Rebuild recollection: A reporter recalls chronicling Coffey Park return from the ashes

The year of reporting on Coffey Park put me face-to-face with people who had just gone through the worst time of their lives.

Here were neighbors who lost 1,300 homes and all of their belongings inside them. Even worse, five Coffey Park residents perished in the October 2017 Tubbs fire, then the most destructive fire in California history.

Such losses contributed to a level of devastation not seen in Sonoma County since the 1906 earthquake leveled much of Santa Rosa’s downtown business district.

The destruction of a city neighborhood of mostly middle-class homes showed how lacking was our understanding of the threat of wildfires. If the Tubbs fire could jump a six-lane freeway and ravage Coffey Park, what part of Santa Rosa was immune from such danger?

As uncomfortable as that thought was to ponder, a different question prompted me to spend a year reporting in the neighborhood on the daily struggles and determination of its residents. What I wanted to know was: How would Coffey Park residents respond to such a profound disaster?

On the fire’s first day, amid a sepia haze of smoldering debris, the answer was anything but clear. Everyone I met was reeling from loss.

“It hasn’t really hit me that I don’t have anything I used to have,” truck driver Gordon Easter told me as he stood amid the wreckage of his Hopper Avenue house.

In the days that followed, residents returned to their burned properties and sifted through ash and pottery, the latter being one of the few materials able to withstand the fire’s incredible heat. Neighbors showed me crumbling safes and congealed metal puddles where their cars’ alloy wheels had melted.

Almost miraculously, some who searched managed to find wedding rings or other keepsakes. Others looked and came away empty-handed.

A new chapter began in Coffey Park when the neighbors started to pull together. That came about through the efforts of leaders such as Jeff Okrepkie, who went on to become the first president of the Coffey Strong neighborhood group.

A month after the fire, leaders of the group gathered 500 residents for a meeting at Luther Burbank Center for the Arts. There, with the help of Sonoma County Supervisor James Gore, they divided Coffey Park into five geographic areas. Residents volunteered to become area block captains and to help keep neighbors informed about all things related to the rebuilding of the neighborhood.

In the months that followed, I met many of the residents and also strangers who had entered their lives to help them heal: Christmas carolers and volunteers who put on a holiday carnival; first responders handing out teddy bears to elementary school students; sketch artists who captured striking watercolor scenes of destruction and recovery; and builders, framing crews and city inspectors involved in the ongoing neighborhood rebuilding.

For all of the turmoil in their lives, the residents graciously allowed me to regularly check in, to hear their stories and to observe their efforts at recovery.

Among those who lost homes were Mike Baker, pastor of Santa Rosa’s Crosspoint Community Church, and his wife, Zöe. I met them while covering a citywide prayer service the week after the fire.

Over the course of the next year, the Bakers shared with me how everything from their rental house to their new clothes felt unfamiliar. They explained how they found it too difficult emotionally to replace Christmas decorations, and how an older couple from church had stepped in to help. And they told me how they urged their two young children to speak up whenever a new recollection of a lost possession in the fire came to mind.

“Tell us about it and let’s grieve that together,” Mike Baker had told his children.

Coffey Park’s fire recovery represents my last major project as a reporter for The Press Democrat. Now, as I close a career of nearly 40 years at the newspaper, two thoughts related to the fire sadden me, while a third offers me hope.

First, in the past 15 months wildfire dangers facing Northern California have grown ever more apparent. In July, we watched as the Carr fire burned over 1,000 homes and 22 commercial buildings in Redding. That same month wildfires sparked in Lake and Mendocino counties became the largest by land area in state history, at 459,000 acres. And November’s Camp fire in Butte County now ranks as the state’s most destructive and most deadly, claiming 86 lives and nearly 19,000 structures.

We have no reason to think we’ve seen the last of such mighty natural disasters.

Secondly, most of the people affected by the 2017 North Bay fires still are dealing with some level of trauma.

In October 2018 remarks in Coffey Park to 500 friends and neighbors on the fire’s first anniversary, a Coffey Strong leader Pamela Van Halsema reminded her neighbors that coping with the disaster had “taken a toll on each and every heart in this space.” Her fellow leader, Okrepkie, this month told me healing may not come easy.

“You learn to live with it and move past it,” he said. “You don’t get over it.”

Even so, over the 15 months I have seen hundreds of people like Okrepkie and Van Halsema take steps to move on with their lives and to help others as they cope with the many challenges wrought by the fires.

The Coffey Park residents not only received help from others during the Tubbs fire, but since then have gone to Redding and Butte County to offer encouragement to families whose homes burned there. They not only are rebuilding their homes, but also are working to forge stronger ties with their neighbors - a strengthening of community many called the silver lining of the disaster.

In short, they’re striving to become survivors and not merely fire victims, regardless of whether they rebuild or move elsewhere to find a new home.

Of course, such efforts may not bring them worldly success. Survivors aren’t guaranteed a victor’s crown or fame and fortune.

But survivors do inspire others to keep moving forward in the face of adversity. That’s a lesson I’ll take from my year reporting about Coffey Park and its resurgence.