Life amid the ashes
Recovery slow, painful, demanding in hardest-hit Sonoma County
Susan Gorin aches to fast-forward to well past next year — when she once again has a home on what is now an ashy lot.
Peter Alan wants to turn the rubble of his Craftsman art studio into something meaningful. Lisa Mast longs to look out her window and see something across the street besides blackened reminders of the flames that swept through before sunrise Oct. 9.
That was the night, six months ago, when hot Diablo winds blasted across the hills from the east, snatched up some sparks and rained fear and sorrow on the North Bay.
Sonoma County took the brunt of it, and its biggest city, Santa Rosa, suffered most of all. Gorin’s lot and thousands of others are still empty. Tens of thousands of people — the county has not tracked exact numbers — were displaced by the fires, and many of them remain in rentals, emergency housing and government trailers. Homeless camps with hundreds of people mark the southern city limits of Santa Rosa. Today, Sonoma remains a county under fire. “I have never experienced a disaster quite like this,” said Gorin, a Sonoma County supervisor. “The seven stages of grief are very much evident here. This will be with us for a long, long time.”
These are the stories of some of those who lost nearly all they once knew. Six months in, they realize — better than they did in October — they may never get it back.
Rebuilding a life
It was in the hills near Calistoga that the worst of October’s blazes sparked: the Tubbs Fire.
It fed off the air, carrying dinner plate-size embers 12 miles across Sonoma County in four hours. The Tubbs Fire consumed 36,807 acres and destroyed 5,636 houses, businesses and other structures, most of them in Santa Rosa. It was joined by several other blazes throughout the North Bay that, together with the Tubbs, killed 41 people — the highest death toll of any wildfire disaster in the state’s history.
The fires had been burning for three days when Gorin, who was in an emergency Board of Supervisors meeting, received a text message from state Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg.
“Is this your house?” it read. He was on a tour of the evacuated Oakmont neighborhood, a newer subdivision of milliondollar houses bordering TrioneAnnandel State Park in the hills east of Santa Rosa.
The lawn of Gorin’s threebedroom home was smoking. McGuire saved Gorin’s car and her husband’s road bike, along with some jewelry, family photos, clothes and computers that he hauled out in pillowcases, before the flames got there.
The house was incinerated. So was Gorin’s former home in the Fountaingrove neighborhood just to the north — an obliteration of 25 years of memories between the two.
“It amazes me how completely a fire can consume a house full of furniture and photos and books and dishes, reducing it to virtually nothing,” Gorin said. “You could see the metal wiring from the house, the hulks of the washing machines and appliances. You could see where the china fell down and shattered. It was a total loss. It destroyed everything.”
Her husband suggested living in an RV on their lot. That’s what others who lost their homes have done. But the refrigerator would have been tiny, and outings to the septic tank station frequent. Gorin didn’t want to do that. “I can’t function in an RV on this lot,” she told him.
So they’re in a rental unit in Oakmont near the home where Gorin’s mother-in-law lives. Insurance pays their rent.
Gorin is lucky, she knows. But the rental is not home. It doesn’t have sweeping views of the state park. There aren’t fruit and oak trees out back. And it’s not as comfortable — not like their old place. The furniture and family heirlooms they moved from Fountaingrove to Oakmont are gone. So are their clothes.
Gorin spends her days slogging through mind-numbing paperwork, applications and meetings with fire victims planning their rebuilds, even as she plans her own. They tell her there is nowhere to live, that this — trying to rebuild a life — is harder than they thought.
She knows how it feels. She has credibility with them; she’s going through the same things.
“I set aside one afternoon where I could go sift through the ashes of my home and use a whisk broom to sweep things away,” she said. “I wanted to sit there and cry over what I lost.”
But she added, “I’m grateful I have the capacity and time and empathy to give. There are so many still struggling.”
Nothing is quick
The wildfires didn’t discriminate. They destroyed a lowincome mobile home park near Highway 101. They destroyed senior retirement homes and the mansions that dotted the hills above Santa Rosa. Thousands of rental units — the exact number of apartments and houses is unknown — were wiped out.
Few residences have risen from the ashes.
Only 54 building permits had been issued in Sonoma County as of March 27 for burned-out lots. Even if they plan to pull a permit, many are agonizing over how to pay for their house reconstruction — more than 40 percent of people who lost homes were underinsured.
Until 2013, Sonoma County was building only 500 new housing units annually. In total, when accounting for job gains and fire losses, it will need an additional 26,000 units by 2020.
The county opened a resilient permit center, a separate department for fire survivors trying to rebuild their homes. Officials lowered fees and cut red tape, promising to issue permits within a week of application, despite criticism that doing so could result in homes being rebuilt in fire-prone areas.
Mark Mitchell, co-owner of Lake County Contractors, has a good guess of what recovery will look like. The 52-year-old has an unusual goal — he strives to rebuild the first home to go up after every major state disaster. He helped erect the first one after the massive Lake County wildfire in 2015. That was shortly after he started his business. Now, he’s finishing the first one in Santa Rosa’s devastated Coffey Park neighborhood. Fortyfive clients are on a waiting list for his services.
“It never happens as quickly as people think,” Mitchell said. “By the end of this year, I would imagine less than 10 percent of the total losses will be rebuilt. Next year, it will be bigger. And the year after, when big builders start buying up lots with premade designs, it will skyrocket. We saw that in Lake County. It wasn’t until other houses started rising that people saw there was possibility.”
