 It was actually out of the area on a hunting trip with a couple friends. We were up in Modoc hunting and you know we'd been planning for the trip for a long time. It was a good time with our friends, you know, it was a beautiful night, you know, it was amazing. It was a very, very relaxed, normal Sunday. I had done my Sunday morning chores, which is some yard work, some watering, and kind of settled to the fact that I was going to do a few chores inside and then really just be lazy. It was a great day. It was beautiful. My wife and I went out for a walk, took the dog, went to Riverfront Park and swam the dog and it was beautiful and we were walking back to the car and she, you know, I haven't felt this content a long time. I was driving on East Side Road, which is overgrown with trees and canopy and it was so windy, I'd moved to the middle lane just thinking, well what if one of these trees comes down. I can just remember thinking to myself, I've never been at winds like this in Santa Rosa. The wind early on was so intense that even my heavy frame, I found myself having to get propped up against my truck from time to time. We all just noticed it was a weird night. It was really hot, it was really windy and the bulk of my night started a few blocks away from the studio actually with kind of a large fire in a field. Scott Bristow, the captain came on and said, I've got a fully involved structure with fire going down the creek and the fire's going up into the backyards of other homes and we're starting to get multiple structures going. Almost all the resources for the city got diverted there. We had two alarms, so both ladder trucks, six engines, multiple chiefs, including the fire chief Tony Gosner. All these people showed up there. It was a challenge to get that fire under control from 6 p.m. to midnight. We had 20 reported vegetation fires and 10 reported structure fires. That's before the Tubbs Fire even came in to the city of Santa Rosa. Probably like 12.30, it got really windy and she had a water bottle sitting on the window sill and it blew off the window sill and hit me in the head and woke me up and I smelled the smoke. I'm going to go down to the end of the block and see what's going on because I'm worried about the trees and I got down to the end of the street and I could see the glow on the hill so I told her that I was going to go to work because there was a fire engine there. I wanted to get out in case they needed it. The city dispatcher called me and she said, when she said she made it sound so big. She said because the wind was blowing, even our house was shaking, was strong wind. And she called and she said, Ms. Finn, I don't know what to tell you but the city is upside down. I went down there, the police was covering the streets, the wind was so strong. The minute we put the barricade, the wind blows them off. As I was going over Fountain Grove, I made contact with station 5 and told the captain we had conversation about we need to upstaff our reserve rigs and he, Don Richies, the captain goes, you know, we should really think about, I'll call on the entire department. So that's a great idea. Recall the entire department. We'll staff all reserve rigs. If we need them, great. If we don't, you know, so be it. It's the first time we've all called the department in probably 15 years. When I got that call that night from the fire chief, the first words out of my mouth do I need to get to the Emergency Operations Center and he said yes. Even then I really didn't know the magnitude but when I got to the Emergency Operations Center, the team had already set up the entire facility. We were, the legal team was in the process of drafting my emergency declaration for the city. 78 strike teams ordered, there was, the EOC was open, the entire department was called back. So there was a lot of work before the fire even came in. Not knowing if the fire was even going to come in. Had not seen any flames yet, drove by a few deputies that I know and they told me that they were just doing evacuations. A lot of what we were doing felt precautionary. Yeah, I didn't think in this day and age that a fire could get that out of control in such an urban area. I won a clock a little after one o'clock. I got a call from Paul Lowenthal who's assistant fire marshal and he goes, we got fire at Cross Creek, it's coming up Cross Creek now, well that's the base of Fountain Grove. There's a one o'clock in the morning, it's like, oh my God, it's already here, houses, you know. I called Neil, our emergency preparedness coordinator who's now in the city at the EOC. We need evacuations, evacuate the Fountain Grove area, down to Montecito Heights, get everyone out. Well pretty soon I looked to the left of Kmart, there's a column of black smoke coming up. The only place that was over there was Mountain Mike's Pizza, it says, hey, Mountain Mike's is on fire, we need to send a fire engine over there. We have no fire engines. You know, and I called dispatch and said, is there any available resources in Santa Rosa? We have zero. There are no available resources in Santa Rosa. I asked them to do an all call for the entire county, send out a page to the entire county. Any available resource needs to respond to Santa Rosa for a wildland urban interface fire. We decided to set up a fire station three in Santa Rosa and operate the incident from there and so in helping the chief do that, it wasn't but just a few minutes into it there were reports of Kaiser potentially either considering the evacuation or being impacted by fire and so he said, hey, get over there right away, figure out, let me know what's going on with Kaiser. I remember driving