Smoky Skies

On Thursday halfway through the morning our skies slowly darkened to an unhealthy gray when smoke and ash were pushed into our region. The sunlight turned orange and it was hard to see the sun at all.

But the worst was the smell. It triggered memories of last year's October fires and heightened anxiety.

The smoke and ash comes from the rapidly spreading wildfire in Butte Canyon, about 100 miles from where I live. While I'm writing this, the fire has become the most destructive wildfire in California (surpassing "our" fire, what a sad record) with a death toll of 42 and the town of Paradise almost completely wiped out. Hell on earth.

Schools were closed here on Friday because of the poor air quality and they are closed again today (yesterday was Veterans Day, so they were closed anyway) which gives me a day off. To be honest though, I'd rather go to work and be able to breathe fresh air. We take fresh air for granted - until we don't have it anymore. Since Thursday I haven't been able to open my windows and can only be outside wearing an N95 mask. I crave fresh air. The smoke is so thick that I can't see my beloved Mount Bennett from our bedroom window. The first two days my lungs hurt and I had difficulties breathing. The Geek still does.

But these are small "sacrifices" compared to what the people in Butte County (and burning areas in Southern California as well) are going through right now. On the one hand I revisit all the emotions and despair that we felt a year and a month ago, on the other hand it is beyond my imagination to picture a community that has been extinguished within less than a day. I have no idea where these people will go to, how they will deal with the loss of their homes AND community, how they will go through the next weeks and months. So many people have lost their lives in this inferno.

It is heart breaking. How often have I said these words...

There is the Northern California Fire Relief Fund that I donated to (feeling completely helpless) and I just pass this on. We had a similar fund last year for "our" fires and it did a lot of financial help. From the experience of my friends who lost everything in the Tubbs and Nuns fires I know that every little bit helps.

The smoke makes for glorious sunrises and sunsets. It always amazes me how close horror and beauty are. Photo on top was taken on Friday morning, one day after the fire started. Second photo was shortly before sunset on Friday night and the last one is the sunrise on Saturday morning.

The Fires One Year Later

Today it's been a year since we woke up to what would become the most destructive wildfire in the history of California.

Crown Hill in Fountaingrove

Some call it the first anniversary. The students at my high school, however, prefer the term "the fires one year later". One in nine of our students have lost their home during those fires.

One. In. Nine. Of 1600 students.

It still feels like yesterday that we woke up at 2:00 am to the worst week in our life. When I went to bed yesterday I had this huge knot in my stomach when I remembered a year ago. How we went to bed not knowing what would happen only a few hours later, and how much it would change our lives.

Of course our lives hadn't changed as much as for those people who lost their homes in the fires, far from it. They are still struggling with insurances, building permits, architects, rents that are way too high. Some are in the middle of rebuilding with some homes being ready to move in pretty soon. Others are still in the planning process. Others are frustrated about the many hurdles. And others got the money from the insurance and moved away.

The school year has been awful and each and every one of us - teachers and staff - were relieved when summer came and we could leave school behind for a couple months. This year we have a new administration and we have been off to a really good start. We will commemorate October 9th by having a "normal" day, but there will be a safe space in the library and we will have therapy dogs on campus. Last year after the fires these things helped a lot.

It's been a year, and still every conversation sooner or later turns to the fires. Talking about it is a way to go through it. Even though the nightmare is in our past, it's still there - in the burnt down neighborhoods we drive through daily, when we hear the sirens of police cars and fire trucks - especially the fire trucks. The smell of smoke, even only from a barbecue, brings up terrifying memories. I think we all have Nixle on our phone now and the emergency systems have been tested.

When I go to Davis and want to take the back roads I check weather conditions and Nixle alerts. I sure don't want to be trapped by a fire in the huge wooden area. Every time I drive along those roads I remember the drive we took there on the eve of the fires. I suspect it will always stay with me.

Crown Hill in the photo above is a neighborhood in Fountaingrove. We used to live right below it, and when we moved into our old house back in 2001 those homes on the hill were just in the process of being built. I remember the constant noise of construction. Now most of the homes are gone and some time in the future, the construction noise will be back. As it is in so many neighborhoods. It's good to see homes getting up again and hopefully families being able to move in and rebuild their lives.

As for our old house - the landlord has decided not to rebuild. The property has been cleared and is just dirt right now. It still makes me sad.

How Green was My Valley

No, this is not a post about a family of Welsh coal miners, but about a hike we did in April in one of our regional parks, Sonoma Valley.

