Recovery from 2017 wildfires continues in Glen Ellen on O’Donnell Lane

It had been a quiet, almost secret neighborhood in Glen Ellen, a narrow street lined by old trees that sheltered a potpourri of private homes, with the steeple of an old white church pinning one end to the sky.

There are only two ways in and out of O’Donnell Lane: the street itself, which looks like a driveway where it ends at Arnold Drive next to the Fig Café, and a second access via Henno Road, a one-block extension off Warm Springs Road that is also often mistaken for a driveway.

The night of the October 2017 wildfires, flames roared down the length of Henno Road, turning bucolic neighborhoods in the heart of Sonoma Valley into an apocalyptic landscape of burned homes and trees.

O’Donnell Lane alone lost 23 houses on Oct. 9, 2017, when what came to be called the Nuns fire swept out of the Mayacamas into downtown Glen Ellen. Of these, 10 are now fully rebuilt, and three still in construction.

Elsewhere in Glen Ellen, primarily along Warm Springs Road and Dunbar Road, 214 more houses were lost. Another 139 homes burned in in Kenwood and two in Oakmont. Thirteen homes were lost just east of Sonoma; four have been completed, and six are in construction.

Overall, 407 homes were lost in the Sonoma Valley, where rebuilding is slow but steady. A little more than half, 231, have been issued permits to rebuild. Of those, just 36 have been completed while 67 remain in various stages of construction and eight are tagged “construction pending.”

Progress has been incremental. Three months ago, 32 houses had been completed and another 79 were under construction. Homeowners say that the coronavirus has slowed progress, as crews are reduced or difficult to find.

Homeowner projects

O’Donnell Lane is busy with activity. Only two houses and a granny unit are still being built as most of the fire rebuilds have been approved for habitation, or soon will be.

Margie Everidge’s middle-aged son is on a stepladder, pinning down a gutter guard screen around the new red house. It’s one of three houses on the Everidge property, all different colors: red, yellow, blue. They are all easy to see as there’s very little vegetation left after the fire.

Everidge thinks this chore pointless. “If there’s a fire, there’s no trees – so what are the gutter guards for?” She lists some of the trees burned to the ground: swamp oak, bay, black walnut – lots of black walnut – and a couple of stately redwoods. They are all gone now.

It is a scene that has been repeated twice in Sonoma County the last three years. Last year, the Kincade fire destroyed more than 170 homes outside Healdsburg and Windsor; and in August the Walbridge fire consumed nearly 160 homes in west Sonoma County.

Smoke from a series of fires ignited last month during a series of powerful lightning storms still lingered in the air in September. “Sonoma Mountain is our guide,” said Everidge, indicating the semi-obscured ridge not too far away. “If we can see it, the air’s not too bad!” She’s 84, and has lived on these properties since she was a little girl, in 1952.

Still, she says several times, “We couldn’t have it any better. We can walk to the market and the bank, and we have great neighbors. We’re very fortunate living where we are.”

Next door, Mike and Jane Witkowski are industriously planting young trees in their back yard – they just bought nine of them at a nursery, including California redbug, flowering dogwood and variegated maple.

A crepe myrtle survived the fire, miraculously. The Witkowskis took 12 cuttings and distributed them among their neighbors, sharing the tree’s survival story.

“If you had looked at Google Earth three years ago, you wouldn’t have seen most of these houses. Just the trees,” said Mike Witkowski. He’s doing his part to bring the green back to the neighborly lane.

Sheltering in place

Smoke is not the only challenge this year, nor the debris removal and ash, or the heavy trucks and pipe replacement projects that tore up the aged pavement of O’Donnell. This year the challenge is the coronavirus.

Home construction has slowed down in the last six months, and face-masked locals out for a walk are a more common sight now than pickup trucks. So for the most part, people stay in their new homes, finishing up the tasks that need to be done.