the first part of this loop to try to get back to the other side to see if I forgot anyone or if anyone needed help. When I first drove past it, I saw smoke and that was it and then it wasn't ten minutes later when I drove past that it was just a wall of flames barreling down the side of the hill. Clear public right of way and it doesn't matter where you are. You see something down blocking the right of way, clear it because you never know. It can become a main avenue for evacuation. So I blocked the fast lane of traffic on westbound Fountain Grove and started bucking and dragging the trees myself to clear the lane of traffic. Those people I would imagine coming over from Napa County that it never had reason to go over the top of Fountain Grove and then you're being chased by fire and you're being told to get out by EMS and there's lights and there's noise and I even had people pull up next to me when I was actively using a chainsaw and focusing and there's loud noise and they were asking me how to get out of here and all I could tell them was keep going downhill, keep going downhill. Well I first learned what was happening when my son knocked on my bedroom door because I hadn't woken up with the wind or anything and get up I think a fire is getting close to our house and I had no idea. We went out in the front yard and as soon as we opened the front door we could see the glow of the fire coming over the wiki up hills and I live in the Mark West Estates area and the sound was like a freight train which we had never heard before. I remember seeing a couple of the officers that had already been doing evacuations and just seeing the look on their faces and knowing what they had been through. Patty Suffins, I remember her just having her her face was just black smeared with just soot she was coughing clearly had smoke inhalation and then you kind of just realized at that point like hey these guys have you know in the time that took us to drive down and get ready these guys have been through hell for the last couple hours before we got here. I got a call from our transit office that the emergency operations center had been activated and they needed buses to do evacuations. I told my wife I said look this is bad I got to go in and I got I got dressed and when I got there the place was buzzing there was a few other drivers that had arrived and the instructions I got they needed buses to go to Mendocino Avenue and Fountain Grove and there would be first responders there to tell us where to go. I got ready to go to work after my supervisor gave me a call came in jumped on the highway coming southbound and it looked like it was you know traffic time like five six o'clock you know in the afternoon you know just traffic jamming you look up at the hillside and it's just glowing orange and it's like wow that's when it like hit you like what it's going on. The magnitude of what was going on occurred later I think once when him and I hit the streets and we actually got out to Journey's End mobile home park and I think that's kind of when it really set in that this was something just that we've never experienced before. How close are you? How close is the fire? The fire is right there in some cases where it's burning the trailer right next door but they're hitting each trailer as they go and leapfrogging through this trailer park trying to get people out. Chief says hey did we get reports there was fire at Journey's End mobile home park can you give me an update and so it wasn't just a couple seconds later I was able to come up over the overpass and I said you know Chief considered Journey's End mobile home park a total loss stand by for Kaiser. There was a period of time when I was at the evacuation center running around crazy trying to organize as much as I could I called my wife and she said I'm in the backyard putting flames out in the back yard and at that moment I just said leave get out of there sorry that's obviously part of that emotional because it's real. And my wife called and we've been together my wife and I've been together since high school and I said hey how's it going she's like hey it's really bad here and I said okay how bad she said well the fire came from Calistoga I think and there's a bunch of fires and it jumped 101 it's in Coffee Park. Wait a minute how come there's a fire in Coffee Park she said no it's a huge fire and it's jumped 101. Those flames were literally jumping over two lanes of roadway without even touching the ground. It was like they were just carried on a wind that was 10 or 12 feet off the ground. What we decided to do because we have two dogs let's just all go in the truck and so we don't get separated so we all got in his truck and drove down the street and then we saw that it was bumper to bumper traffic and as we were getting in his truck I looked down at my phone and I saw that the city's EOC had contacted me to come in and work so I'm like all right well let's go to Finley and I'll work however when we got on the freeway the fire had just crossed the freeway so we were headed south on 101 and they closed the freeway when they were making everybody do a U turn and head north so I called in to work and said I wasn't going to make it right then because we couldn't come south. And so when my wife woke me at about two in the morning it's the last thing I'm like what are you talking about we've got this fire going or there's fires coming our way and I was kind of like in denial because I live in Coffey Park area that was way over in Napa that's not here in Santa Rosa we're on the other side of the freeway so there's a little bit of that disbelief that my wife is saying no Tom I'm serious