of Sept. 27, when a friend tipped Sanchez off that fire personnel were staging at the Safeway along Highway 12 at Calistoga Road. He decided to ride his motorcycle out to Los Alamos Road and look for himself.

“I thought, that fire’s gonna hit us in a couple hours,” Sanchez recalled. He started driving up to neighbors’ homes and honking his horn, trying to alert them. No one had received evacuation notices, he said, and many didn’t seem too concerned.

Another three hours went by before residents of Los Alamos Road received a Nixle alert: Go now. No warnings were issued before then.

Vannoy left with some essentials to stay at a friend’s home in Santa Rosa. Sanchez stayed. He drove his four-wheeler to the northwestern boundary of the property and opened the gate so the donkeys could run, unencumbered, for their lives.

Then Sanchez readied himself with one of the couple’s pressurized fire hoses, purchased precisely for a night like this, hooked up to their 10,000-gallon water tank. The firefighting system is powered by the same gas pump the couple uses to pressurize water in their home when the power goes out.

“We try to be as independent and off the grid as possible, even though we’re on the grid,“ Sanchez said. ”We’d sailed around the world for a few years. We knew how to be very self-reliant.“

At around 10 p.m. Sunday, he continued spraying down their home, guest house and wine cellar as a wall of heat began to bear down the slope toward him. He could already tell from the sizable firebrands raining down and the height of the flames that the fire was going to be much more formidable than he had first thought.

“I still held out 1% hope that I might be able to stop the fire if it came from one direction,” he said. “But then it came two or three directions.”

For about three hours, Sanchez went back and forth with the hose from the wine cellar to the house, putting out spot fires. At one point, when he climbed into one of the ponds nearby to protect himself from the heat, his iPhone fell from his pocket into the muddy water without his notice.

Around 1 or 2 a.m., about the time when the black walnut tree close to their house began to catch fire, Sanchez’s water supply suddenly failed. The hose was burned. He had no choice but to walk down to a pond further from the house, to take refuge in the water and wait until the fire passed through.

He called it his “walk of shame.”

“At that point, I knew it’s a losing battle,” he said. “I just walked through the fields that were already burnt and sat in the mud and water and watched everything burn.”

The couple’s twin cats, Bocce and Vida, couldn’t be found when Vannoy and Sanchez were packing their things earlier that night. But as Sanchez approached the pond, he found Bocce, badly burned, he said. After some time spent trying to offer him water, the 4-year-old cat died in his arms.

When he and Vannoy returned to their property a few days later, they found Vida had somehow made his way to the place where Sanchez had laid Bocce. But he, too, had died.

“It just broke our hearts to see that,” Sanchez said. “I just had hopes for the donkeys, that they had survived somehow.”

Dangerous to stay behind

Unexpected changes in fire conditions and breakdowns in contingencies are common reasons why civilians who defy evacuation orders require rescue, said Ben Nicholls, Cal Fire division chief.

“A wildland fire can look very benign, depending on the weather conditions or fuels it’s burning in,” Nicholls said. "That can change on a dime. And what was a benign, low-intensity fire becomes a fire that not even firefighters can be in front of safely.“

He said he understands why people feel the pull to fight for their homes, especially if they believe fire resources are already stretched thin across several incidents.

“I’ve had landowners in past fires say, ’I’m going to stay and defend my home,’ and they stay,” Nicholls said. “Their family is more worried about them than they are worried about the house. (They’re) worried about that individual being hurt or worse because of that fire. No human life is worth a building or a piece of property.”

Vannoy said a family friend was in contact with firefighters in the area, and thought they might be able to rescue her husband if needed. But she also believed the pond would provide Sanchez with needed refuge in a dire situation.

Vannoy didn’t call for a rescue. Instead, she spent five or more hours on the phone with her sister, avoiding the cloud of anxiety that might surround her if she were left to her own thoughts.

At around 6 a.m. Monday, Sanchez called her. He had found the iPhone in the other, mostly dried-up pond. Somehow it had survived. And somehow, so had he.

“That was my gift,” Vannoy said. “When I went back to the property, I didn’t cry, because I’ve got my husband. That’s all that matters.”

Not giving up

Wednesday afternoon, Vannoy and Sanchez went back to the property again. Equipped with apples and slices of bread, they coaxed Mango, a timid miniature donkey, up to the field surrounded by a blackened forest.

A scout with Sonoma CART was the first to find Mango, said Angelina Martin, a spokeswoman for the organization. The nonprofit, started after the 2017 firestorm, assists with large and small animal evacuations, but also helps owners reconnect with their animals after fires pass through.

Sanchez, Vannoy and the team are hopeful that Newton, Cuca and Boo might be safe in someone’s field.

For now, Mango will find a new home at a nearby ranch, where he’ll have some llamas for company, Vannoy said.

“They will foster Mango (until) we rebuild,” she said in a text message. “I’m crying with so much joy!”

The miniature donkeys were part of the couple’s vision for their property: building a little corner of Italy in the hills east of Santa Rosa. The verdant forest and vineyard of sangiovese grapes that they largely sell to local vintners also contributed to realizing “Alpicella,” the name they bestowed on their property. The town in Italy where Sanchez’s mother was born is the namesake.

“We bought this old farmstead up there and thought we would raise children, grow organic grapes,” Sanchez said. Though they didn’t raise children there, the couple hosted exchange students, provided a home for children in foster care, and offered their guest unit as a vacation rental.

“We just tried to share the spirit of that property with as many people as we could over the years,” he said.

At this point, they do plan to return, to clean up and rebuild, the couple said. But before that, Vannoy said, they’ll spend a little time away. With Mango taken care of, they’ll take a road trip and regroup.

“We’ll come back when property rejuvenates,” she said. “When things start turning green.”

“We haven’t given up,” Sanchez said.

You can reach Staff Writer Kaylee Tornay at 707-521-5250 or kaylee.tornay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @ka_tornay.