Tubbs Fire survivors: ‘I just can’t believe I’m seeing this again’

SANTA ROSA » When the winds picked up, howled really, Michael Fiumara ran out of his house for a better look and gaped at the “horrible, heinous glow” coming from Geyserville.

It was 11 p.m. — about the same time the Tubbs Fire two years ago had destroyed nearly every house on this Fountaingrove hilltop but his — and terror set in.

“I became, I don’t know how to say it, I just started to cry, and I just can’t believe I’m seeing this again,” Fiu

mara said Thursday morning from his home some 30 miles southwest of the growing Kincade Fire. “I’m traumatized, if you really want to know.”

From the hills of Fountaingrove to the flats of Coffey Park that were decimated by the Tubbs Fire of Oct. 8, 2017, the wind and smoke from the fire to the north, which had consumed 10,000 acres overnight, incited terrifying flashbacks in Santa Rosa.

“PTSD was at an all-time high in our neighborhood,” said Annie Barbour, who was one of the first to rebuild her home in Coffey Park after it was completely flattened by the Tubbs fire.

On Wednesday night, “People were crying, talking to each other online and in a panic,” she said.

About 70% of the homes in Coffey Park have been rebuilt, and construction equipment remains everywhere, so many were fearing “this can’t be happening,” said Pat Gibson, 66, whose home was one of the few in Coffey Park to survive in 2017.

“These poor people are finally getting back their homes,” Gibson said, “and just this whole idea that potentially there could be a threat again, it’s nervewracking.”

“It’s a trauma-inducing event to see smoke in this area,” said Sonoma County Supervisor James Gore as he checked on evacuees at the Healdsburg Community Center on Thursday morning.

But people are also more prepared now, Gore said. They take evacuation warnings more seriously, he said. And agencies are more prepared as well — just last week, he rode along with sheriff’s deputies as part of a drill to knock on doors and issue evacuation warnings. “People are awake to the situation.”

On Wednesday night, however, misinformation on social media added to the chaos.

“There were like, seven reported fires in Sonoma County last night and they weren’t real,” Barbour said. “It’s that people saw the flames from Geyserville and couldn’t tell where it was and they panicked and called them all in. The fire department was running all over the place.”

By midmorning Thursday, another fire — this one confirmed — had started near Annadel Park in the Spring Lake area a few miles south of Fountaingrove and Coffey Park.

“I need to be on alert,” Fiumara said Thursday morning.

The experience, he said, has been emotionally exhausting.

As Fiumara was trying to assess the approaching danger, a neighbor whose house burned down in the Tubbs fire and had just been rebuilt, drove by with her husband and dog.

“She said, ‘I’m packing, I don’t give a damn,’ ” Fiumara said. “She was hysterical, and I tried to calm her down.”

Fiumara went back to his house and started posting on Facebook his photos of the fire’s glow still far in the distance to try to counter bad information he was seeing online. His home had survived in 2017, and despite his fears, he decided not to pack his things this time.

He figured that since nearly all the homes and trees around him were destroyed two years ago, there was little to propel a fire closer to him now.

Fiumara’s home was not in the area where PG&E had shut down power as a fire-safety precaution Wednesday. So he turned on all the lights in and around his house “as an act of defiance,” that he was staying put, he said. “If anyone needs me, I’m here.”

By Thursday morning, with the second fire closer to home, he realized he needed to rethink his plan. Construction workers who were rebuilding homes below him appeared to be packing up themselves.

All he could see in the distance Thursday morning, he said, was heavy smoke.

“This is just a disgusting norm we’ll have to face,” he said.