it's coming. Once I got the bus parked they were just running to the bus with you know people very fragile people in wheelchairs and in different states of dementia most of them like probably 90% of them couldn't move on their own. Many had to be carried in and it was it was painful for them and they were getting rashed it out of bed at 2, 3 in the morning to do this. I turned right on Fountain Grove Parkway again heading towards Mendocino Avenue and you're coming down a hill and I got this crazy view of the Journey's End mobile home park the entire thing was just engulfed it looked like every single unit in that park was on fire. My primary role was to maintain those stations running you know as once you know that first day or came in and the next day we'd come in and work out we were working the 12-hour shift so it would come in at 2 in the morning and then we'd go around to all the different stations make sure those running make sure we assess the all of our different facilities whether it was a reservoir whether it was a wet well whether it's a pump station for a water for the water system or a lift station for the sewer system and making sure that the infrastructure was also you know there was no broken pipes there was no sewer spilling out of manholes if there was trees that need to be cut up and move out of the way so people could get through and just basically drive around and assess our infrastructure. It felt like it was going a hundred miles an hour a lot of us you know had been working at this point more than half our shift our cars were running out of gas it dawned on me that my house was just a few hundred yards north of where that fire was headed straight to six hours a week my kids were home by themselves and it was right in the middle of those six hours my engineer Doug and for my firefighter Rob who came in and they were in right away right in the early moments of the fire they said that as they worked their way into coffee park the fire was already you know had to just jump the freeway and was working its way into coffee park and to hear them talk about the wind speed and the intensity the fire was so great that they both knew that there was really nothing that you could do with an engine to stop the head of that fire the head is being the very tip or the point of the fire as it moves in one direction and they knew right away which is great I mean they made that recognition right away that if we try to get out front of this we're gonna die and how the people are gonna die the best thing we can do is get people out of the way of this because in the end you can rebuild you can buy new cars you can do whatever else and they had that in their mind but what you can't do is replace a human life. As I continued up Hopper Lane there was the brick walls and I could look on both sides and see that again every house is on fire every single one and cars are flying past me just people trying to get away I'm looking at it I'm just staring at it and going how is every house on fire what happened out here this was the whole neighborhood everything everything there wasn't I couldn't see anything that wasn't on fire. When we were waking the neighbors up this there was one lady who was a single mom and had three little kids and she had come over just like two or three months before and introduced herself and her kids and left us this note to read after she left and said I just wanted my kids to know the neighbors because my cousin just died in a house fire and if there's a problem I want them to know where to go so she was like one of the first things I thought about I thought about that letter so we went over to try and wake her up and I was pounding on the door and she wasn't coming to the door and I was I just tell my wife I think I got to break it down because she's not coming out I know she's in there and all of a sudden everything got really bright I turned around at a tree in her front yard and caught on fire. Decided to take advantage of this opportunity to fly over and we were actually traveling with a battalion chief and he said that at one point he was with his group of firefighters and they came up on this building that was a care facility and he said we can't have that we don't have time to evacuate this building and we can't let it burn and it was it was a striking comment. On round barn we had a building that had 120 people in it that we couldn't get out so the decision was made moving to the west side of the building we parked three fire engines on there with the battalion chief and said don't burn the building down if you burn the building you're gonna lose 120 people so that's a hell of an order. Such a dedicate a moment of dedication from his from that team of men and women that were there to fight that fire it was I think it will always stay with me. Literally running from door to door knocking on people's door and they could feel the fire coming in they could feel the heat and it was the glow and the ember cast the ember showers just landing on them and them taking the heat trying to shield themselves as they went from door to door to try to browse people and get them out of their homes you know I mean the fire started so late at night that most people were in bed which was the worst case scenario. There wasn't a whole lot that they can do except tell people to get the hell out so save your life. I needed to buy some time to accomplish the evacuation of Kaiser and there was a last set of homes and journeys that were still there and so we obtained a fire engine finally found a fire engine and we cut holes through the fences of Kaiser and the mobile home park and got a line in there and