When we talk about the cataclysmic wildfires that ravaged our region in October 2017, we talk about our personal experiences of compassion, fear, anxiety, helplessness or confusion, the cause of the fire, the response to the fire, the resilience of our community and of the rebuilding process.
Many Sonoma and Napa county residents experienced likely the worst natural disaster of a lifetime with the October fires. While we Californians are used to nearby wildfires, this one was different. It ravaged neighborhoods, displaced thousands, and many of us felt we lost an entire month of our lives. The fire’s size, intensity and destruction were immense. More than 6,000 structures lost, more than 245,000 acres burned, 43 members of our community dead.
Much of the post-fire conversation has centered around financial relief for victims, liability, insurance payouts and rebuilding. It is the last part, the rebuilding, that Sierra Club leaders see as an opportunity to shift to more fire-resilient urban planning.
“We’ve lost 5 percent of our housing stock, and rents are going through the roof,” said Steve Birdlebough, Redwood Chapter’s transportation chair and a Santa Rosa resident. “People who are not actually burned out of their homes are finding themselves either having to pay more rent than they can afford or move elsewhere.”
Santa Rosa suffered the lion’s share of the housing destruction by the Tubbs Fire, which raged westward from Tubbs Lane in Calistoga along the Mark West area, into Fountaingrove, Hidden Valley, Larkfield-Wikiup and jumped Highway 101 to engulf the Coffey Park neighborhood. Many homes were also destroyed by the Nuns fire in Sonoma Valley and by the Atlas Fire in Napa. But the severity lies in northern Santa Rosa, where city and county leaders are grappling with how to preserve owners’ rights to rebuild and re-imagining a city that can house people of all income levels, not just the wealthy.
Sonoma Group leaders are also holding conversations on how to advise public leaders and Sierra Club members on the rebuilding process.
“Experience tells us that many families who lose their homes to fire do not rebuild, but sell their lots to developers instead,” said Birdlebough. “Since we are even more deficient in housing than we were before the fires, there is a great deal of pressure to build housing in general. This can include proposals to rebuild more densely in burned areas, putting in multiple houses where there had been one, or even building on previously undeveloped lots within the burned area.”
The 1964 Hanley Fire burned almost an identical path as our October fires, but back then, the hills were far less populated. Sonoma County’s housing growth into the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) and its development of Fountaingrove in the 1990s has put many residents directly in the path of wildfires.
Sierra Club will urge public leaders not to compound the mistakes of the past by building even more densely within the footprint of the Tubbs and Hanley fires, but instead to continue the recent trend in Santa Rosa and other cities of building new housing near the city center and near public transportation.
“While honoring the rights of homeowners to rebuild if they want to, we can choose a safer and more resilient future for our community,” said Birdlebough.