San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
TERROR, LOSS AND SURVIVAL
The wind pounded against the window panes and whistled under the front door. It screeched, hungry and alive. In her 61 years, Astrid Granger had never heard anything like it. She was elbow-deep in dirty dishes, scrubbing away encrusted pasta sauce, as the gale increased. Her grown children had driven to Santa Rosa, one from Sebastopol and the other from Oakland, for family dinner. Now, just before midnight on Oct. 8, she stood alone in the kitchen, listening to her Coffey Park home shudder in the wind. The wind carried the acrid scent of smoke. There was a fire burning somewhere, she thought. Not here — maybe in a far-off place like Lake County, which was 65 miles to the north and always seemed to be aflame. Her cream-colored home on Jenna Place with the petunias out front was safe. Still, the wind scared her in a way she didn’t yet understand. Its howling made the hair rise on her arms.
She called her brother in Germany. “Something terrible is happening,” Astrid told him. “It’s so windy it’s like there’s a tornado outside. I don’t think we will survive this night.”
A few blocks away, in a pretty tan house on Astaire Court, the lights sputtered for a second or two before the electricity cut out for good. Melissa Geissinger, 34, lit a row of candles. She hadn’t been able to fall asleep. The wind was blowing too hard.
It was just before 2 a.m., and the sky was a blizzard of ash and debris. Trash pickup was in a few hours, but the blue and green plastic bins were being blown all over the street, spilling recyclables and spoiled food. The clatter had awakened their neighbor, and he was standing in his underwear in the driveway, gaping at the hot storm.
Melissa watched from the living room window while her husband, Cole, 31, searched for news on his phone. She was seven months pregnant with their first child, and Squiggy — the baby’s in utero nickname — somersaulted in her belly, a reassuring distraction from the adrenaline rush.
Two of their friends, who lived 8 miles away on Shiloh Ridge, had already fled their home as flames approached and planned to sleep on an air mattress on the Geissingers’ floor. That was starting to look iffy. Melissa began packing a few things — a framed photo from a recent trip to Denver, her work computer, a signed Kenny Loggins poster from childhood — just in case they needed to leave, too.
There weren’t many reports online, but from what Cole could tell, a fire had sparked earlier that night in Calistoga, 16 miles to the northeast. They were safe, he thought. But 10 minutes later, an alert pinged on his phone. The flames had jumped Highway 101, just east of their neighborhood.
The wind was carrying the wildfire to Coffey Park.
That Sunday began normally — it was warm, quiet, even still. If it had ended that way, so much would have been different. But that wasn’t Coffey Park’s fate.
Astrid and her husband, Henry Granger, 78, had lived in the neighborhood for 30 years, ever since Henry retired from the military and moved here to work as a private pilot. The North Bay was pricey even then, so he left Astrid and their two young children behind in Goshen, a tiny town near Visalia in Tulare County, until he could buy a home.
He found the perfect one in Santa Rosa, in a new neighborhood being developed off Highway 101. The year before, construction crews had finished Mocha Lane, and he took out a mortgage to buy a home on the next street to be developed, Jenna Place. In July 1987, the Granger family was the first to move in on the street.
He and Astrid might have gotten strange looks elsewhere — she’s white, he’s black, they were raising mixed-race children — but in Coffey Park, they felt safe and accepted. In Alabama, where Henry was born and raised, people stared. It happened in Astrid’s native Germany, too. Not here. The neighborhood welcomed everyone.
Melissa and Cole Geissinger
Melissa Geissinger, on the phone with her mother as she drives away from the fast-moving Tubbs Fire
moved in just nine houses away in July 2015, imagining the family they would soon begin.
By then, Coffey Park had settled into suburban middle age. There were mature apple and apricot trees in the backyard. Melissa looked at a builtin bench off the deck and saw herself spending weekend afternoons there, reading.
It was nearly beyond their budget. They took out a mortgage and bought the house anyway.
The place felt like a mansion. It was double the size of their first home in Cloverdale, which was 900 square feet. They were so excited that they didn’t wait for the furniture to come — they ate and slept on the carpeted floor.
One of the first things they hung on the wall was a custom branding iron, wrought into the loops of their joined initials. At their wedding, they branded three wood planks — for each set of parents and themselves — as a symbol of unity. The iron was among their favorite possessions.
