USA TODAY International Edition
SONOMA STRONG
For survivors of last year’s inferno, new fires test nerves
SANTA ROSA, Calif. – The two conflagrations raging across Northern California, the Carr Fire and Mendocino Complex Fire, are not within striking distance of this storied town best known as the home of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz.
Yet with every firetruck siren, every morning that dawns hot and windy, every sunset rendered vibrant by a smoky veil, the hearts of those living in this town skip a beat.
Nearly a year ago, an inferno raced across Santa Rosa, killing more than 20 people and destroying more than 5,000 homes. The aftermath has tested emotions and fueled resilience, banding citizens and city officials together to recover from the unimaginable. Banners with the county’s post-fire motto, Sonoma Strong, still dot the town.
But as experts predict longer, hotter fire seasons across the Golden State, fear is an inevitable ingredient in this city’s determined resurrection.
here have a sort of PTSD, where you’re constantly clearing brush around the house, always checking the news,” says Paula Lindsay, 56, who lost her home, cats and car in last October’s blaze.
“Of course, the new fires make you nervous,” she says. “But I’m not living my life as a victim. So while I don’t want to go through this again, I will. “This is home.”
Like most of those displaced by the fires, Lindsay is still in a rental.
Across town, three generations of Guzmans sit around a dining room table in their new house in Coffey Park, a middle-class neighborhood that looked as if it had been hit by an atomic bomb last fall.
The Guzman clan moved a few weeks ago into one of just seven new homes – city officials hope to have 1,000 houses under construction across the city by the end of the year – rising from a landscape of dirt and blackened trees.
The three grandparents, two parents, two adult children and one tabby all are grateful to again have a roof over their heads after living with friends, in hotels and in small apartments where one grandparent had to sleep on the living room couch. But theirs is a fragile peace.
“I wake up here now, and yes, I’m in the same location once again. It’s my street, my neighborhood, and yet it’s totally different,” says soft-spoken Leticia Guzman, 41, who tears up easily when talking about the fires. “Nobody can really prepare you for what it’s like to lose everything.”
For Guzman, a Whole Foods deli worker whose father, Jose, came to Santa Rosa from Mexico in the 1980s, what she lost were talismans of the American dream.
“People say, ‘You have a new house, new furniture.’ But while that’s true, it’s the things you can never replace that really make you hurt inside,” Leticia says. “It’s all so weird.”
Variations of Paula Lindsay’s and Le“Many ticia Guzman’s stories play out across this city. Feelings range from rage to acceptance, from a frustration that life remains in limbo to gratefulness at simply being alive – emotions that some residents of Redding and Mendocino and Lake counties may soon share as firefighters struggle to contain deadly wildfires fueled by heat and wind.
City officials allocated $9 million from the city’s general fund – recoupable through the new-house planning fees – to pay for a two-year contract to hire outside staff just to handle permitting issues related to rebuilds after the fire.
The city created a website, Resilient City Fire Recovery, that gives residents information on how to rebuild. It tracks the city’s house-by-house comeback: There are 421 homes under construction, 321 have the permit review in process, and 140 have permits and await construction.
David Guhin, Santa Rosa’s director of planning and economic development, says citizens banding together have been crucial to the town’s rebirth. Neighbors help one another with everything from insurance claim questions to going in on land surveys together to reduce fees.
Over in Coffey Park, Leticia Guzman says she doesn’t need to hear about new fires to get overwhelmed by a sense of foreboding and a fear that the past could revisit her family one more time.
“It was like a nightmare, but it wasn’t a nightmare. It was real,” she says. Some nights she has dreams where she is choking from the smoke, “and I wake up, and there is nothing.”