Name: ‘It’s like God has no sympathy’: Wine Country residents shaken by relentless onslaught of wildfires
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‘It’s like God has no sympathy’: Wine Country residents shaken by relentless onslaught of wildfires

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This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateResidents of the North Bay’s Wine Country have become tragically familiar with fast-moving wildfires that erupt in the dead of night amid intense autumn winds, forcing them to flee for their lives.The reactions have varied: Some people have moved away. Some have stayed and pushed fire-safety reforms. Most are simply trying to cope with a new seasonal fear and frustration.In fire-weary Sonoma County alone, the fire epidemic picked up in 2017, when parts of Santa Rosa were incinerated. Then, last October, California’s biggest wildfire of the year burned near Geyserville and threatened some already burned neighborhoods. And flames terrorized Santa Rosa once more late Sunday and early Monday.Some places that burned or were threatened by the Tubbs and Nuns fires three years ago were evacuated again overnight as several major wildfires, linked together as the Glass Fire, burned in Sonoma and Napa counties. The latest hellish scene came a little more than a month after the LNU Lightning Complex fires burned hundreds of thousands of acres around Lake Berryessa, near Vacaville and in the forests of western Sonoma County.“I’m sort of numb at the moment,” said Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin as she drove away at about 1 a.m. from her evacuated home in the Oakmont community on Santa Rosa’s eastern edge. All of Oakmont’s 4,500 residents were ordered to leave.Gorin has lived this nightmare before. Three years ago, the Nuns Fire consumed her Oakmont home, which is still being rebuilt while she lives in another home in the same neighborhood. While fleeing to a hotel in Novato, Gorin contemplated the horrendous prospect that the same fate could befall her once more.“It seems surreal to me that we would be facing this again in some of the same areas that lost so many homes so traumatically just three short years ago,” Gorin said. “It’s like God has no sympathy, no empathy for Sonoma County.”But Gorin blames the worsening fire threat not on a heavenly cause but rather a human one: climate change. Rising temperatures have dried California’s vegetation even more than normal and made a single spark far more likely to cause ruinous conflagrations like the ones unfolding now. More than 3.75 million acres have burned statewide since Jan. 1 — far more than any other year on record.The damage this year has been particularly acute in Wine Country and in Butte County, where the historically deadly and destructive Camp Fire decimated the town of Paradise in November 2018. Paradise was placed under an evacuation warning late Sunday as fast winds hastened the spread of the month-old North Complex fires.In Santa Rosa, the repetitive nature of the fires over three years is taking its toll on those who chose to rebuild or move to another neighborhood in the area, only to be evacuated again. The Skyhawk neighborhood, where homes burned on Monday, is where people who lost homes in the Tubbs Fire chose to relocate.Gorin was mindful of her 2017 experience as she evacuated again, making sure to pack photos saved from her home that burned three years ago. Also stuffed into a pillowcase was a copy of her daughter’s wedding album, which she had to replace after the first one was lost in the Nuns Fire.Similar scenes of people who survived past fires played out around east Santa Rosa.On the other side of Highway 12 from Oakmont, Will Abrams and his family fled their home in the Skyhawk neighborhood even before they were ordered to do so, having seen the flames get no more than a quarter mile away. They could see fire on both sides of the highway as they left.A few hours later, homes in Abrams’ neighborhood were burning. He didn’t know if his was one of them, but he was bracing for potential bad news later, given the intense winds and fast spread.“The conditions were just horrible,” Abrams said.He moved with his wife and two children to Skyhawk after their previous Santa Rosa home was destroyed in the Tubbs Fire. The disaster, which killed more than 20 people and leveled several thousand residences, reshaped many parts of his life.He began advocating for emergency warning improvements and eventually took a keen interest in the bankruptcy proceedings of Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which caused the Camp Fire and many others in Wine Country in recent years. State investigators blamed the Tubbs Fire on a resident’s privately maintained power system, but Abrams and other victims of the fire were still included in PG&amp;E’s multibillion-dollar bankruptcy settlement.Causes of the current fires are still under investigation.As he drove his family to the East Bay, where they planned to sleep in their car outside a family member’s home to stay safe from the coronavirus, Abrams couldn’t help but ruminate on some apparent emergency-response shortfalls. Evacuation warnings he received were vague or confusing. One alert included a link to more detailed information, but the website was down. He couldn’t tell which way out of town was the safest.Given that local authorities had bungled alerts so badly before, Abrams thought their capabilities would be better now.Latest updates on wildfires burning across Northern and Southern California“I’m a lot of pissed off,” he said.Phyllis Rogers rushed from her home in the Oakmont senior community on the very eastern end of Santa Rosa Sunday night. She moved there after her longtime home in Larkfield, an unincorporated community just north of Santa Rosa, was destroyed in the Tubbs Fire. Though she originally planned to rebuild in Larkfield, Rogers, 82, ultimately decided to make Oakmont her permanent home.Rogers wanted to drive west on Highway 12, deeper into Santa Rosa and eventually Highway 101 south, but traffic was backed up too much at 9:30 p.m. Sunday. With an apparent hourlong wait to get through a single stoplight, Rogers turned east instead and drove into Kenwood, where she took windy, narrow backroads to arrive at her son’s home in Rohnert Park at about 11 p.m.California WildfiresReflecting on her repeated evacuations Monday, Rogers recalled how she had seen a therapist for a while after enduring the trauma of the Tubbs Fire. Eventually she stopped but she had preserved the opportunity to return if she needed a “tune-up.”“Today I thought, maybe it’s time to get a tune-up,” Rogers said. “At this point, I’m in a state of shock and I’m tired. I haven’t had enough sleep, and I will wait at least one more day to take my pulse and decide.”This was the third time that Doris and Armin Tietze, residents of the Oakmont senior community, have evacuated from a wildfire in recent years. It reminded the German couple of surviving World War II.As they recover from the latest fires, Sonoma and Napa counties will continue to grapple with fallout from earlier fires, including last month’s LNU Complex. Rebuilding from the fires of 2017 and last year’s Kincade Fire remain incomplete.Sonoma County officials had been contemplating how to best allocate nearly $150 million from PG&amp;E’s bankruptcy settlement. The money is a product of a lawsuit the county filed over damage from the 2017 fires, and it’s supposed to aid the region’s disaster recovery and preparations for future emergencies.Gorin said the Board of Supervisors, which she chairs, plans to discuss the settlement next week.J.D. Morris is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: Twitter:Latest updates on wildfires burning across Northern and Southern California

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateResidents of the North Bay’s Wine Country have become tragically familiar with fast-moving wildfires that erupt in the dead of night amid intense autumn winds, forcing them to flee for their lives.The reactions have varied: Some people have moved away. Some have stayed and pushed fire-safety reforms. Most are simply trying to cope with a new seasonal fear and frustration.In fire-weary Sonoma County alone, the fire epidemic picked up in 2017, when parts of Santa Rosa were incinerated. Then, last October, California’s biggest...

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J.D. Morris

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‘It’s like God has no sympathy’: Wine Country residents shaken by relentless onslaught of wildfires

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