Santa Rosa landscaping firm provides first line of defense against Kincade toxins harming ecosystem

It’s a race against time for Paolo Tantarelli and Jeff Shields, owners of an eco-friendly landscaping company trying to keep toxins and ash left by the recent Kincade fire from entering key local waterways.

Not long after the smoke cleared in early November from the largest wildfire by acreage in Sonoma County history, temperatures quickly dropped and the skies darkened with rain clouds that have repeatedly drenched blackened hillsides still scarred by bulldozer firebreaks.

In many cases, before a thorough cleanup could take place, flooded lots where homes once stood were replete with toxic compounds from burned plastics, household cleaning products, insecticides, construction materials, televisions and electronics.

“The things that we love the most become poison to the environment after a wildfire,” Tantarelli said. “A burned car can drop 10 to ?15 pounds of lead within a ?10-foot perimeter.”

Tantarelli and Shields started Community Soil in Santa Rosa 10 years ago as a family-owned business that designs, installs and maintains natural landscapes that can produce food in the North Coast.

The company’s holistic approach, known as permaculture, uses ecosystems as a model for designing low-impact and sustainable urban, suburban, and rural landscapes. Six years ago, the two partners launched Community Soil Foundation to augment the company’s work and to promote ecology and sustainable agriculture education to children and adults.

For example, the foundation was involved in the formation of a community garden at Maddux Ranch Regional Park in Larkfield, a project that has connected local residents to healthy, organic produce while teaching them to grow food and operate local farm stands. The nonprofit has grown tens of thousands of pounds of food that has been donated to low-income families and area shelters.

Community Soil, a private company, has 12 employees. The foundation, with an annual budget of $145,630 in 2018, has four employees and uses about 200 volunteers a year. The foundation also teaches outdoor ecology and nutrition eduction to 350 students in the Mark West Union School District.

After the 2017 wildfires, the foundation collaborated with the Sonoma County Office of Resiliency and Recovery, focusing on erosion control and waste containment from fire victims’ properties.

Although the Kincade fire burned far fewer homes than the Tubbs and Nuns fires did two years ago, the recent inferno scorched a more rural area where access to burned homes and properties is difficult, Tantarelli said.

What’s more, because the Kincade fire was not declared a federal disaster, the same level of recovery assistance from FEMA was not made available to people whose properties were damaged or destroyed, said Michael Gossman. Consequently, none of the affected property owners are registered with FEMA, meaning local officials have to track them.

Tantarelli and Shields have had to work twice as hard locating property owners and obtaining contact information so they can request permission to enter scorched properties to deploy erosion controls and prevent contaminants getting into waterways and drainage channels.

“We want landowners to know this is a resource for them, that it will be paid for by the county,” Tantarelli said. “If you have a home that’s burned, then you should reach out and call.”

Gossman said it’s the private property owner’s responsibility to protect watersheds. But because many who lost their homes and belongings during the Kincade blaze are “overwhelmed” by the losses, the county has set aside money to help, he said.

In late October, Sonoma County supervisors allocated $2.5 million to begin paying for the county’s initial response to the Kincade fire. Of those funds, supervisors carved out $300,000 for watershed protections, which led to hiring Community Soil Foundation, Russian Riverkeeper and Sonoma Ecology Center at $87,000 each, Gossman said.

Of nearly 320 parcels affected by the fire, about 50 have been identified as top priority.

“We’re trying to reduce the risk of runoff of toxic ash and debris into the watershed,” Gossman said.

The work includes placing on properties straw waddles to minimize the spread of toxins and plastic on top of piles of debris yet to be removed, Gossman said. On steeper slopes, waddles are also sometimes placed to prevent erosion, he added.

Don McEnhill, executive director of the Healdsburg-based Russian Riverkeeper, said the collective effort to protect local waterways is bolstered by business owners like Shields and Tantarelli, who can utilize both their expertise from their landscaping business and their foundation for a broader, good cause.

McEnhill said firefighters’ efforts to contain the Kincade fire “cut probably three times more bulldozer lines up and down the faces of slopes” than previous fires. That poses significant erosion problems for the county, he said.

“There’s a lot of other work that arises because of the enormous footprint of the fire,” he said.

Shields said they’ve identified burned properties that are not on the county’s priority list of ?50 tracts. He said the $87,000 contract is only a “fraction of what is needed” to contain toxins and prevent erosion in the burn zones that cover a wide area including parts of Geyserville, the Anderson Valley region of prime vineyards near Healdsburg and Windsor.

Even so, many property owners are not aware that there’s county money to pay for this important environmental cleanup work.

“When we were told that FEMA would not be involved, we thought it would have to come out of our pockets,” said Nadine Lavell, the owner of a property on rural Brooks Road in Windsor that burned in October.

On a rainy day last week, water flowed through a drainage channel that went down a hillside slope right next to a pile of debris that was covered by a black plastic tarp on Lavell’s property. The drainage fed into Windsor Creek, which in turn drains into Mark West Creek, the Russian River and finally the Pacific Ocean.

Shields and Tantarelli said the cost of the work on Lavell’s property is about $3,000.

“But we’re just putting a Band-Aid on it until the hazmat people come along and clean up,” Tantarelli said. “This is going to happen again and again.”

Tantarelli and Shields said the work of their company and foundation is guided by similar principles, to heal rather than harm the environment. But more businesses need to get involved, they said.

“Where are the mission-?driven businesses in Sonoma County? How much annually do you want to contribute to the community in which you live in?” Tantarelli said.

You can reach Staff Writer ?Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213.