‘Line of sorrow’ where it ended
Some residents grabbed bowls, garden hoses to stop the blaze
On one side, the world is gray, dark and devastated, an entire subdivision reduced to knee-high ash. On the other, life goes on in bright Technicolor, with a gardener trimming a flowering hedge, automatic sprinklers showering green grass.
Residents of Santa Rosa’s ravaged Coffey Park subdivision have started calling this divider the line of sorrow, the sharp demarcation where the wind shifted, luck held and firefighters and small bands of residents armed with garden hoses and plastic bowls could finally take a stand against the Tubbs Fire on Oct. 9.
Driven by vicious winds that sometimes swirled into tornadoes, the fire that burned Coffey Park and another 200 square miles ignited houses one after the other. By dawn, hundreds of them in the subdivision were incinerated. There was little anybody could do at first, emergency crews say — but somewhere between 5 and 6 a.m., they were able to finally stop the fire’s advance.
They carved the line in a curvy path around the subdivision, roughly ending on the west at the SMART train tracks. And on Friday, as some residents were finally allowed back in to view the damage, there was only sorrow — all they could see was soggy ash for blocks before intact houses marked the end of the fire zone.
But that sorrow would have been multiplied many times over if not for the army of firefighters — and some residents — on that fateful morning. The wind shifted around dawn, dying down and blowing more to the east than the west, and that made a huge difference. But so did that army.
The southern edge of that path, around Sansone Drive, is where one strike team held the line.
It was a unit made up of five engines, four from San Francisco’s Fire Department and one from Berkeley’s. A harrowing video one Berkeley firefighter shot of their battle has been viewed roughly 200,000 times.
The images can’t convey the savagery they faced, say members of the strike team.
“None of us had seen anything like that before,” said San Francisco fire Lt. Robert Coleman, 53. “It was crazy looking. We thought maybe we’d just have a wildfire urban-interface scene, where we’d triage the houses and make them safe — but we got there around 6 a.m., and that part of the city was just totally on fire.”
Berkeley firefighter-paramedic Mike Shuken, who shot the YouTube video, said just finding the right place to fight was hard.
“We kept thinking, which way to go? Right or left? You couldn’t tell — everything was so burned,” said Shuken, 47. “We drove 10 or 15 minutes before we found the front line, where you start seeing houses that aren’t burned down.”
That front line wound up being around Towhee Drive. One hydrant didn’t have enough pressure, Shuken said, so they found another. First they had to chain-saw trees and knock out traffic signs to position the engine correctly. Once they did that, they hooked five hoses onto it and started spraying down a flaming house. They also hit the unburned house next to it to keep it from lighting up.
“The San Francisco guys came over, and pretty soon we had 15 people fighting that fire,” Shuken said. “That made it possible to knock the flames down enough to stop it. I figure we saved about 30 houses.”
Earlier in the night, a few blocks to the northwest — on the west side of the train tracks, right at the edge of Coffey Park — apartment building manager David Thibeault was running from door to door, telling everyone to get out. The flames hadn’t marched to his neighborhood, but the smoke was bad. Embers lit up the weeds around his fence line.
A handful of residents and neighbors gathered at the apartment building to stare at the flaming subdivision across the tracks. And then they started grabbing fire extinguishers from the walls in the carport to douse the spot fires popping up along the property.
“We were kind of using whatever we could,” said Joe Caswell, 48, who lives a block to the west. “We thought if we could stop the fire, it would save us and everyone behind us.”
Someone brought shovels, and another neighbor went across Waltzer Road and gathered a half-dozen garden hoses, screwing them together to reach a house that had an accessible water tap. One resident brought out a plastic salad bowl filled with water to douse spot fires on fence posts.
“I told them, ‘You can’t put out a grass fire with fire extinguishers. You’ve got to go,’ ” Thibeault said. “They stayed.”
Shuken and state fire officials say that in fact, they should have gone. “When firefighters tell you to evacuate, you really should evacuate,” Shuken said. “It’s safer for everyone.”
But that’s a hard argument to absorb when everything you own is in danger. At least that’s what Thibeault and others who were there that morning say.
Several blocks to the southwest of where Shuken’s team would dig in its heels, retired firefighters Charlie and Jerry Wright could smell the smoke and see the orange glow. The 73-year-old twin brothers live two houses from each other in the Orchard retirement community alongside the SMART tracks.
“We knew something was going on,” Jerry Wright said.
Embers started to drift onto the dry grass near their homes. And then a house around the corner lit up. The Wrights ran to the clubhouse and grabbed the large hoses stashed in case of emergency.
“We knew how to use them,” Jerry Wright said. “You never forget.”
They didn’t know that just up the road, much of Coffey Park was already destroyed. They just knew that city firefighters were somewhere else and at least for the moment, they were on their own. As their neighbors evacuated the homes across from the Orchard, the Wright brothers weren’t going anywhere. They fought.
Across the railroad tracks and less than a mile north, Wayne Sims was dousing his roof, the siding of his house, the fence and the front yard. His house was on the last row in Coffey Park, backing on Barnes Road. His wife had fled with the cat.
The inferno was so hot it burned cars to the ground, and it was headed his way. Firefighters were evacuating residents. “I told them I’m not leaving,” Sims said. The firefighters left him a hose, which offered more water pressure than the garden hose he had. He trained it on his next-doorneighbor’s house, which had burst into flames.
Fortunately for Sims and the other stay-behinds, more firefighters from agencies across the region started to pour into the community. And sometime between 5 and 6 a.m., the wind shifted, pushing the fire away from the apartment building, the houses in the Orchard and Sims’ Coffey Park home.
But there was no time to celebrate. Coleman and Shuken’s strike team headed out to other fires before noon, when they were satisfied they’d stopped the advance at their spot.
“This was a completely history-making fire, an entirely different animal,” Coleman said. “I’ll never see another one like this again.”
“None of us had seen anything like that before. It was crazy looking.” San Francisco fire Lt. Robert Coleman