Residents: ‘When is this going to stop?’: Blackouts, fires keep Sonoma County on edge
SANTA ROSA >> Chris Godley, Sonoma County’s director of emergency management, was talking Wednesday afternoon about how PG&E’s intentional blackouts might make it even more difficult to get people to safety during a wildfire.
He was concerned that alerts might not go out to residents, he said, or that people trying to evacuate would be navigating intersections without traffic signals. Then, suddenly he asked, “Do you smell smoke?”
Godley hurried back to the county’s Emergency Operations Center to see if something was burning, then reported that it had been a false alarm.
Hours later the Kincade Fire broke out and quickly spread into the county’s northern mountains.
In a region that already knows too well the destruction that late fall can bring, this was a week that tested the nerves of Sonoma County with an escalating series of fire season emergencies that are far from over. There was the blackout, the bone-dry wind, the fast-growing fire, the hazardous smoke and the new threat, tak
ing shape even before the gusts had died down, of a fresh round of dangerous fire weather this weekend.
In some ways, life went on — butcher shops in Healdsburg served up charcuterie as helicopters doused burning hillsides a few miles away, crowds watched the World Series at a Santa Rosa brewery that still had power while parts of the city sat in the dark.
But residents went from scouring weather forecasts and PG&E’s website Tuesday to find out if they would have power, to tracking the Kincade Fire’s progress Wednesday night, to monitoring air quality sites on Thursday, only to repeat the process Friday.
Each step felt familiar, and each brought back bad memories and ramped up people’s anxiety.
At the Sunrise Villa assisted living facility in Santa Rosa, which frantically evacuated its residents as the Tubbs Fire burned nearby two years ago, executive director Jeff Cave said PG&E’s Public Safety Power Shutoff would be more than just a logistical challenge.
“Going through the fire and the smoke and all that, it triggers you when the lights go off,” said Cave, who lost his home in 2017. “It’s just like — everything’s quiet.”
For some, the barrage of threats that is becoming routine as California faces a hotter, drier and more dangerous future became a tipping point.
Watching the fire Wednesday night from her home on a ranch east of Healdsburg, Jessica Herland remembered thinking, “I want to leave.”
She didn’t just mean evacuate. Herland also fled the ranch during the 2017 fires, which destroyed the home where she grew up in Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighborhood.
“I don’t want to do this again,” Herland said.
Madonna Tavares fled her Geyserville home with her husband, Victor, in the dark on Thursday morning after a firefighter pounded on their door at 5:30 a.m. They scrambled around, grabbing their dogs and a few possessions, along with clothes and pictures they had packed in the car the night before.
They learned later from a neighbor who stayed behind that their house wasn’t damaged, Tavares said Friday. But despite the efforts of firefighters racing to get the Kincade Fire under control, the fire is all but certain to still be burning in the mountains not far from the Tavareses’ home when the winds pick up again tonight.
“We’re going to be in the danger zone again,” she said. “We just have to wait and see.”
If PG&E shuts off power to vast swaths of Sonoma County today, as it’s expected to do, that will be the third such blackout in less than three weeks. Plenty of people have already gotten used to making due in the dark.
At Sunrise Villa, the blackout earlier this month went on for 2 ½ days. The one that started Wednesday only lasted about 24 hours,
Cave said. And by Friday, concerns had shifted to the smoke blowing south from the Kincade Fire and the next blackout.
“We can’t just close and lock the doors and say, ‘We’ll be back when the power’s on,’ ” Cave said.
The ranch Herland manages is a boarding facility for horses, so when the fire broke out Wednesday night and moved toward the ranch, she went to work packing up 39 horses in the dark and ferrying them to an evacuation center at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa. Her daughter put out a call on social media for friends to bring trailers for the horses, and friends kept an eye on the fire as it burned.
“I feel like we’re getting good at it,” Herland said, having done the same thing as trees caught fire at the property’s edge in 2017.
Herland isn’t alone in questioning her future in Sonoma County. Her parents rebuilt the Coffey Park home but are now talking about moving out of the area. So are some of her friends.
“When is this going to stop?” she said.
Others in Sonoma County seemed to have accepted the idea that this chaos — the evacuations, the blanket of smoke in the air for days, the processions of fire crews along city streets — is going to be a new way of life.
Dick Dilworth, 76, didn’t evacuate from his 86-acre property in the Alexander Valley as the fire blazed through a small creek canyon nearby. The buildings on his property were not damaged, but fire crews could not stop the fire from igniting the palm trees on his neighbor’s property, which spread to the neighbor’s house and burned it to the ground.
Dilworth, who spent 58 years with the Geyserville Fire Department, said the fires aren’t so concerning that he would leave, even as smoke rises over the ridge and small hot spots smoke around his property,
“It’s just a way of life for me, I guess,” he said.