They created a business, designing websites within 24 hours for clients. They hosted friends to play nerdy board games like Settlers of Catan and Dead of Winter and watch nerdy movies like “Battlestar Galactica.” They celebrated two pregnancies and mourned the loss of one of them. They were a team. On what would be their last afternoon on Astaire Court, they shampooed the carpet and painted the nursery gray.
The day was blissfully ordinary. For the Geissingers and the Grangers, there hasn’t been one of those since.
Around 9:45 p.m. on Oct. 8, a fire ignited near Tubbs Lane in Napa County for reasons that remain unknown. The blaze would feast on the county’s brittle woodlands as Diablo winds blowing at speeds up to 80 mph picked up the sparks. Fire rained down for miles.
The Tubbs Fire reached the edge of Santa Rosa at the worst possible moment: in the early hours of Oct. 9 when nearly everyone was asleep.
But at 2 a.m., Astrid wasn’t among them. She couldn’t doze off. Even with the windows closed, smoke was filling the house. In the distance, electrical transformers were exploding, a cacophonous POP-POP-POP.
Henry went outside to retrieve the couple’s trash bins, and Astrid turned on the radio. Somehow, they still had electricity.
What she heard made no sense. The fire she thought might be in Lake County was within a mile of her home. The Kmart on Cleveland Avenue was burning down, the newscaster said. The Kmart? How could that be? She used to buy Henry’s clothes there.
The air was thick as milk. Astrid wheezed asthmatically. By now neighbors were zipping by in their cars, abandoning their homes.
“You need to evacuate to a safer area,” pinged a message on her phone from a parishioner at her church. That’s when Astrid knew it was real. In the distance, there was orange light in all the places orange wasn’t supposed to be. She changed out of her pajamas and stuffed a towel under the closet door. She didn’t want her clothes to smell like smoke when she returned.
“Let’s go park our car in the park,” Henry said. They lived less than a block from Coffey Park, where 20 years ago, before it had opened, their kids climbed under the fence to play. “We can wait out the fire there.”
“No, we can’t do that,” Astrid said. “What if the park burns, too?”
The main thoroughfare, Dogwood Drive, had become a tangle of traffic. The streetlights were out, and everyone was honking. Some people abandoned their vehicles and ran, their backpacks bouncing with every stride.
Astrid grabbed their expired passports by mistake instead of the new ones. She took two purses and her citizenship and birth certificates, forgetting Henry’s insulin and other medications. There was no time to think.
Henry got in his car, and Astrid got in hers. Their daughter, Audrey, who was spending the night, loaded her duffel into a third car. One by one, they merged into the exodus from Coffey Park.
Astrid feared that everything was already lost. But she locked the front door anyway.
“Mom, if you saw what I’m seeing. I’m sure the house is gone. The wind and the smoke ...”
Melissa white-knuckled the steering wheel. It was 2:16 a.m., and she couldn’t breathe. The car windows had been open all night, and ash filled the vehicle.
Apples and bananas rolled around in the backseat. Melissa wasn’t sure why she ran out the door with them instead of the new camping gear or more clothes than what she’d scooped from the dryer. In those too-few moments, all she could register was that she and Cole would eventually need to eat.
As she drove away, the wind blew tree branches, trash bins and God knows what else onto the street. Nothing looked familiar, and she missed a turn she had taken hundreds of times. Cole followed in his car, their cat, Ascii, loose in the backseat. Their friends who had hoped to sleep on the air mattress left as well.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Melissa told herself. “Think of the baby. Don’t cause an accident.”
They were driving to her parents’ home in Sebastopol, and she had never been so scared. They wouldn’t be coming back to the same place, she knew. It was all going to be gone. But she couldn’t process that, not yet.
“Missy, nothing is going to happen to your house,” her mom, Nancy Crain, said over the cell phone. “Stay on the line. Just stay on the line.” Melissa was sobbing. “Stay calm,” Crain said, trying to talk her daughter out of hell. “Keep your eye on the road. Watch out for other people.”
“I will, Mom,” Melissa said. “Mom, if you saw what I’m seeing. I’m sure the house is gone. The wind and the smoke ...”
“Just breathe,” Crain said. “Take your time.”
“But Mom ...” “Breathe.”
The murky-red sunlight of dawn revealed just how thoroughly the lives of the Grangers, Geissingers and 7,000 other residents of Coffey Park had been altered.
In all, the Tubbs Fire destroyed 4,651 homes and killed 24 people, including four in