Sonoma Valley Regional Park was smack in the middle of the October fires - this was the Nuns Fire - and almost completely burned. It was closed for weeks and weeks after the fire and only opened at the end of 2017. When we went there in April we were prepared to see a lot of damage, but we were in for quite a wonderful surprise - a green valley.

While there were scorched tree stumps and burned tree bark, the fresh green color of the vegetation was what really struck. Nature was recovering for sure! The park looked healthy even though it was quite clear that an inferno had taken place only six months before.

People came out in crowds to enjoy this beautiful gem between Sonoma and Santa Rosa.

As expected there was wildflower galore - and this was only the beginning of it.

We first walked through the valley - an easy stroll - but we decided to go up into the forest for our way back, a much more hilly and strenuous hike.

And as you can see, the forest didn't look too good. A lot of the madrones and manzanitas were charred, but the good news is that they didn't die and will probably recover. When we got closer it was amazing to look at the bark of the trees.

The fire was not able to destroy these beautiful trees. It is breathtaking to witness how nature heals itself and how fast it springs back to life. While it will take a while until the entire park will have recovered completely, it is so encouraging to see how everything comes back to life. Just a little stumble along the way...

Not so much for us humans, though. There were still burnt down sites that hadn't been cleaned up, even six months after the fire. Over and over again we are shown the dimension of this disaster.

It's so much easier and encouraging to look at nature.

But despite the earthquakes, wildfires and following landslides I love where I live. I don't think I'd like to live anywhere else right now.

Six Months Later

It's been exactly six months when in the very early hours of Monday, October 9th 2017, we woke up to what would become the most destructive wildfire in the history of California. The week that followed was the worst week in my life and was utterly life changing for so many. 5300 homes and residences were destroyed in Santa Rosa alone. The devastation afterwards still leaves me speechless.

By now, most of the burned sites are cleared and the debris removal is almost complete. Where once used to be homes, trees and gardens is replaced by flat, cleared sites. Some trees are still standing, hoping that they might come back to life. All in all it's a pretty sad sight.

The big debris removal trucks are seen every day, and last month when one of those trucks drove down the hill (too fast?) and its brakes failed there was a rather bad accident involving seven injuries and a fire. This happened at a site that was badly burned during the October fires and for some people it was a traumatic déjà vu.

Here you can see one of those trucks, and the area behind it is our old neighborhood. The red x marks the spot where our old house used to be (I'm still so relieved that we moved a few years before the fire). We have heard that the landlord is not going to rebuild.

He is not alone. Many people have found out that they have been under insured or rebuilding will be just too expensive. Many lots have gone up for sale. Other people, neighbors in a street, have come together and want to rebuild together to keep costs lower. So far, only one home - in the Coffey Park neighborhood - has been erected since the builders were able to use the existing foundation of the house. This is not possible with most houses since the foundations were removed as part of the government-funded debris removal. However, even if it's only one home, it's a sign of hope. But still there are not even 200 building permits being currently processed since most people are still figuring out how much money they get from their insurance.

Six months later they still struggle. Some insurances have been better than others. It gave me a lot of pause. There also is a lot of price gouging, rents have gone up astronomically and the housing problems we had before the fires have become a serious housing crisis. People affected by the fire have moved away because they weren't able to find a place to live that they could actually afford.

24 people in Sonoma County (43 in all the affected counties together) lost their lives in the fires. For the past six months there has been a debate whether the county could have done more in terms of warning the population (a resounding YES). Officials have resigned over the decision not to activate the emergency system (why oh why?). While everybody agrees that no one could have been prepared for a natural disaster of such dimensions it is also clear that serious mistakes have been made (and hopefully we will learn from them).

Many people have PTSD in various degrees. When the county decided to make steep cuts to the mental health services the outcry was fierce and somehow the money for keeping up these services was found. Mental health issues have increased - I can see that in my school, and as someone said "we're not out of the woods yet" when it comes to the emotional toll of the fires.

The scars in our community will be visible for a very long time.

Nature, however, is bouncing back. Right after the fires the hills were charred and there are still a lot of burned trees in the landscape (they appear orange-brown and black in the photos).

However, since wildfire is important and necessary for California's nature, everything is coming back to life. There are beautiful wildflowers, and plants that need fire for their seedpods to open are making a big return . I think we're in for a huge gift by nature. Looking around the hills and mountains you can clearly see where the fires burned and destroyed, but you can also see all the new signs of life.

Everywhere there are still the "thank you" signs for our first responders, and I have a feeling that they will be around for a while. These men and women were working tirelessly in some of our darkest hours. My respect for them is immense.

