Beginning life amid the chaos
Andrea Jones’ contractions began around 11 a.m. Sunday. She spent the next several hours doing breathing exercises and teetering on a fitness ball in her Santa Rosa condominium. At around 11:30 that night, she and her husband, Dylan, got in the car and headed to Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital. Then the fire hit. “The wind was already really strong when we left our home, and I could smell smoke,” Andrea said.
The blaze spread rapidly while nurses evaluated her at Sutter and decided she should return home and wait. By then, the fire was roaring through nearby hills and the hospital was evacuating all its patients. Andrea would have to deliver her first baby somewhere else.
When she and Dylan walked outside, smoke blotted out the skyline, and they could see orange flames lapping in the northeast. Embers and ash filled the air like snow.
“We could hear branches breaking, transformers popping, loud booms that could have been propane tanks exploding,” Dylan said. “We saw random embers landing on the concrete. The fury of the fire was just crazy.”
But the scope of the blaze didn’t really hit him until he and Andrea made their way back home along a warren of roads, trying to avoid the bumper-tobumper traffic of cars heading south on Highway 101 to escape the wildfires. When they got to Piner Road, the smoke had formed a thick fog, Dylan said, and the street was clogged with fleeing cars.
Piner Road was roughly a 10-minute drive from the couple’s home on McConnell Avenue.
“We later found out the whole area burned down,” Andrea said of the part of town they were driving through.
A few hours later, at 4 a.m. Monday, the couple was back on the road, headed to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, where the emergency room was packed with patients — including some with respiratory problems from inhaling smoke.
Doctors and nurses were scrambling to help, even though some of the medical staff were fire victims themselves. One nurse had lost her house, her cats and her chickens.
“And there she was, helping us,” Andrea said.
Their daughter, Parker Jones, was born at 7 p.m. that evening, one of 10 “fire babies” delivered at Santa Rosa Memorial since early Monday morning. Four other women were in active labor at the hospital Wednesday.
These babies were born at a time when hospitals were facing a sudden surge in patients, said spokeswoman Christina Harris. Two nearby facilities — Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital and Kaiser Santa Rosa Medical Center — had been evacuated, and patients were streaming in with asthma, throat irritation and breathing problems caused by the smoke.
Andrea and Parker were discharged from the hospital Wednesday afternoon and were headed to their so-far-unscathed two-bedroom condo.
A few miles away in the Coffey Park neighborhood, the Joneses’ good friends Oscar and Catie Velarde had also been starting a new phase of life together.
They had just gotten married in mid-September. She had worn an organza ball gown with a sweetheart neckline and a train that everyone kept stepping on. He had a navy suit, a paisley tie and a brass lapel pin with his boutonniere.
“It’s all gone now,” Catie said, recalling how she and her new husband returned Sunday from a honeymoon in Mexico to settle into married life in a rented three-bedroom house with a garage and a backyard.
They woke up around 2 a.m. Monday to hear their three dogs barking. Smoke had clouded the windows and seeped into the house. Embers were falling on Catie’s 2016 Kia Sorento.
Outside, the house on the corner of their block of Brandee Lane was already burning.
Catie grabbed the dogs, a carry-on bag with a change of clothes, a jewelry box with her grandmother’s pearls and a pearl bracelet that Oscar had given her to wear at the wedding. Oscar grabbed dog food, a couple of shirts and a pair of shorts. They joined a line of cars speeding from the neighborhood, leaving their house to burn.
For the past two days, the Velardes have stayed with Oscar’s parents in Rohnert Park, with their bags packed in case they have to leave again.
“My family (members) in Reno and South Lake Tahoe keep telling me to look for a new place to rent,” Catie said. “But I’m telling them that the fire is zero percent contained. With all these homes burning down, we’re not sure where we’ll be able to stay.”
Back on the Joneses’ street, McConnell Avenue, the houses and apartments are intact.
At the Jones condo, along with a well-equipped nursery, there are also a blow-up mattress and futon for any evacuees who may move in over the next few days. Besides the Velardes, Andrea and Dylan have other friends who lost their homes in the fires.
“We’re open to shelter them,” Andrea said. Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan