A Fire-Devastated Northern California Takes Care of Its Own

This article originally appeared on this site.

“Heartwarming hell” is how the restaurateur Patty Ginochio summed up the situation in the town of Bodega Bay, on the northwest edge of Sonoma County, when I met her there on Sunday, October 12th. A sturdy woman radiating competence, she was officiating at the Grange, a ramshackle building on Highway 1 that serves as a community center in ordinary times and had become an evacuation dormitory, and then a supply depot, in the wake of the deadly fires raging through the region. The building was full of tables and shelves piled high with donated goods, pillows and sleeping bags, toilet paper and warm gloves, all meticulously organized and labelled in both English and Spanish. A woman volunteer—white-haired, wisecracking—stood behind the Grange kitchen’s serving counter and offered up sandwiches and snacks. A young Latina girl with a delicate band of artificial flowers over her smoothed-back hair wandered the aisles.

The restaurateur Patty Ginochio has been helping out at the Grange, along Highway 1, which became an evacuation dormitory and then a supply depot.

Photograph by Alex Fradkin

No one expected Bodega Bay, a small, unincorporated town far from the fires, to become a major evacuation destination, yet people started pouring in not long after the blazes started, on October 5th. Maybe the presence of water, of the Pacific Ocean, drew them, someone in Bodega remarked to me. The first to arrive were families who had fled the fires that had raged through Santa Rosa and other regions; some, another volunteer told me, came with nothing in hand and children still in the pajamas they’d worn to bed. Later came people who were evacuated from areas that hadn’t burned. The first evening, Ginochio found people freezing in the middle of the night and brought them to her restaurant, where she lit the fireplace. When I met her, she talked about the kindness, about the people already working together in teams, less than a week into the crisis, to provide what was needed.

Out at the beach that day at coastal Doran County Park, a few miles away, another Bodega resident described “an overabundance of love” as she strove to manage the flow of would-be helpers and donations that would need sorting and distribution. She also talked about the people she’d tried to dissuade from attempting to help, or interview, the undocumented immigrants who’d fled to the area. During my visit, a woman reporting at the Grange from Turkish TV had come looking for undocumented immigrants and been told why none would be willing to go on camera. The fire’s impact on undocumented people—who are ineligible for most government disaster aid and feared arrest and deportation if their immigration status was checked—had become a hot topic in the media, and the undocumented families who flooded the beaches of Bodega Bay in the first days of the fires retreated from the attention. They began instead to camp by roadsides, Ginochio told me, where one spark from a car could set the dry brush and grass on fire, and organizers began forming networks to provide them with supplies, gift cards, and other donated resources. A few days earlier, ICE had announced that it was suspending immigration enforcement in the areas affected by the fires, and Jared Huffman, the congressman for the northern California Coast, including western Sonoma County, had issued a statement reassuring people that ICE was placing “public safety first.”

My friend Mary Diaz, a thirty-five-year-old artist and activist, lives in the countryside west of Santa Rosa. The second day of the fire, she went out to Bodega Bay and spent a couple of nights as a sort of campsite monitor for the scores of families who were staying in the campgrounds or camping on the beach. The rangers on site were caught between the urgent needs of individuals and the rules and regulations of public land, and volunteers and evacuees worried about whether they’d be allowed to stay. In at least one case, I was told, vacationers with a campground reservation arrived and were indignant to find their spot full of evacuees.

A helicopter drops fire retardants in the Sugerloaf Ridge State Park area along Highway 12, in Sonoma County.

Photograph by Alex Fradkin

One night, Diaz helped distribute a truckload of blankets to families, many of whom were reluctant to accept help because they were convinced that there must be people in more urgent need. Later, the situations she encountered became more intense. “There were people three four five days out from their medications,” she recalled; she was asked to take care of a woman having an anxiety attack. It made her contemplate “how shaky everything gets after the immediate escape,” she said. “Anything is coming through the door and we don’t really know what is coming in and we are not trained.” But the women staffing Bodega Bay’s Grange and campsites stuck with it and dealt with what arose, and Mary moved on to start long-term organizing to help undocumented families elsewhere in the county.

A flamingo lawn statuary stands in front of a home devastated by fire in Coffey Park, Santa Rosa, Sonoma County.

Photograph by Alex Fradkin

A lot of the coverage of the California fires has referred to Napa and Sonoma counties as wine country, a term that summons up a vision of some Tuscan terrain of rolling vineyards and gracious living. But Sonoma County’s population is a patchwork of Latinos and white people, many of modest means and countercultural persuasions, and though grapes dominate the area’s agriculture there are also apple orchards, redwood forests, grasslands, and small farms. Evacuating large farm animals became a crisis in the fire’s first days, and the Sonoma and Solano county fairgrounds became horse and livestock refuges. Sonoma County is also home to thousands of marijuana farms, and during the fires millions of dollars of harvest-ready marijuana reportedly went up in flames. Last week, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat ran a story about a pickup truck piled high with fresh, apparently stolen marijuana that plowed into two firefighters’ vehicles.

