After being exiled by Kincade fire, 140,000 Sonoma County residents return home

Don Mussatto’s delight was apparent as he swung open the front door of his home near Foothill Regional Park in Windsor.

Nevermind the distinct scent of smoke that greeted the nostrils once inside, or that a backyard fence had blown down during the same windstorm that drove the massive Kincade fire within blocks of his Meadow Place home only days before. Mussatto, 76, was just “so happy to be back” after his hasty evacuation five days earlier.

His power was still on, to boot. A freezer full of frozen food provided proof.

“I’m so excited to be home, I feel like one of those Fourth of July things whizzing around on the ground,” he said.

Homecomings like his played out across Sonoma County on Wednesday, as Sheriff Mark Essick lifted evacuation orders for more than 140,000 residents once thought to be in the path of what’s now the largest wildfire in Sonoma County history, at 120 square miles in size.

They included the towns of Healdsburg and Windsor, both evacuated in their entirety on Saturday morning, as well as portions of Santa Rosa, Larkfield, Rincon Valley and Fulton - communities that were cleared out later Saturday and Sunday in advance of gusting winds that threatened to bring the fire down into multiple communities at once.

But by day’s end, only 5,788 people - from a peak of 186,000 over the weekend - remained under mandatory evacuation order, primarily in rural areas along the eastern flank of the week-old fire. They included the region near Mount St. Helena, Knights Valley and eastern parts of Mark West Springs Creek canyon.

Many of those allowed to return home still were under evacuation warning, given the still-burning wildfire at 45% containment.

But Wednesday’s sudden authorization for so many to return home came as welcome relief to the thousands of residents inconvenienced and, in some cases, frustrated by the large-scale evacuations imposed since the Kincade fire sprang to life in the Geysers steamfields amid one of three periods of fierce winds during the past week.

Nonetheless, it evoked a range of emotions, particularly among those returning to neighborhoods in close proximity to the charred edges of the fire perimeter, with fire engines and other vehicles still coming and going and aircraft still active overhead as the firefight continued late into the night.

Shannon Moltchanoff had followed news of the fire nonstop from her daughter’s home in Bennett Valley, and found herself near tears after driving past blackened ridgelines toward her home off Bailhache Avenue in southern Healdsburg.

“We see it here. We smell it,” Moltchanoff said.

Nearby, John Rader and his wife, Leighann Lindsay, were still assessing damage to the farm and country garden on Bailhache Avenue, where they are resident managers, when Rader pointed to the faint reddish-pink hue of fire retardant on the ridgeline just above.

“The fire came right over that ridge,” Rader said.

But it was stopped, and though the wind tore off some tree limbs and ripped off the roof to their chicken coop, all 46 girls were accounted for, and the place was largely unaffected, except a missing cat.

They had fled Saturday without any idea where they were going, and settled briefly in Bodega Bay only to be rousted again. They then landed at Lindsay’s parents’ place in Cloverdale, “just a golden nugget,” where they had been welcomed by the community and kept safe, she said.

But seeing a blinking computerized message board at the entrance to Healdsburg reading “Welcome Home” on Wednesday: “What a sigh of relief,” Lindsay said.

Even before the sheriff officially issued the eagerly awaited order shortly after 2 p.m., allowing people to return home from what were sometimes overcrowded, unheated or makeshift quarters they adopted during their exile, Windsor Mayor Dominic Foppoli had gathered with other elected officials, city staff members and firefighters at the Central Windsor Highway 101 off-ramp armed with a huge “Welcome Home” banner in anticipation that residents would soon start coming home.

And they did, though the return started as a trickle - a few cars heading into the barren streets still eerie with the absence of life or powered traffic lights - and eventually a steady pace of jampacked trucks and SUVs, trailers and RVs, and two-car caravans clearly belonging to folks coming home after a time away.

Along residential streets, chalk Xs still marked the driveways, put there by law enforcement officers last weekend to mark homes that had been evacuated.

A second welcome banner was attached to a fire engine parked at the corner of Foothill Regional Park, where Sonoma County Fire District crews greeted returnees and waited on standby for any questions related to the fire that had come into the neighborhood a few days before.

Passersby honked, waved and shouted their appreciation to the heroes of the day.

Among those in the first wave of returnees were several residents of Lisa Court, a short lane in Windsor’s northeast corner, where the wildfire made a run across Foothill park and started spot fires in several residential areas on Sunday afternoon, including just across Arata Lane at Brooks Road North.

The entire area had been shrouded in smoke for days, which got into the houses, too.

Betty Henry, a woman in her 70s, came home just long enough Wednesday to photograph the food in her refrigerator and freezer that would be thrown away the next day - when she returned with help. Her husband already had made arrangements to have a painter come to determine if the interior needed to be repainted to help with the smoke.

She said it had been nerve-wracking tracking the news of the firefight so near her home at the end of Lisa Court. At one point, she and her husband and daughter were watching video footage of firefighters attacking a burning house that was the same model as their own and which they thought might be, until their daughter rewound the video so they could just make out the street number enough to know it wasn’t their home.

“It was touch and go,” Henry said. “I was pacing a lot. The firefighters did a fabulous job.”

Two other neighbors had similarly begun making arrangements to have their interiors cleaned or repainted, given the penetrating smoke from the fire.

“It smells toxic to me,” said Megan Woods, 45, who hosed the house and opened all the windows within minutes of her arrival. “We’re not staying.”

Across the street and a few houses away, Martha Hernandez didn’t even make it past the front door before the overpowering smell of acrid smoke in the house for several days turned her back.

But it’s what she had expected, and she already had called her insurance company about arranging to have the carpets, drapes and upholstery cleaned of the smoke they had absorbed.

“I knew I was not going to come here to sleep in here,” said Hernandez, 53, as her mother watered plants and picked tomatoes from the backyard.

Hernandez and her family and neighbors had been staying with her mother in southwest Santa Rosa, and would continue to make it work, though it was packed and they were sleeping on inflatable mattresses.

“None of us are hurt. We’re all fine. It’s good to be back,” she said. “It’s good to see that everything is intact.”

On Healdsburg’s Bailhache Avenue, it had taken only an hour or two for someone on the street to post a large, hand-painted paper banner saying “Thank You Firefighters” with lots of hearts.

Rader and Lindsay, still without power like many returning home Wednesday, expected to be cold during the night.

But, Rader said, “I’d still rather be here than anywhere else.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com.