San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Big scramble to evacuate in Healdsburg, Windsor
The news everyone had been dreading came at about 10:30 Saturday morning: the more than 44,000 residents of Healdsburg, Windsor and other communities along Highway 101 had to flee the roaring flames of the Kincade Fire.
Within minutes, residents were hustling to pack up and get out of town. Some learned of the evacuations over breakfast by watching the county sheriff’s press conference on a restaurant television. By Saturday night, an additional 46,000 people in the nearby towns of Guerneville, Forestville, Larkfield, Mark West Springs and several other communities stretching west to the Pacific Ocean were also ordered to leave their homes.
They took the order seriously — by 2:30, traffic in Windsor was gridlocked on Old Redwood Highway east of Highway 101 — in one direction by people trying to get to the highway, in the other by people hoping that the usually less hectic route toward Santa Rosa was a better bet.
And because the order was both mandatory and across the board, it even applied to Windsor’s emergency operations center, which had just set up shop at 7 a.m. that morning at a fire station on the south side of town. Some tempers began to fray as gas station lines began snaking into the street.
“People are getting cranky,” said Laurie Taylor, manager at the Omelette Express restaurant in Windsor.
“It’s getting so chaotic out there,” she said, looking out the front window.
“You can see the traffic backing up. My customers got the news on their phones, finished their meals quickly and left. There are a lot more people going out than coming in.”
Police officers and firefighters patrolled the streets. On block after block, people loaded cars with armfuls of boxes, suitcases and framed pictures and clothes. With the fire still well to the northeast, the evacuation proceeded in good order.
Residents had until 4 p.m. to flee.
In Healdsburg, traffic picked up as people rushed to take care of lastminute matters before leaving town.
Michael Katz, 68, had just driven to his son’s Healdsburg home to help him pack up.
“There’s such long lines of traffic in town, and they’re not moving quickly,” he said.
The smell of smoke in the air reminded Katz of being at his son Asher’s house on Lupine Road during the 2017 Wine Country firestorm. The family had hosed down the yard in anticipation of the fire’s approach.
“We’ve been through this before,” he said, “so we’re calm, but at the same time we’re anxious.”
Katz’s daughterinlaw, Abbie Gabrielson, 31, a pianist, grabbed her music books as she packed her Honda Civic.
“These textbooks from grad school I spent a lot of money on,” she said, stacking compositions of Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin as well as her own scores in her back seat.
Larry Hatfield, 64, was one of the few remaining people in a nearempty downtown Healdsburg on Saturday afternoon. And he was afraid he might not make it out.
“We’re stuck,” he said, as he waited more than two hours to catch a bus at the downtown square.
Hatfield is homeless and he doesn’t have a car. He normally camps behind the McDonald’s restaurant but hastily collected his belongings in a backpack when he heard about the evacuation on his radio and went to the bus stop.
“It doesn’t take very long to pack,” he said.
Windsor’s town green, lined with apartments above shops in fauxhistoric style, had the feel of a quaint ghost town.
A fall harvest festival was scheduled for Saturday, and the area was decorated with scarecrows and pumpkins. A children’s trickortreat through the town center was scheduled to begin at 12:30 p.m.
By then, all the shops were locked and dark, except for Capri Hair Salon, where Kelly Brown had just finished with her last customer of the day.
“I’m sad, because I work for myself and all my clients were calling to cancel” after the orders had issued, said Brown, who lives in Rohnert Park. “I’m getting texts from friends (asking) ‘Have you left? Have you left?’ But I have to make the money I can.”
Around the corner, Ron Touchstone and his family methodically loaded clothes and supplies into two cars and his red Toyota Tacoma pickup with a 6foot bed. Attached to it was a trailer filled with camping gear, propane tanks, packs of instant oatmeal and six cases of bottled water.
The evacuation order came as students at Windsor High were taking the ACT tests for college applications. Because neither the students nor the proctor had access to cell phones, word came from a parent.
The proctor called a break, students went into the hall and “everyone’s phones started going off” with notifications, said Malia Llerena, one of the students.
Not everyone was in a hurry to depart.
“I’m going to wait until the last minute,” said a man who would identify himself only as Dean. “I was up at 3:30 (a.m.) to go fishing at Lake Sonoma. So I’m heading back to the condo where I’m staying, to sit for a while.”
Steve Rubenstein, John King and Kurtis Alexander are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: srubenstein@ sfchronicle.com, jking@sfchronicle.com, kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @steverubesf, @kurtisalexander, @JohnKingSFChron