Living From Moment To Moment

It's been a harrowing 10 days.

Thank you to all of you who sent their love, thoughts and prayers for my town and my county. Your kind words, your checking in on Facebook and your emails have been a light in the gray thickness of the past days. Thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I don't even know where to start. The past 12 days are partly crystal clear and partly a mere blur. I'm not sure I remember everything in the right order. I don't know whether I will get through writing this post without crying. Everything is still very raw and we're just beginning to get out of this.

On Sunday, October 8th, we were visiting Kaefer in Davis. While it was rather calm here, it was extremely windy in Davis. The air was dusty and the dust seemed to settle everywhere. But I wasn't really worried - this is a very flat part of the country and Kaefer often told me that it is very windy.

When we drove home in the evening we took the back roads - it was such a lovely day, the forests, hills and vineyards were covered in the beautiful glow of the evening sun. We took the very same route that only a few hours later the Tubbs Fire would take. I remember how much I enjoyed this peaceful drive.

Back home we relaxed a bit, and then the wind picked up. It was pretty crazy. I remember that I once thought that this wind would feed a fire, but I still wasn't worried because this is California and we have wildfires every year. They don't get into urban areas.

We went to bed and slept well until around 2:00 am when the house phone rang. It is in another room and we knew that we weren't quick enough to pick it up, so we let it go. The Geek went back to sleep, but I was a bit restless. I smelled smoke. So I got up, walked around the house - everything was fine - and looked outside - nothing but darkness. I went back to bed. It was 2:22 am by then - I remember that so clearly because I looked at the clock by the Geek's bedside and loved the combination of  the numbers. Then I noticed that there were cars driving by our house, one after the other. That was unusual. This is a very quiet neighborhood, and so many cars at this late (or early) hour didn't bode well. I also heard popping sounds over and over. So I got up again because I thought it might be a good idea to check my cell phone. I saw a text message from my close friend Lyz which said "Are you guys safe from the fire?".

That's when I realized we were in trouble.

I woke the Geek, and we went downstairs, turned on the local radio station and heard what was going on. The neighborhoods on the hill, Fountaingrove, were burning. The cars that I heard were coming down from there (it's just up the hill from us). The fire was burning up smaller neighborhoods at the slopes and bottom of the hill, then jumped the six lanes (!) highway and burnt down another entire neighborhood, Coffey Park. There was no stopping the fire.

I grabbed our "grab and go" box and we packed our bags with some clothes and things we deemed important, sleeping bags, and put them right by the front door. I rolled the car out of the garage and parked it in the driveway. We were ready to go any minute if they told us we had to leave.

Then I went outside to take a few pictures. The photos are all blurry because I was shaking, but I still decided to include them.

Right across our street:

And up the hill a bit further down the road:

Then I went back upstairs and took a shot out of our bedroom window:

We constantly heard the popping sounds when transformers or propane gas tanks blew up. I remember that I ran to those of our neighbors' houses that had no light on to wake them up. We told the elderly couple next door to pack a bag and put it in the car. Just in case...

At daybreak there was thick smoke, an eerie light with no chance for the sun to get through.

At seven in the morning our phone rang. It was my friend G who had to evacuate at 1:00 am and had been sitting in the Safeway parking lot since two in the morning. She came to our house where we fed her and brewed a big pot of coffee. We would need it.

From then on, things start to get blurry. The three of us were glued to both the TV and the local radio station. One of the stations had to stop airing when the fire burnt the trees in the backyard of their building. Later they would be back on the air, just working with a generator and some very basic equipment, but they informed us all day, every day.

We saw the first pictures of Coffey Park - devastation (the picture is in my last post). It was hard to believe our eyes. I have friends and aquaintances in Coffey Park. It is a normal middle class neighborhood. They had to leave in the middle of the night, often with only 10 or 15 minutes to spare. What do you take when you have to leave so suddenly? For many it was only the clothes on their backs and some important papers and documents. Some didn't even get that.

They not only lost their house, but their home with everything in it.

Later that day Kaefer's old kindergarten teacher posted photos of what used to be her elementary school:

This was the first time that I cried.

We used to live very close to that school. I walked Kaefer to school every morning, it was just a 10-15 minutes walk through our old neighborhood. We knew so many people here - we had lived there for 11 years before we bought our current home. We went trick-or-treat, sold Girl Scout cookies, had block parties, chatted with neighbors walking by while I was working in the front garden.

