Students, first responders, town officials and locals gathered below an archway in downtown Windsor Thursday, Oct. 28 to see the mural commemorating firefighters and others who defended the town from the 2019 Kincade Fire.
The panels of hills, hoses, flames and smoke, firefighters and the passage of cows gazed down at the crowd by the corner of Windsor Road and McClelland Drive, while town officials, firefighters, Police Chief Mike Raasch and others addressed attendees.
Bay Art Academy students painted the scenes of the disaster and recovery two years ago during the extended school closures due to the fire’s impacts, academy instructor Yang Chen said. They titled the mural “Together Above All.”
According to parent Forest Huang, the students then raised the money to make smaller canvas copies of the mural to send to as many fire teams they could track down an address for that came to help beat back Kincade.
Flanking the mural are two long columns listing dozens upon dozens of other fire departments and emergency agencies from across California and nearby states that provided mutual aid in Windsor’s time of need. The installation includes two large QR codes that lead to a timeline of the Kincade Fire and a news article on the students painting the mural in 2019.
Cyndi Foreman, division chief and fire marshal of the Sonoma County Fire District, said firefighters “don’t take a lot of praise well in this job,” and it can be awkward for them and other first responders like law enforcement to receive the appreciation, but the mural was deeply touching and poignant for them.
“We have this hanging in our fire station and every time I walk by it, it still catches my attention,” she said. Even though firefighters receive all sorts of thanks in hard times, like cards, letters and paintings, the mural sticks with them “because it really captures not only the tragedy, but also the recovery and what comes from the other side of it.”
Emma Chen is a senior at Maria Carillo and a Bay Art Academy student who worked on the mural, unrelated to Yang Chen. Friends of hers lost their homes in the Tubbs Fire and she nearly lost her own last year in the Glass Fire, she said.
Chen shared that while her family didn’t lose much, they were scared and knowing firefighters was reassuring. “Especially these past few years, it’s nice knowing that we have a really great fire department that’s always there to step up and help us out,” Chen said.
She especially liked the bottom of the mural where her peers painted the small human interactions that held such power.
Councilmember Debora Fudge served as mayor during the 2017 Tubbs Fire that caused huge destruction in Santa Rosa and as vice mayor during the Kincade Fire.
“We’ve had a really hard time since the fire with COVID and we’ve sort of torn apart a little bit,” she said. “But this week, everybody’s been remembering where we were two years ago, where we were the day we evacuated, how we evacuated, where our animals went, where we went. All friends and family that were concerned about us and it’s really important to tell the stories and remember and remain strong as a community.”
The first night Fudge and former mayor Dominic Foppoli were in an emergency operations center, Sonoma County Fire Deputy Chief Matt Gustafson “turned to us and said the way the winds are shifting right now, we could lose Windsor tonight, in like three or four hours,” Fudge recalled.
“And we said, ‘You’re kidding. The whole town?’ and he said, ‘The whole town,’” she added.
Fudge said seeing the firefighters from other cities and states coming to the rescue was a glint of hope.
“If you could have seen them at 2 in the morning — I think it was the second night, they were lined up from Hembree all the way up to Vinecrest from every department I could think of. Hollywood, Orange County, El Dorado, the fire trucks were just solid. And then I knew we had a chance because we had so much help,” Fudge said.