“It’s been awesome, actually,” said Steve Thomas about the shelter-in-place period that started just two weeks after he moved back into his rebuilt home March 1. “When a new house is finished, it’s rare that everything is done. We used all of that time just to settle in – do some of the interior finishes, work on our property. For us, we’ve been really busy and grateful to be back home.”

He and his partner Mike Grace moved to O’Donnell only a few months before the fires struck, but they took the lead in organizing the annual Firestorm Remembrance Block Party, on Oct. 9, in 2018 and 2019.

This year, they’re not so sure it’s going to happen. “We were just talking about that, and wondering how everyone would feel about it,” he said. It would be a party, after all – and Thomas is well aware that once the wine goes around, social distancing relaxes.

A colorful rebirth

Though it remains the archetype of a friendly neighborhood – people wave, everyone seems to know where everyone lives – changes have come to O’Donnell, inevitably. One of the houses that burned was a low 2-bedroom wood frame house that the owners rented out to weekenders. They rebuilt it in a modern container-style box architecture, with every room painted a different color and the exterior a color that Margie Everidge called “putrid green,” though real estate agent Daniel Casabonne generously called “turquoise.”

The couple who owned the property eventually decided to sell it along with their home in Sonoma, and move to New Mexico. “A lot of people are moving to New Mexico. I sure don’t get it,” said Everidge.

Casabonne said the container house, at 5190 O’Donnell, had been on the market for two months with no interest. So he suggested to the owners that they paint it – battleship gray on the outside, white dove in every room. It sold in two weeks for $798,000.

“It’s nice to see the transformation in that stretch of road – you’ve got some nice architecture in those new houses. It’s a rebirth, it’s coming back,” he said.

Some of the new houses do seem out of character, however. The former O’Donnell Ranch at the end of the road, across a short bridge spanning Sonoma Creek, sold to new owners just days before the fire. Now a 2,900-square-foot home is hidden behind a code-high wooden fence, its gate securely locked.

Just when the Sonoma Valley will be fully rebuilt is unknown, and perhaps unknowable. The factors hindering a full recovery are many, including the almost annual return of fires in the hills of Sonoma County, the unexpected slowdown in construction due to the coronavirus health orders, and the increasing insurance costs in what has become widely recognized as a high-risk area for fire.

Property taxes may also play a role in fire survivors’ decisions to rebuild. Many of the homes lost to the 2017 fire, especially in the Glen Ellen area, had been family-owned for decades and enjoyed relatively low property taxes since 1978 under Proposition 13. While county tax assessor Deva Marie Proto clarified that all property is to some extent “covered by Prop. 13,” she said that under “the calamities provision” of the law, rebuilt property of a similar size and usage would retain its tax basis.

“If they choose to rebuild a larger house, we’d reassess only the increase of square footage,” said Proto. But she made it clear the calamities provision applied only to the original owners of the property. If a burned lot was sold, the new home builder and owner might find themselves with a much larger tax bill than the previous one enjoyed.

The rebuilding process will take place in three waves, said 1st District Supervisor Susan Gorin, who lost her own Oakmont house in the Tubbs fire. Each will last about three years, she predicted, citing a presentation by North Coast Builders Exchange CEO Keith Woods.

If so, the county is now approaching the end of the first wave, driven largely by homeowners able to finance rebuilding through their own means or insurance payouts. It is evident in many of the burn zones, including many of the smaller homes in Glen Ellen and Kenwood.

The second wave will be fueled by homeowners who were underinsured, forcing them to either sell their properties to spec builders or redesign homes they able to capable of rebuilding, she said. Many of these homes are in hillside areas with complex lots, driving up the cost of construction.

The third wave will follow the decisions of people still mulling to rebuild or sell, she said.

“Keith and I agreed that it may take 9+ years to complete all rebuilding, and that was before the next two fires, starting that process all over again,” Gorin said in a statement.

But on O’Donnell Lane, life has almost returned to normal – and, in some ways, a better normal. “The O’Donnell neighborhood has recovered,” said Mike Witkowski. “We were a tight-knit group before, and it brought us even closer together.”