All gone.

source

G stayed with us. She was shaky - she is 75 years old and only two years ago lost her husband, and now, it seemed, her home, too (we would later found out that by some kind of miracle her house survived). Lyz, who had sent me that email in the night, had lost her home, in G's neighborhood. The neighborhoods on Fountaingrove were gone. A retirement mobile home park was gone. Two hotels and the old round barn and many businesses were gone. Two hospitals were evacuated. Nurses were transporting patients in their personal cars with the IV sticking out the window.

The following days were mere chaos. The amount of misinformation was immense. We heard of more and more friends, colleagues and aquaintances who had lost their homes. We learned that at one time there were 17 fires burning (or even more, I can't remember) all over Sonoma, Napa, Lake and Mendocino Counties. The newspaper reported about the fires for days - and we really weren't interested in anything else.

But there were inspiring stories as well. The owner of Safari West, a wildlife preserve, saved all his animals while his own home was burning down. A cat was rescued from a drain (and is now in the UC Davis veterinary center). There were a lot of stories of true heroes.

For the first couple days we didn't dare to separately leave the house. We only have one car, which was packed with our important belongings, and we were absolutely certain that the mandatory evacuation order would come when one of us was away in the car. So we did everything together. We weren't the only ones who drove around town with a fully packed car - everybody seemed to do that. Some of them actually lived in their car because they didn't want to go to one of the many evacuation shelters. We didn't sleep particularly well; I was getting up several times during the night to check that there were no new fires in our vicinity. We ate a lot of chocolate and drank wine (we were not going to leave the wine for the fire!). We didn't make any plans because we had no idea where we would be the next day. We were living from moment to moment. On Wednesday night we received the order for voluntary evacuation. I remember we were sitting in our neighbor's house, drinking wine when the Nixle alert came (we had signed up for every alert system that was available for our area). The women became restless, the men were cool... there were some very tense moments. In the end, almost the entire corner of my neighborhood decided to stay. We slept in shifts. I spent the night on the couch in the living room to make sure that I would hear the police when they were banging on the door.

Fortunately this call never came.

One day a German friend of ours who had lost his home called us. His Koi fish had survived, but the person who was supposed to bring them to a safe pond didn't turn up. So the Geek and I jumped into the car to rescue his fish. This may sound weird, but if you have lost everything, those fish are everything you have. The fish were in a huge bucket, and they were wasting away. They needed oxygen. So the Geek, practical as he is, took a protector sheet from our folder with the documents, rolled it up and used it as a straw, blowing air into the bucket. There we were by the side of the road right next to a burnt down neighborhood, trying to rescue fish. Completely crazy and insane, but these were crazy and insane times. The fish, by the way, made it.

Everywhere people were helping each other. The community really pulled together. Yes, there were some bad apples in the form of looters, but the kindness of people was overwhelming. No one in this community has been unscathed by this inferno. Everybody wears some kind of scar from this disaster, some bigger, some smaller.

On Friday evening our evacuation order was lifted. There was still a big fire burning and I was still restless. And indeed, on Saturday morning at 4:40 my cell phone exploded with Nixle alerts. There was a new mandatory evacuation order for some neighborhoods to the east. And this is what it looked like from our bedroom window:

Fire and smoke. I was rattled.

The air had been bad all week. Whenever we had to go outside we wore our N95 masks. We couldn't open our windows. It was hot and stinky. Ashes were raining to the ground. But everybody was still helping - donating clothes and food, collecting school supplies. Everybody stepped up.

In between there were sparks of humor. The Tubbs fire was renamed to Chubbs fire because we had all been stress eating. The statue of General Vallejo in Sonoma was wearing a N95 mask.

People were partying. I now fully understand the people in London during the Blitz who were partying like there was no tomorrow. And for many there wasn't.

For quite some time we didn't know whether we still had a job. There were rumors that the Geek's work was completely destroyed (the company is smack in the middle of the fire zone). Someone said my high school had burned down. Days later we found out that none of  this was true. While it will take a long time for the Geek's work to return to their damaged site, he can work remote from home or go to the building that they have rented as an interim solution. My school started today with a staff meeting, and on Friday the students will return. About 145 students in my school alone have lost their homes.

The fires are almost completely contained. Entire neighborhoods are destroyed. Over 40 people have perished in the fires. 6800 structures have burnt down, most of them homes. Now we're moving into the hard time of rebuilding and recovery. It will take a very long time.

And we will never  forget the true heroes in this disaster.

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The Redwood Credit Union, our local paper The Press Democrat and our State Senator Mike McGuire have set up the North Bay Fire Relief Fund where every donated dollar goes directly to aid relief efforts and help the victims of the fires.