Fires leave founder of charity group homeless

SANTA ROSA — When 13year-old Ian Rich founded his nonprofit Operation Blanket four years ago to provide some warmth to the homeless in Sonoma County, he never thought one day his family might join their ranks.

That all changed on Oct. 9, when the Tubbs fire ripped through the family’s apartment building on Old Redwood Highway in Santa Rosa, consuming the material life he inhabited with his parents, Cary and Josiah Rich.

Ian Rich was supposed to make a delivery of $5,000 worth of blankets that morning to the Sonoma County Task Force for the Homeless, and then the fire changed everything.

Like so many others early that morning, no evacuation notice came for the Rich family. It was only when Josiah Rich, 63, woke shortly before 1 a.m. to the thick smell of smoke and fire on the horizon that the family knew they had to leave.

“We just got up and got out,” Cary Rich, 54, said.

The family fled south, eventually getting a hotel room in Emeryville about 5 a.m.

“He was trying to be strong for everyone, yet he was suffering and learning about loss first-hand,” Cary Rich said of Ian during the family’s escape from the flames. “And he’s also learning about homelessness first hand. One day he said to me, ‘Mama, we’re really homeless. Now I know how important Operation Blanket is for people. They really need us.’ That was his realization out of all of this.”

The family has been staying in a trailer on a friend’s property in Forestville while they look for a more permanent home. The fire also displaced the Riches’ daycare business, which they ran out of their apartment.

Though the blaze destroyed almost everything the Riches owned, the shipment of blankets — kept in a storage unit nearby — was spared.

In all, the group has donated about 1,000 blankets since its inception.