Three years after Tubbs fire, Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park reconstruction almost finished

The numbers tell the story of a job close to completion. Of the 1,422 Coffey Park neighborhood homes destroyed in the 2017 Tubbs fire, 1,158 replacement houses are occupied, with another 151 under construction or approved for rebuilding.

Another measure of this Santa Rosa community’s comeback has been on full display during the holidays — and not just in the numerous, over-the-top exhibitions of Christmas lights on many of those recently completed houses.

On the evening of Dec. 13, a holiday “Light Up Car” parade of some three dozen vehicles wended and honked its way around the neighborhood. The route was planned by self-described “car guy” Russell Ernst, after some Coffey Strong neighborhood support group board members asked for his help.

The result was a caravan including dune buggies, hot rods, Santa Claus in a sleigh atop a flatbed trailer, plus a pickup truck toting a hot air balloon gondola, complete with a fire-breathing “burner” whose heat “I could feel from three cars away,” said Ernst, who led the parade, along with his wife, Vicki, in their 2017 Corvette Stingray.

An estimated 1,500 residents came out to cheer them on. Many stood, others reclined on lawn chairs. Some warmed themselves with hot cocoa, others “with more serious libations,” said Ernst, who described the vibe as “amazing” — and unprecedented.

“I’ve been a homeowner here since 2008,” he said. Since the Tubbs fire, there is “a camaraderie, an esprit de corps, that wasn’t there before.

“It’s brought out the best in people,” Ernst said.

“This is one of the silver linings of trauma,” said Anne Barbour, vice president of Coffey Strong. “You pull together as a community.”

Resplendent as Coffey Park now appears, with its hundreds of gleaming new homes, some damage has yet to be repaired. Many of the items remaining on its 2021 to-do list will be paid for with money from the $95 million PG&E owed to Santa Rosa — the city’s share of settlement funds from the 2017 wildfires.

Several of those millions are expected to go toward repairing and replacing roads, curbs and gutters in Coffey Park that were damaged by heavy equipment during debris removal. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has repeatedly declined to pay for those repairs. Residents also have asked to cover the fire’s burn scars on roads.

What is a burn scar? Coffey Park residents take out their garbage and recycling on Sunday nights. The Tubbs wildfire began on Sunday, Oct. 8, 2017. As a result, little pools of hardened, blue plastic still can be found embedded in some parts of the neighborhood’s asphalt. Many people would like to see those vestiges of the catastrophe erased.

One road, in particular, could use some tender loving care.

Coffey Park’s entryway, at Hopper Avenue and Coffey Lane, was recently landscaped, and is now accessorized by electric blue Christmas lighting that spells out it name. That intersection, embodying the grit of the neighborhood and its triumph over adversity, never has looked better.

But it also throws into sharper view the problems along the rest of the Hopper Corridor. Those plants rising from the dirt along its cracked sidewalks tend to be dead shrubs and trees, or live weeds.

To help decide how to spend that windfall from PG&E, the city invited citizens to give their thoughts. An upgrade of the Hopper Avenue corridor was high on the list of many residents of Coffey Park.

Were it not for those grim stretches of Hopper, some scattered burn scars, and a conspicuous absence of mature trees, a visitor would be hard-pressed to know that this neighborhood was all but destroyed three years and three months ago.

Some day in the not too distant future, Barbour said, “We hope to be able to say, ‘We’re finished, we’re done, we’ve physically recovered.’”

Even then, the building of community will go on. As people have moved back to rebuilt homes, and life has returned to normal — or whatever passes for normal during a global pandemic — they’ve had more time to cheer, or join, a parade, to bedeck their homes with thousands, and in some cases tens of thousands of Christmas lights. They’ve had the bandwidth to “start paying it forward, to start giving back to their community,” said Barbour, who noted that turnout was high for a recent blood and food drives.

She foresees a gradual passing of the torch, as residents of Coffey Park step up and take over duties previously performed by Coffey Strong members.

“It’s like saying, Russell (Ernst), you helped with the parade last year. Are you up for it this year? Can we put your name on this thing?” Barbour said.

The answer: an emphatic yes. Noting that he’d already signed up to organize next year’s parade, Ernst said he’d also submitted a couple of revisions of the route.

“It’s going to be even better,” he said.

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