Did care homes abandon residents?
State moves to revoke licenses of two facilities it says left some elderly people behind in wildfire evacuation
“Itwas really scary, really sad and really scary.” — Steffany Kisling, granddaughter of retirement home resident
SANTAROSA » Providing horrifying details of how two luxury retirement complexes abandoned residents at the height of the deadly Santa Rosa wildfires last October, the state announced Thursday it ismoving to revoke their licenses and ban their top administrators from ever working at care homes again.
Had emergency responders and frantic relatives of the elderly not arrived, more than 20 residents left behind might have died, according to the report from the California Department of Social Services.
The scathing report highlights numerous shocking failures by staff of the Villa Capri and Varenna retirement facilities, owned by Oakmont Senior Living. The violations included employees on duty having no idea where to find flashlights or batteries or the keys to the retirement complexes’ buses that sat idle all night. Several workers fled in their personal vehicles with some residents, leaving many behind.
Both retirement homes are part of a sprawling retirement complex in Fountaingrove, one of the Santa Rosa neighborhoods devastated by the wind- driven Tubbs wildfire Oct. 8 and 9. Villa Capri was destroyed but is being rebuilt. Varenna was damaged but quickly reopened. Both housed a total of nearly 300 elderly. Fountaingrove Lodge, also on the property, was not cited in the report.
Late Thursday, Oakmont Senior Living issued a statement refuting the report, calling the allegations “unfounded.”
“The night of the Tubbs fire, we voluntarily began evacuating residents after we were repeatedly unable to reach emergency authorities on clogged 911 phone lines,” the statement said. “We never received an official evacuation order from emergency authorities.”
All 418 residents were safely evacuated, it said, calling their employees and others who helped that night “heroic.”
Oakmont has 15 days to appeal and request a hearing before an administrative law judge. If it does not successfully appeal, the complex would either be shut down or need to come under new ownership.
But one of the relatives who helped that night was heartened by the state’s sanctions. Steffany Kisling raced from her home in San Rafael to Varenna to rescue her grandfather that night. She arrived at about 4:30 a.m., an hour after her brother, R. J. Kisling.
“Having been there that night and how they followed up with the incident, I’m thrilled to hear that” the state was taking action, Kisling, 39, said Thursday. “There was no staff helping at all. One of the firemen was asking me where the master key was, assuming I was staff.”
Kisling said she arrived just as the roof of the Villa Capri next door was starting to burn. She and her brother ran from room to room, banging on doors to help people out of Varenna and the casitas nearby.
“It was really scary, really sad and really scary,” she said.
The Tubbs fire was considered the most destructive wildfire in California history, killing 22 people and destroying 5,636 homes and buildings. The dramatic rescue by police at the elderly care homes that night was captured on body camera videos, first reported by this news organization in June.
The state moved to revoke the administrator licenses of both Varenna’s Nathan Condie and Villa Capri’s Deborah Smith, banning them from working in any care home in California.
In the early morning hours of Oct. 9, as flames raced over the hill toward the Villa Capri, 62 residents were in their rooms, including 25 housed in the dementia wing and considered nonambulatory, according to the report.
Four staff members were on duty. None of them had ever participated in a fire drill. Marie So, the supervisor that night, did not know the evacuation plan, did not use the emergency binder, did not know where the keys for the facilities’ vehicles were kept nor the flashlights or batteries for f lashlights, according to the report. Employee Cynthia Arroyo spent an hour unsuccessfully searching for vehicle keys in four different offices.
Arroyo and employee Elizabeth Lopez were unable to lift more than 10 pounds or use both hands, meaning they could not help transfer residents, the report found. The staff ultimately left with some of the residents in their personal vehicles but left many elderly behind, the report said.
When So arrived at the evacuation center, she did not notify anyone of the situation, nor call 911, the re- port found. Oakmont officials have said that some staff had tried to return to help more residents, but roadblocks during the fires prevented them. Police have disputed that the roads were closed.
Relatives of the elderly arrived finding no staff to help. Melissa Langhals, who helped her mother evacuate, flagged down a police car and emergency responders.
“If these familymembers and emergency responders had not evacuated Villa Capri residents, more than 20 residents would have perished when Villa Capri burned to the ground after all staff left the facility,” the report found.
The report found Smith, the Villa Capri administrator, failed to train facility staff adequately and, although not on the property that night, ordered staff by phone to guard the three exits of the dementia ward to prevent residents from escaping. Smith arrived at the evacuation center at 6 a.m.
The state also cited the facility for bulldozing the Villa Capri building 10 days after the fire, despite promising at least two residents’ familymembers they would have time to retrieve property from the site.
It didn’t go much better at neighboring Varenna, where Condie arrived at 12:30 a.m. and joined three staff and two maintenance workers.
There were 228 elderly residents at Varenna, 142 in the main building, in- cluding 13 residents who needed care and supervision and one in hospice. The other residents lived in two other buildings, and individual casitas.
Condie, however, didn’t provide staff with instructions until about 90 minutes later when he directed them to return residents to their rooms rather than evacuate, the report said.
“Respondent Nathan Condie stated that he did not want to cause issues or make trouble,” the report said.
Condie left Varenna at 3:30 a.m. in his personal car with a small number of residents. He did not alert the rest of the staff he was leaving, nor did he alert staff that the keys to a large facility bus parked outside were in a desk drawer, the report found.
More than 70 residents remained behind with staff that had no training in evacuation procedures. At some point, the employees left while many residents remained asleep inside their rooms.
Again, it was family members who came to the rescue, some picking up their loved ones. Around 4 a.m., a grandson of a resident arrived at Varenna looking for his grandfather but learned he had already evacuated. However, he was besieged by questions from abandoned residents in the darkened, smoky building who needed help.
“( He) ran door-to- door banging on doors to locate and awaken residents, assisted them into the build- ing lobby, and started a list of resident names,” the report said. “(He) voluntarily stayed at the facility for approximately three hours, actively helping to evacuate residents for the full time.”
Police arrived shortly thereafter, kicking in doors and alerting sleeping residents, but they had no roster of residents or list of residents who had been evacuated.
The next day, three other Varenna employees conducted a search of the facility, which was damaged but not destroyed, and found three residents who were never evacuated. Two of those employees — Pooya Ansari and Joel Ruiz — lied to state investigators, saying they found no one that morning, the report said.
Steffany Kisling said she is particularly pleased that Oakmont was called out for misrepresenting what really happened that night when it published a letter on its website called “The Real Story of Oakmont Senior Living and the Tubbs Fire.” The report said it was filled with false and misleading statements, including that the staff had led the evacuation.
“Clearly, if they’re trying to cover it up,” Kisling said, “they don’t have any desire to take corrective measures to make sure that never happens again.”
“Clearly, if they’re trying to cover it up, they don’t have any desire to take corrective measures to make sure that never happens again.” — Steffany Kisling