Coffey Park business owners try to regain homes and livelihoods
Eleven years ago, John Thill knew he’d found a special place to fix crumpled cars when he moved to a small shop on rural Mark West Springs Road.
“Have you ever been to a body shop that has a view like mine?” he asked a visitor one drizzly morning last month, waving north to oak-covered hills and a nearby ranchette with extensive white-fenced corrals.
But Thill’s shop a mile east of Highway 101 lay in the path of the Tubbs fire. So did his Coffey Park home in northwest Santa Rosa. The October wildfire destroyed both properties, leaving Thill and his wife, Colleen, among scores of county residents who had lost both homes and businesses.
Their ranks include landscapers, painters, house cleaners, musicians and others - most who used their houses for a home office or a place to secure key tools. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but a local service club has received requests for fire relief from more than 250 county business owners.
“What we found were these home businesses are really at the fabric of our community,” said José Guillén, a project manager for a fire relief fund overseen by local Rotary club leaders. The Rotary members have interviewed fire survivors and are helping to distribute roughly $1.4 million in fire relief, including $1.1 million from the North Bay Fire Relief Fund.
The October wildfires in Sonoma County claimed 24 lives and destroyed almost 5,300 homes. The losses includes four lives and 1,200 homes in Coffey Park, a compact neighborhood of tract homes built more than a quarter century ago.
The effort to rebuild a business after a natural disaster is hard enough, fire survivors suggested. But for those who also lost homes and possessions, the tasks of recovery at times are overwhelming.
“Emotionally I’m running on empty,” said Bill Perkins, a Coffey Park resident who owns AA Driving School.
Perkins, 66, and his wife, Cora, were awakened by their husky, Bailey, on the morning of the fire and were able to escape their Barnes Road home. The fire destroyed the house and three vehicles parked there that Perkins and three employees had used to give behind-the-wheel training sessions.
The couple plan to rebuild their home. Bill Perkins, who had been in business a quarter century, said he is thinking of once more training students, though he may focus less on teenagers and more on senior citizens who need to demonstrate their fitness to remain behind the wheel. However, he said he now lacks the energy that would be needed to hire employees.
“No one understands a disaster until you’ve had it hit you,” he said.
At 1 a.m. on the first morning of the wildfires, Thill got an automated emergency call that warned of approaching flames near his body shop. He immediately set out to save the four cats living at the property.
But when he reached the corner of Mark West and Old Redwood Highway, he could go no farther. Two cars were burning near the intersection and law enforcement had blocked off Mark West to eastbound traffic. Thill looked east toward his shop and “the whole hillside was on fire.”
He drove west toward his house in Coffey Park, still thinking the neighborhood was safe because Highway 101 stood in the fire’s path. Before he made it home, he received a notice on his mobile phone that the flames had jumped the six-lane freeway. The Thills quickly escaped their Dogwood Drive home before it burned.
Shortly before the fires, the couple purchased the Mark West property that includes the body shop and two small houses. All three buildings burned.
In November, Thill’s problems were compounded when he broke a leg while working in a muddy field near the shop.
He since has outfitted the bed of his red GMC pickup with a portable generator and air compressor to help with work.
Even so, he remains unsure how much auto body work he can accomplish in a tent that he’s set up on the Mark West property. The fire destroyed $200,000 in tools at the shop, he said, but his insurance provided only $60,000 to replace them.
The Thills plan to rebuild not only their Coffey Park home but also their business, John’s Auto Body. And John Thill expressed gratitude for the $5,000 he received through the Rotary club program. The money mattered, he said, and so did the sense that the community cared about his wife and him.
“It’s huge to each one of us that gets help from it,” he said of the program.
The Sonoma program is part of a four-county effort by the region’s Rotary clubs to help both individuals and businesses that suffered from the fire. In this county, about 60 members from 10 clubs volunteered to process applications, interview business owners and make recommendations about who should get grants of up to $5,000 each.
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