Spending a week with the wildfire in our backyard
Day 0
Sunday, October 8th, 2017, was a beautiful day in Santa Rosa.
My wife (aka “Mom”) works in the Emergency Department at Kaiser Santa Rosa. She was slated for a double-shift which put her at work from 6am to roughly midnight. When this happens on the weekends the kids are all mine and I try to maximize this special time we have.
We started the day off visiting a local tourist spot we’d never been to before, the Petrified Forest in Calistoga. It’s about 15 minutes from our house but on a side road that we rarely take. I’d been on that road recently and decided it was time to check it out. It would be the perfect morning activity. We headed there and took a short hour hike around the trees before cruising off to find some burgers and dogs at Ozzie’s Grill.
After Ozzie’s it was time for our afternoon plans.
I’d been promising to teach the kids to skateboard for a few months now. It was time. We grabbed boards, helmets, and threw on some jeans and headed down to the kid’s school.
Both kids picked it up quickly - particularly my daughter who’s a bit older and was more determined to figure it out before her younger brother did. I skated next to her and grabbed a quick video.
What’s particularly eerie about this video is that you can hear the wind that started to pick up on that hot, sunny, and dry afternoon:
After the skate session we heard Mom was heading home between her double for a quick break. We grabbed her a burrito and met her at the house.
The rest of the day was mostly uneventful.
The wind didn’t let up through the evening. It was shaking the trees in the neighborhood pretty hard, branches flying everywhere. It got to the point where I figured I’d text Mom and let her know to be careful on the drive home.
Yes, she has a lead foot.
9:50pm: When I sent that text the Tubbs Fire had just started near Tubbs Lane. I went to bed shortly after sending the text. I turned on a box fan in the room to drown out the wind noise and left a few windows cracked open for the fresh air.
Day 1
1:00am: Mom came home early Monday morning. She had smelled smoke when she came outside and saw my text about the wind. Someone walking past her mumbled something about “a fire in American Canyon”, which made her think it was just the wind bringing the smoke in our direction. She took a side road (Chanate) home and did not go over Fountain Grove. She settled in and went to sleep.
2:30am: Like any other middle-aged person I partially wake up at random times in the night. That morning I registered that Mom was home. I also smelled smoke and felt it in my throat. I didn’t think too much of it and fell back asleep again.
3:00am: I woke up to our doorbell ringing repeatedly and frantic knocking on our front door. I threw some shorts on and ran to the door. I could see a male figure through the obscured glass. I slowly started piecing together that the smoke I could smell and this figure are related. I opened the door. It was my new neighbor, Jim (name changed). I’d met him the Wednesday before for the first time taking out the trash (we moved to this neighborhood in July and are still making the rounds). Jim had panic on his face. Jim said the following words:
Hey man, the fire is coming. Get out, go west, get out. The fire is coming.
Not a fire. The fire. That will always stick with me.
Jim ran off to warn the next neighbor. It was pitch black outside but I could still make out ashes and smoke. I slowly turned to the left and over the crest of the hill I can see an orange glow. I cannot see flames, yet. I ran back inside and shut the door.
When I got back upstairs Mom was slowly coming to. She heard part of the conversation. She is amazing in crisis situations. She asked me:
Do we have time to pack?
I had no idea. I said yes. I said we have 10 minutes to pack and then we need to go. I grabbed a duffel bag and threw in clothes and a toiletry bag. I ran downstairs and grabbed my work bag with my laptop and various helpful traveling electronic things in it. I ran into the office and grabbed all our files which happened to be in one convenient spot. I took this all down and loaded up her car. I happened to have camping equipment near the car so I grabbed four sleeping bags and a few extra supplies. I also grabbed the kid’s school backpacks thinking it might make life a little easier if we’re displaced (sort of a nonsense thought but it made sense at the time).
When I got back upstairs the kids were awake. They were still in pajamas but Mom had woken them up and they had jackets and shoes on. My daughter is 9 and my little man is 6. My daughter was struggling with the reality of the situation and starting to freak herself out. She mumbled to herself:
Is this my first real disaster? This is my first real disaster. I can’t believe it.
I grabbed her by the ears and told her that she needs to breathe, that it was going to be a very long day, it was going to be a very long week, and it will probably be a very long month and maybe more if our house burns down. I told her it’s a marathon, not a sprint, which is such a dad phrase but also not the first time she’s heard it. She started to calm herself down.
Mom then came down with two suitcases and we were ready to go. We later discovered that in Mom’s sleep-deprived state she packed the kids perfectly but barely packed for herself. She’s amazing. I asked her if she felt like she could drive my car and she said no. We then left in her car.
3:30am: I’d like to think we got on the road sooner than 3:30am. We didn’t. It took us 30 minutes to leave the house. Besides our files and documents we were otherwise unprepared. What I’ve learned since is that it’s not as important having stuff prepared as it is having one less thing to think about in a crisis. Being prepared correctly with one emergency bag (which we didn’t have) and one set of files (which we did have) can save 15 minutes of scattered panicking. The prep isn’t for the stuff. The prep is for clarity of mind.
I made a ton of mistakes in my attempt to drive the kids away from the chaos. It was anarchy and everyone was on their own. Information was non-existent. Even at 3:30 in the morning there was already traffic and bottlenecks on the main way out of town and the road from our house to Fountain Grove was already blocked by police. The red arrow shows the path I took, quite possibly the worst path of all time, governed by fire:
On the way south we were passed by a dozen ambulances escorting patients south to safer hospitals. Fire and police personnel were hustling northbound. Traffic moved slowly and weirdly but people were still following basic traffic laws. Everyone was scared but people mostly drove safe.