the plan was to just buy time. The minute I got off there was a police fire department sheriff blocking the street and I didn't know what's going on but I could see the fire was burning and my house is like a block from that so I came to the police and I said I live here my kids are down there my wife is down there so please let me in they said nobody could go because all this place is burned so my heart was blown I I don't know what to do I was standing I was crying and all the sudden ten minutes later a car was coming from the dark so it was my wife she came out and they were so scared the kids were yelling and screaming where were you we were almost died and blah blah I was happy I don't care whatever they were saying I was happy to see him. Once I finally made it to the Finley shelter this the place was just lit up it was just a buzz there were cars stacked up on the street trying to get in and I've got a bus full of fragile people I need to get off so most of them needed wheelchairs and there weren't any so they they wheeled out office chairs and then just put them in office chairs and use those to wheel them in it was one of the greatest examples of an organized chaos I've ever seen there were people everywhere that were you know the uncertainty the fear the the the sense of loss and all that coupled with a huge contingent of people that were just there to help did a lot of improvising we grabbed the staff chairs from desk and we grabbed tables and we ran them out to ambulances and buses and loaded people on tables and into our chairs and rolled them in and unfortunately kind of laid them down how I say in like almost a sardine style on our mats just to get it be able to get enough people into the facility and in a safe place. At this point I had watched the fire kind of crest over the hill and come down into their backyard and she went straight back into the house to get her cell phone for work you know I could appreciate that she said she was a doctor I get it and I went running back in her house to find her and and she just wasn't going and I that's the one time during the night it became personal and and I said listen my kids aren't gonna lose their mom because you're looking for a cell phone. You couldn't see you couldn't see when they got into cul-de-sacs to evacuate people they couldn't figure out how to get back. Hopefully I can get out of here. So you know they're asking on the radio get me out of here you know through GPS and these kinds of things. I went out in the backyard and I saw Big Amber Land and started a spot fire so I grabbed the garden hose put it out looked over another one fell and lit put it out another one was falling and I just said this is not gonna work so I just left. There was always concern that the hospital is gonna burn mainly from the roof down that was the biggest concern that I had and just being able to pull the evacuation off in a timely manner was gonna be gonna be important but knowing that we didn't have the resources to sustain a hospital fire attack and a high-rise. We grabbed all their maintenance staff told them to grab every fire extinguisher you can find get up on the roof and stay up there. They were finding spot fires on the roof extinguishing those. Two of our bus drivers basically got called in right off the street by just police officers you know what are you doing can I take you now can you go in here and get people that's what they did. So we loaded up patients and staff and took them to the the San Rafael office. They're standing outside of Kaiser and they're trying to figure out how do you evacuate a major metropolitan hospital. We still had a hold that we cannot let the hospital catch on fire same thing was going on Luther Burbank and Carl Newman that was threatening and Larkfield largely was threatening Sutter two-year-old hospital we could not let the hospital burn that that would be a huge impact for the community and there were a couple of the trucks that came in that needed repairs and we got those going and then it you know it got quiet because everybody was out busy and the last it's kind of weird the last truck I worked on I had to drive around the block make sure everything was all right. It hadn't happened in a while. I drove around the block to make sure everything was all right and I heard him call my neighborhood a complete loss. When this thing is moving what was it I think as fast as a football field every five minutes up on Fountain Grove Ridge for a first responder to know that it's moving that fast and still go up there and bang on people's doors run sirens draw them out of their houses. It's why I think we have always called public safety workers heroes. They they lived up to that standard above and beyond on that night it's not something you could prepare for or even train for you know because it's not it's not a forest fire it's a fire and a housing tract that's being pushed by you know Gale Forest Wins. Kent Porter the photographer from the press Democrat who I worked with for 25 years and he said Fountain Grove is gone and he said you know the round barn is gone the Hilton is gone and he said I think Coffee Park is gone too and hearing those words it was like unbelievable. You know they have a term called area ignition and what that means is when an area gets preheated like that and then the fire moves into it just it's like an explosion of flames it's just amazing things that are unbelievable. We really weren't able to do really valuable anchor and hold until five or six in the morning and that's when the wind lifted it was still windy but the wind shifted up and went upward instead of down towards us but wherever the fire's