Recap: Point Fire in Healdsburg’s Dry Creek Valley

It’s been almost two weeks since the Point Fire broke out near Lake Sonoma on Father’s Day. It was by far our biggest local wildfire since the Walbridge Fire in the same area nearly four years ago.

On June 16 and 17, forebodingly early in fire season, the Point Fire burned through 1,200 acres of “wildland-urban interface” in the Dry Creek Valley and its foothills outside Healdsburg — aka, countryside with homes and farms and wineries tucked into trees along winding roads, some of the most difficult kinds of properties to defend.

But thanks to strong, smart firefighting and some luck with the wind, the Point Fire ended up being much smaller and less destructive than Walbridge. Fire crews and bold West Dry Creek Road residents who hung back to fight the flames managed to keep the fire from consuming most properties in its path. As one elderly resident, Ed Perotti, told the Press Democrat: “This is my home. My wife died here, and I figured if it’s my time to go, I’ll be here with her.”

All of the world-famous Dry Creek Valley wineries threatened by the Point Fire survived, although a rep for the Winegrowers of Dry Creek Valley association told me that some grapevines did burn at Bella Vineyards & Wine Caves.

“Cal Fire was so impressive,” Sherie LeBlanc from Raymond Burr Vineyards said in an interview with the PD. “They came here with an army. They came here with crew after crew. They stayed the night. We appreciate everything they’ve done.”

Also: The general consensus in the winemaking community seems to be that this fire came early enough in the grape-growing season that smoke taint won’t be a factor. Now, winery owners are just worried they won’t see as many visitors because of the fire. (They’re all back open now, so go support your local vintners!)

Of course, none of this is any consolation for those whose homes didn’t make it. Three houses and seven other structures burned down entirely, according to Cal Fire’s incident map, and four other houses and structures were damaged.

There was also one freak incident in which a home one-and-a-half miles outside of the evacuation zone, closer to town along Dry Creek Road, burned down in the wee hours Monday morning. The folks who live there, Dani and Mike Price, run the online wine shop Maison du Prix and just launched a wine label called Fat Dragon. According to the Press Democrat, they had (kind of miraculously) decided to stay in their guesthouse that night, because it has air conditioning and the smoke was bothering them — so no one was hurt. But they basically woke up to their house burning down.

While the cause of the Price couple’s house fire is still under investigation, the running assumption is that a wayward ember blew all the way over from the Point Fire that night. “We were in complete and utter shock,” Dani says. “We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. It was surreal.” This also speaks to the somewhat arbitrary nature of pre-drawn evacuation zones, which don’t necessarily conform to the whims of a given wildfire.

During the Point Fire, three (equally bold) photojournalists from the Press Democrat entered the active Fire burn zone to document what was burning and what wasn’t. They got some pretty insane footage. One of them, Beth Schlanker, “ended up tracking a Cal Fire crew to a house on Brown Road just south of Lake Sonoma, parking her Honda Civic and shooting about 45 minutes’ worth of photos and video that resemble something out of the sixth circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno,” an editor for the paper wrote in an email newsletter. “She embedded herself with the four firefighters as things got worse by the minute.”

You can watch the video she took here. In Beth’s words: “The intensity of the wind was really surprising — how quickly it came up. But the firefighters were so calm and professional. That’s what kept me kind of grounded. It was just like another day at the office for them.”

A couple of days later, another Press Democrat photog documented a garage full of classic cars that burned at 8203 West Dry Creek Rd.

Now that Cal Fire crews are done with their “mop-up” operation to make the area inhabitable again, they’re in full investigation mode. Officials have reportedly ruled out the 300-acre prescribed burn near Lake Sonoma a couple of days prior as the potential cause of the Point Fire. This bodes well for local fire agencies’ ongoing plans for more controlled burns during wildfire season, to keep wiping out potential fire fuels and creating burn breaks. When I spoke with Marshall Turbeville — head of the Northern Sonoma County Fire Protection District — a few days into the Point Fire, he said it would be a definite “setback” if the prescribed burn had indeed caused this one.

On that note: Healdsburg photographer Tenaya Fleckenstein posted some amazing pics on Facebook recently of that same prescribed burn on June 14 at Lake Sonoma. She said she listened to a local tribal leader describe how these fires are used to “clean the land,” and how excited he was that “after this burn the natural growing fruits and nuts that should reemerge to the land.” (I’ve noticed similar stuff happening where my family lives in the scar of the Walbridge Fire.)

Here are some more powerful pics of the Point Fire aftermath from Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, who went up in a helicopter to check out “watershed threats and damage” and posted some aerial footage from her trip. “If this fire does not demonstrate the urgent need for ridgetop fuel breaks *everywhere* in our rural areas, I don’t know how better to make the argument,” she writes.

Lynda also raved about the high-tech helicopters and cameras used in this fight:: “We watched in real time as a CAL FIRE helicopter loaded water and completely extinguished a smoldering, smoking hot spot within the fire perimeter. Henry-1’s infrared camera was able to both identify the hot spot and provide confirmation it was extinguished.”

Along with a few other giant wildfires across California this month, the Point Fire was part of an explosive early start to the season. More acres have already burned within our local Cal Fire division — covering Sonoma, Napa, Lake, Colusa, Solano and Yolo counties — than in the previous three summers combined.

So, with a long, hot and dry Summer 2024 ahead of us — and vegetation extra thick from the especially wet winter behind us — fire officials are urging us all to raze any grass surrounding our homes “before it becomes a matchstick.” It’s all about creating defensible space right now. “The grass this year is just burning really well,” Chief Marshall Turbeville told me during the Point Fire. And it wasn’t even “as dry as it’s going to be in July and August.” Let’s get on that.