Santa Rosa, where several neighborhoods were devastated by the fires, is Sonoma’s county seat and a place I always thought of as placid, so much so that even its famous figures, the Peanuts cartoonist Charles Shulz (whose widow’s house burned down) and the plant breeder Luther Burbank, the father of the shasta daisy, were avatars of the mild and quotidian. Last Sunday, I visited the Coffey Park neighborhood, just west of Highway 101, where lawn ornaments and chimneys still stood in a landscape almost devoid of color. Vintage cars had burned so thoroughly that their wheels were resting on rims and the softer metals had melted and then solidified again in silvery streams. The relics of family lives were visible in the toolboxes and flowerpots, the stepping stones and mailboxes that survived the blaze. In some places the whirling vortex of the firestorm had become so powerful that it flipped cars, and they lay on their roofs like dead beetles.

In Bodega Bay, I’d met one Coffey Park inhabitant, a house painter, who’d had to flee for his life. A sturdy blond in cargo shorts, he showed me the video he shot on his phone as he left. It showed fires blazing red and orange in all directions for block after block in the blackness of his subdivision, where the power had gone out. He had gotten FEMA vouchers for a hotel he was headed to, and he told me that though his own apartment hadn’t burned much of the complex had, and he expected it all to be torn down. “The fire won’t get me—the tractor will,” he said.

In some places the whirling vortex of the firestorm had become so powerful that it flipped cars, and they lay on their roofs like dead beetles.

Photograph by Alex Fradkin

Even before the fires, the Bay Area was in the midst of a housing crisis, thanks to Silicon Valley’s annexation of more and more real estate for its employees in the region. Now Santa Rosa, which had a vacancy rate in the range of only one per cent, has just lost five per cent of its housing to fire; a lot of the people who lost their homes, in other words, are going to have trouble finding new places to live, and many are going to have to leave the region. On my way out of Santa Rosa I saw people gathered among tents beneath an overpass and thought at first that they were evacuees, until I realized that they had been rendered homeless by older, less dramatic crises.

Rebuilding the region’s destroyed homes, too, will be a challenge. The Trump Administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants has already reduced the labor pool. The disaster-preparedness expert Kathleen Tierney told me that many of the country’s migratory construction workers are now in Houston, rebuilding after the immense devastation of Hurricane Harvey. As climate change causes more and more extreme weather, she added, as California’s fire season grows longer, and the fires more frequent and ferocious, it’s likely to become increasingly difficult to find the workforce to rebuild after natural disasters. “We are in the unsustainable future,” Tierney said. “Now that the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico have heated up so much, there are going to be more of these big storms and there are going to be more fires.”

Firefighters heading into Sugerloaf State Park, in Sonoma County.

Photograph by Alex Fradkin

People often expect disasters to be populated by distinct groups of victims and rescuers, but in reality they’re often the same people. Tierney told me that the most important rescuers are often “the ones who are there if and when the so-called first responders show up”—the neighbors there to help one another—and that they often evolve into groups that stick together for months and years after the most urgent phase of a disaster has passed. Last Saturday, I visited an official evacuation center, the Marin County Fair and Exposition Center, twenty miles south of Sonoma County on Highway 101. A huge electronic sign along the roadside stated the center’s official position: “NO DONATIONS.” Nearer the evacuation center, though, a handmade cardboard sign with bright duct tape lettering said “DONATIONS,” and a small ad-hoc group had formed to receive and distribute the supplies that arrived from a steady flow of cars and was being packed into other cars and trucks heading north.

If there’s a silver lining to the devastation caused by these fires, it’s that the rebuilding effort in California will provide an opportunity for citizens to decide together what they want their revamped towns and cities to be. There will be the chance to create new homes that are adapted to the challenges of climate change, with solar systems and energy-efficient design as well as fire-resistant materials. Some of the improvised organizations that have formed in places like Bodega Bay will likely formalize their membership and mission in the coming days and weeks, as Occupy Sandy did, in New York City, after the 2012 hurricane, or Common Ground did in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And, as in post-Katrina New Orleans, Sonoma and Napa may experience a long-term renaissance of civic engagement. Many will never return to the lives they had before the fires, but will find new capacities in themselves and new possibilities and roles in their communities.

An oak tree is shrouded in smoke from fires in Sonoma County’s Sugerloaf Ridge State Park.

Photograph by Alex Fradkin

Of course, this is not to discount the work of professionals. Emergency workers will have plenty to do in the region for years to come. When the rains finally arrived, this past Thursday, they brought relief but also a new anxiety about the toxic runoff that will come from the burned-out buildings and threaten the waterways. If the Environmental Protection Agency has not been completely dismantled by cleanup time, it will take charge of scraping away the remains of scorched homes at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. But ordinary citizens will continue to play a crucial role, as they have since the fire’s initial blaze. On that first night, in her hilltop house in Santa Rosa, my brother’s mother-in-law, Shirley White, was awoken by the big winds that are believed to have started the flames. As she walked by the kitchen just after midnight, she told me, she saw “a big frightening light outside my window.” A neighbor’s huge tree had blown down and knocked down power lines twenty feet from her house. The flames were creeping up an oak tree, and in the heavily wooded neighborhood, any tree fire was bound to spread. Shirley ran outside to grab her garden hose, and by the time the firefighters arrived she had the blaze under control. “They did finally squirt it and get it more subdued,” she said, and then they took off. “They had much bigger fires to put out.” Sometimes the first responder is an octagenerian in a nightgown.

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