Half the clients he works with give up before anything is built. They aren’t ready for the barrage of choices, and if they’re couples, they can’t always agree: Paint? Tiles? Windows? Floor plan? Carpeting? Cabinetry?
“All of these people are just thrown into it,” Mitchell said. “They don’t have a choice. Most of them don’t want that choice. They liked where they were, and they don’t want the additional stress of building a home on top of losing everything.”
The county has made the process easier. Mitchell is able to submit applications electronically — something many counties don’t do. But there have been holdups. Like when Fire Department officials delayed a home he’s building in Coffey Park. The sewer laterals in the neighborhood weren’t big enough to support the now-required fire sprinklers. It took a few weeks, but they sorted it out.
Everyone is figuring out the best way to build, Mitchell tells clients. When you’re the first, there are bound to be delays. But for some people, being the guinea pig is too overwhelming.
“We’ve had clients come to us and sign design contracts,” he said. “A week later, they will decide they aren’t going to rebuild. It won’t be one size fits all. It’s a stressful process after you’ve already been through enough.”
“It amazes me how completely a fire can consume a house full of furniture and photos and books and dishes, reducing it to virtually nothing. You could see the metal wiring from the house, the hulks of the washing machines and appliances . ... It was a total loss.” Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin, describing her destroyed home
A trailer isn’t home
Many who were renting when the flames came can only wish they were burdened with too many choices. With nowhere to go, and no way to pay for housing, thousands of them — the best estimate officials can come up with — are stuck in limbo lodging.
Within three weeks of the fires’ ignition, the Federal Emergency Management Agency received more than 4,500 unemployment claims. Most of those people had already been living paycheck to paycheck, getting by on cheap rent. Some have moved to the Central Valley or out of state to find affordable housing, saying goodbye to a county where the rental vacancy rate went from just 2 percent before the fires to zero afterward — and the average rent has gone up more than 30 percent.
A few who didn’t leave, couldn’t stay with friends and family or weren’t able to find a rental wound up in temporary housing from FEMA. The biggest colony is at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds RV Park, where all of the 101 brand-new trailers brought in by the agency are filled.
The trailers are part of a disaster-recovery effort that has housed about 400 people in apartments, trailers or modular housing units. People can stay up to 18 months.
The population at the RV park includes people who were living on the margins of the economy in jobs like housekeeping, where a couple of missed paychecks always meant trouble. Or artists who live commission to commission, like 49-year-old Peter Alan.
After flames gobbled his studio in Glen Ellen southeast of Santa Rosa, he scored the smallest model FEMA trailer, the one with a single bed, kitchenette, bathroom and a fold-down table. Rent and utilities are free while Alan rebuilds his art career working in paint, multimedia and sculpture. He estimates he lost $120,000 in art and $18,000 in supplies in the fire.
“I’m truly grateful to FEMA for this space, but I really do need to get a studio and a place of my own,” he said. “It’s been an adjustment. The energy around the park here can be abrasive, often very noisy, and there’s no place to do my work in a trailer this small.”
Alan, a trained massage therapist, has been taking clients and saving money for rent. But he’s also applying for art grants.
He’s hoping to open a studio with two other local artists and create sculptures and other works from fire debris. For now, Alan is storing ash and gray-black fragments from his destroyed studio — “not from anywhere else, to be respectful” — in his mother’s garage in Santa Rosa.
“I don’t want people to be sad when they see it,” he said. “I want this art to be healing.”
Across the RV park from Alan’s trailer lives Daisy Carreno, 35. She would be on the street if not for her FEMA rig.
Carreno, her husband and their three children all scrambled out of their rented house in Coffey Park just as the Tubbs Fire consumed it. Her husband went back into the flames to rescue their car. But that was it.
Carreno is a house cleaner and her husband works as a printmaker — but they still can’t afford what they’ve been able to find. Every two-bedroom place costs $2,500 a month or more, and they’d barely been able to cover the $1,700 on the house that burned.
All that remains of their former home is a handful of half-melted bracelets and necklaces and the center ring of John Denver’s “Back Home Again” LP. That all sits on a shelf in the trailer like talismans.
“We are going to frame this when we move into our real home,” Carreno said in Spanish, touching the LP fragment tenderly. “My daughter says it doesn’t matter what the roof is. The home is where the family is.”
From a home to a tent
They are the unluckiest of the survivors.
Isaak Faber has lived in a lot of places during his six years of life — maybe half a dozen as his family followed jobs and circumstances around the area. For most of the past six months, home was a tent pitched in the middle of scores of other tents. He knew it had something to do with that fire he had to run from with his mom and dad in October.
Isaak goes to kindergarten in Santa Rosa on the other side of town from his burned house and watches other kids go back to homes when the school bell rings. One chilly recent day, he nudged a little red toy sports car with his foot down the dirt pathway at the homeless camp in south Santa Rosa. It was what passed for fun for the afternoon. It wasn’t really fun.
“I just want to go home to my real home,” he said, staring at his shoes. Isaak’s father, 38-year-old Keith Faber, hugged him for a long moment.
“Soon, son, soon,” Faber said.
A few days ago, the Fabers found a spot in a shelter. It’s still not home. They’ve got a lot of company in their misery.
Sonoma County has the overwhelming majority of the homeless population of the North Bay, much of it in and around Santa Rosa, but before the fires it had been making progress. The last street count, taken in 2017, found the homeless population down 2.4 percent from the year before, at 2,835 people. The fires ruined