6:00am: We emailed our close friends, Bruce & Janie (names changed) in Novato telling them what was going on so they would see our note when they woke up. 15 minutes later they called us and demanded we come over and set up camp there.
7:30am: It took us 4 hours to get to Novato. That’s normally a 40 minute drive.
About a week before the fires started we were invited by a neighbor to join a local email group. The area where we live is pretty small and distinct. It’s like a small gated community with no gate. Maybe 40 houses total. They use the email list to occasionally discuss topics and share information.
This email list became my lifeline for the first day. The messages were both terrifying and comforting depending on the email. I had no idea if the house was standing. I kept telling the kids to mentally prepare themselves. I didn’t think the house was standing at that point.
5:00pm: Once we were physically safe from the fires we were also marooned from them. With only one car it was difficult to get back to the house without leaving one parent and the kids stranded. We spent all of Monday in Novato. I hiked up a nearby hill with Bruce to look at the smoke. I went grocery shopping at Safeway to stock Bruce and Janie’s fridge. We took the kids on a few walks to give them something to do outside even though the air quality was terrible.
By the end of the day I finally remembered that I could check the Nest we inherited when we bought this new house and see if we were still online. We were still online. I exhaled my first sigh though I was still worried. It’s a testament to the overwhelming nature of the day that it took me 10 hours to have the clarity of mind to even think to check the Nest. We were online, that meant we had power, internet, and Nests working — all amazing signs.
Day 2
Our caretakers in Novato both worked from home on Monday and on Tuesday. They have two kids under 5 years old that are in daycare/preschool and both were closed due to air quality. We took the 4 kids to a local YMCA racquetball court and let them run loose for a hour (Bruce’s idea — which was brilliant):
As with Monday I reminded the kids that our house was most likely gone and told them to prepare themselves mentally for a long road ahead.
Day 3
On Wednesday morning Mom and Janie woke up with a plan. Mom is technically a first responder, however the hospital had been closed since Monday morning. We found out that some personnel at the hospital had lost their houses but were working at the shelters. Mom wanted to head north for the first time since Monday to (1) check on the house and grab other items we missed and (2) check in with the hospital staff and see if she could help. The ladies left early in the morning.
At the house Mom ran into a group of firefighters wandering through our yard. They were from Modesto. The trees behind our house were still catching on fire, albeit slowly and without the wind from Sunday night. The firefighters went through our back fence and told Mom to “grab all the guns and get out”.
Some of our neighbors were staying in their houses at this point and starting to organize patrols to keep the area safe from flare-ups and looters. They would meet at 6pm and collect supplies and sign up for hourly night shifts. Looters were reportedly sneaking into our neighborhood to light fires to distract the emergency personnel and homeowners so they could loot. It was still complete anarchy and very scary.
Janie grabbed my car and drove it back down to Novato with Mom.
Later that day we received a video directly from a neighbor down the street from us. This was taken on our road between our two houses:
Day 4
On Wednesday I finally made it back to the house since I now had my car. I posted this the next day:
This is what I saw:
While up there I saw Jim and another neighbor. They had a fire extinguisher and were putting out trees that had slowly started to catch on fire.
I ended up staying Wednesday night and volunteering for a night shift patrol with the neighbors. I felt incredibly guilty that I hadn’t been able to help watch for flare-ups and looters for the previous days. I signed up for a shift from 9–11pm and then headed back to Novato. On Thursday I came up again, this time staying in Healdsburg with Mom’s parents and taking a tougher shift from 3–5am. I used up one fire extinguisher in the woods behind our house in that first night and another the second night.
Day 5
I drove back up with my dad on Friday night to stay at the house by myself and do another night shift. I wanted to go alone but he wouldn’t let me. We packed light and I told him to be ready to roll at any moment. Our community signal for an emergency was one long loud blaring horn honk from a car or truck (so that it wouldn’t be mistaken for a car alarm). I did another middle of the night shift from 2–4am.
I got back to bed at 4:30am.
At 5am we heard a loud, long, blaring horn. I jumped out of bed. Both my dad and I were sleeping in our clothes so we could be ready to go. We were out the house in less than 2 minutes. Turns out a fire had flared up across the valley to the east of us (for reference those charred hill pictures above are to the west of us) and was blowing our way.
I told my dad we were leaving and we hopped in our cars and drove out. We went straight back to his house and got there by 6am. In order to not wake up the ladies and kids we went to a coffee shop for an hour and discussed the madness.
Day 6
I returned to the house again to start to get things ready to move back home.
While at the house I saw more firefighters up behind the house. I had an idea to grab our big bag of halloween candy and take it up there to them.
When I got to the firefighters something felt off. They looked at me sort of weird as I asked them if they wanted any halloween candy. One of them came forward and told me:
Hey, you can’t offer that to us directly, it’s actually a felony. But if our captain approves it we can have some.
They were inmates helping out the CALFIRE team. For future reference, CALFIRE wears yellow. Inmates wear orange. Lesson learned.
I found their captain and after taking his share he approved and CALFIRE and inmate teams emptied the bag.
Later as I was hosing down the roof and cleaning out the gutters two of the inmates came up to the back fence and whistled at me and made the motion of asking for a cigarette. It was surreal. I didn’t have any cigarettes.
Day 7
We finally fully moved back home.
I will say we kept the car packed and loaded for a few extra days just in case. We didn’t slept in the house that night and opted for staying at Mom’s parent’s house in Healdsburg instead. Our first night sleeping in the house was Day 8.
We kept the air filters running almost full time. I had changed the air filters in the house back in August. They were both black.
By the next Thursday (Day 11) it actually rained in Santa Rosa. That was the first night I really slept well since everything had started. It marks the end of one of the most interesting and terrible weeks I’ve ever experienced, and we’re one of the few lucky ones with a house still standing.
