Evacuations: Residents pack up and go, and not for the first time
Ed and Claire Burdett started getting ready to leave their Healdsburg home nearly as soon as the Kincade Fire ignited. They pulled out their gobag list of 30 items that they would pack when the evacuation orders came.
The list included house plans in case they had to rebuild, family photos and the baseball glove Ed’s father had when he was 6.
They were ready when they were instructed to leave just before 8 p.m. Saturday. The last unwritten item on their todo list was to say a silent goodbye to their home, just in case.
“We circled the house twice, and I sat there and cried,” Claire Burdett said. “You just do what you have to do.”
It was the third time the couple fled a fire. They escaped the 1991 Oakland hills firestorm. Two years ago, they ran from the Tubbs Fire. Both times, their homes survived.
They have no plans to move from the Wine Country, so
they recognize they might have to flee again someday. The threat of fires has become an annual event. On Sunday they were cautiously optimistic their house would be OK, but it’s impossible to know for sure. They have plenty of company: About 185,000 people in Sonoma County were under mandatory evacuation orders Sunday evening.
The couple helped form a Citizens Organized to Prepare for Emergencies, or COPE, group after the Tubbs Fire to help their neighborhood prepare for disaster. When the evacuation warning came on Saturday, they alerted their neighbors, ensuring they would be ready to go even if they lost power and cell service.
“The biggest feeling (when evacuating) is panic and confusion,” said Claire Burdett, 69. “And we thought, ‘We’re not going to do that again.’ ”
She and her husband took refuge Sunday at a friend’s house in Cloverdale to wait out the fire, their 30 items stacked in the hallway, the house plans and insurance information tucked in a bag with irreplaceable photos and mementos.
Like the Burdetts, Sharon and Garvis Martin prepared as best they could for what was coming. They were also working from experience, having been forced out during the Tubbs Fire.
By the time a blaring fire truck rolled into their neighborhood at the end of Piner Road in Santa Rosa at 3 a.m. Sunday, the Martins had already packed their bags and loaded them into two cars, along with their puppy, a miniature poodle named Shiloh.
Among the essentials: paper towels, underwear, socks, three packages of toiletries, a batteryoperated radio, camera, power pack, cell phones and “every medicine in the house,” Sharon Martin said.
“We packed up Saturday afternoon when Healdsburg and Windsor were evacuated,” she said. “Then we just waited. I had my cell phone on all night and the alerts would buzz.”
After fielding calls from neighbors, the couple headed to the Finley Community Center on West College Avenue, which was taking evacuees. When they arrived the center itself was being evacuated, so the couple drove to the Sonoma County Fairgrounds. By the time they arrived at about 5 a.m., it was full. They hunkered down in their cars instead.
The parking lot at the fairgrounds was packed with cars Sunday, all filled with belongings that people had quickly grabbed before fleeing. Some hauled bicycles and surfboards. Many people milled around outside with their dogs. Others sat in their cars on their phones.
Rod Kris, 68, didn’t have to evacuate his home in the South Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa. But he still showed up to the fairgrounds just before 10 a.m. Sunday to meet up with a homeless woman he had dropped off the night before.
“She needed some care. I thought maybe I could find her here,” he said.
The two met at a laundromat on Santa Rosa Avenue and struck up a conversation.
“She had no place to go, so I dropped her off here last night around 8:30. I said, ‘I’ll be here at 10 o’clock tomorrow,’ ” Kris said. He went off to look for her.
While many evacuated residents scattered to shelters and the homes of friends, four chickens — Salt, Pepper, Kate and Allie — took refuge from the Kincade Fire in a comic book shop.
Kathryn Hecht and her husband, Ryan, had packed up the poultry, two cats, a dog and personal belongings Thursday morning before the mandatory evacuation hit the Palomino Lakes area of Cloverdale that night.
The chickens rode to town in the back of the car and then relocated to the hallway of Next Door Comics, which the couple owns along with the local movie theater.
The cats were stashed in the bathroom.
“The chickens are fine. They’re probably the most stable of our family,” said Hecht, 46. “The cats are losing their minds and hiding everywhere they can.”
Hecht said she felt more prepared this time than the last, when the couple evacuated two years ago during the Tubbs Fire. But she fears this will become an annual exercise and that Octobers will be filled with dread.
While she believed her home was spared, she said she could still see huge plumes of smoke in the distance, a reminder that all the communities in the area are simply subject to the whims of the wind.
“I don’t want it to be the new normal,” she said. “It feels like we’re paying a price to live here now.”
Jill Tucker and Tatiana Sanchez are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers Email: jtucker@ sfchronicle.com, tatiana. sanchez@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker, @TatianaYSanchez