Residents seek normalcy in city hit hard by fire
SANTA ROSA (AP) — At Willie Bird’s Restaurant near Santa Rosa’s downtown, life goes on amid the haze.
Saturday morning, regulars crowded the bar for bloody marys and greasy breakfasts as smoke from a wildfire billowed black and ominously outside.
“You just want to get the fire out of your mind,” said Doug Ferroggiaro, a retired iron worker from nearby Rohnert Park.
Sheri Laugero and her two friends also sat at the bar, mapping a strategy for how to get back to her undamaged Santa Rosa home, which is in an evacuation zone and off-limits. She wants clean clothes.
“You kind of need a lot of it right now,” said Laugero, who plans to return to work Monday as a records clerk at an area hospital.
And so it goes in Santa Rosa, a city of 175,000 that is a gateway to California’s fabled wine region in Sonoma and Napa counties. There’s devastation in one part of the city, but elsewhere locals are back at work, and wine-loving tourists are popping up again.
The Santa Rosa vacation home four couples from Columbus, Ohio, expected to rent this week was destroyed before they arrived on their annual winery pilgrimage. So they rented rooms in a Bodega Bay hotel.
On Thursday, they drank pints at the Russian River Brewing Co. like they do every year and made plans to visits wineries unaffected by the flames.
“We are still glad we are here,” Anne Wheeler said as she sipped the brewery’s popular Pliny the Elder.