This time it was not a hurricane in Florida or Texas; it was not a tsunami in Japan or an earthquake in Mexico. This time it turned out to be the “next time” we all prayed would never happen. This time it was our time; this Red Flag Alert was meant for us.
The series of wildfires was led by the Tubbs Fire that raged over the ridge from Calistoga into north Santa Rosa and took a dozen or more lives and destroyed 1,500 homes and landmark businesses. This was much more than a wake up call about emergency preparedness. This was the real thing and it took real lives and caused damages from which it will take years to recover.
It is too soon to measure all of the Columbus Day wildfire damages and losses. The fires will burn for weeks and the choking smoke will linger nearly as long.
But it is not too soon to take inventory of the lessons learned and the lessons we might have forgotten from the time before.
The Tubbs fire path eerily followed a near-identical path of the 1964 Hanley Fire that also started near Calistoga and was pushed westward by strong early autumn winds. The 53 years between the two fire incidents made for big differences.
First, thousands of more homes and people now live in the urban-wildland interface of the forested Mayacama ridge between Napa and Sonoma counties. Only a few remote homes and estates existed in 1964 above the eastern edge of Santa Rosa where this week a few hundred multi-million dollar homes were destroyed in Fountaingrove. When the Fountaingrove ridge neighborhoods are rebuilt, will any new lessons be applied to their footprint or construction methods?
Second, imagine fighting a fire as big as the Hanley or Tubbs fires without modern communications or a well-funded aerial assault. There was no chemical fire retardant in 1964, only water, and the fire brigades and volunteers communicated with a small number of army surplus radios, not the full network of cellular phones available today.
Speaking of communication, we all learned this week of the indispensable value of AM radio and the vulnerability of Wi-Fi. When our Comcast connections failed and the internet “went down,” only the local AM radio station KSRO and its local news staff remained as a source of current and accurate information.
Rural residents in the Tubbs Fire learned the good and bad of having cleared a defensible space around their properties. Eyewitnesses to the aftermath reported many cases where homes with cleared brush and tree limbs remained standing in areas where nearby homes without cleared boundaries did not.
At the evacuation centers and during important emergency announcements we learned how important bilingual skills can be. Whether in English or Spanish, the same warnings needed to be delivered to the entire population of Sonoma County.
The Tubbs Fire threatened two of the county’s largest hospitals and both Kaiser and Sutter in Santa Rosa had to evacuate their patients. Neither hospital suffered fire damage, but the lesson must be reinforced that all of the county’s big and small hospitals and community health care clinics should immediately update their emergency response networks. The next “next time” could be a major earthquake and the medical disruptions could be much worse and much more widespread.
The wildfires attacked in the middle of the night and gained an upper hand against local fire fighting teams. Once deployed in daylight our first responders were quick to establish a perimeter and beat down the flames that were threatening even more property and personal losses.
The lesson to be learned here is how grateful we are in our continuing support for our local fire professionals and volunteers. But there is also a lesson that more volunteers will be needed for the “next time.” There can never be enough.