edge is we'd hook into a hydrant and we would stretch lines and we would try to make sure that fire did not get past us. Panels from metal garage doors that had gotten carried in the wind and ended up 50 or 60 feet up in redwood trees you know it was just the the whole image of pure destruction really. It's one of the first questions you ask as a chief especially is everybody okay? Do we have everybody accounted for? We had to make tough decisions to not get sucked into things burning on the interior because it left a hole in the gap to allow that fire to continue so we had to make some big-level strategic decisions and then we just gave those assignments very broad told them what the what the objectives was and what the plan was and how to box this thing in and let them do their thing. It was shocking to wake up the next morning and start you know contacting the city offices in the way that I normally would and discover even then it wasn't contained how big it was and how big it would continue to grow. We found out about nine in the morning that my house was burned down and my whole neighborhood was burned down and I was also in contact with the EOC and as soon as they found out that I lost my home in my car and all my belongings they knew I had to get clothes and a rental car and I had a lot to do but I really wanted to come to work and see how everybody was doing and see how it was going at the shelter so once I found my mom and the kids a place to stay I came to work. Our supervisor said the backup people showed up so you guys could go home. What is my home? I was standing down there everybody jumped their cars they left and I was standing down there and thinking what could I call home. And I was working with people in the EOC who knew that they've probably lost their home and they kept just trying to deliver the best response even through the fact that they knew in their heart of hearts they had probably lost their home. For them to know that okay I got my family out and I know my family's safe now and then to come back in to go back into that is most people think it's crazy but you know it's just in my mind it's heroic. I knew after a period of time I knew my wife was safe and my kids were safe and the animals were safe they actually came into the evacuation center so I got to see them personally which was helpful. So once I knew they were safe and that was safe nothing else seemed to really matter in the moment other than helping out these other 700 plus people that are in the facility and trying to make their lives as comfortable and safe as possible and hopefully trying to find out about their loved ones and making sure that again they have their family members are safe and so really I was able to turn the focus away from myself and just focus on the needs for the again hundreds of people that were were in our center and and trying to make it the best possible experience in a negative situation for them. It's an incredible testament to people's dedication to this community that you could lose everything make sure your family is safe and then come back and work in some ways that may have been for them what they needed they needed to be able to grasp on to something that's in their control versus not being in control because I needed them here I needed them working I needed them being here and also being able to emotionally withstand that too that's that's tough. Everybody was just dog-tired by day two or three because they'd been operating for days on end without without sleep or if they were able to get it it was an hour here an hour there. We had mentioned the local assistance center we called it the LAC and that was really an amazing experience and I spent most of the time I think probably two weeks into the fire for then the next three or four weeks there as we all did we'd rotate shifts and it was just where all of the different agencies and departments that you would need to deal with to basically rebuild your life were all located in one spot so the city government departments were there county DMV anything social security and you could go from station to station and talk to those people and and get information you could get your driver's license and things like that and the as they were ramping that up the people that were coordinating that would kind of have a debrief in the morning and I was right there at the very beginning and one of the things that they things that they told us which I thought was really thoughtful try the best that you can to put yourself in the shoes of the people coming to see you they just lost everything their house their belongings their clothes everything from Friday morning I was heading into the EOC and we were getting ready to evacuate Lincoln Valley because of the fires approaching and how people were so tense at that point that when we issued the evacuation order for Lincoln Valley we cleared out the entire community I mean it's probably 15,000 people cleared out in a matter of maybe 35 40 minutes you know I think everybody that was in the area myself included you know with my wife calling me going what do I pack I go anything you can't buy on Amazon you know even walking her through that while I'm trying to I'm sitting at the EOC working through each one of these problems and everybody in that EOC every city employee everybody that was there was kind of struggling through some of the same stuff personally a number of missing persons and people that reported that were missing and then we have to try to track people down and coordinating that with the Sheriff's Department to figure out exactly you know how do you take you know 2,000 reported missing people and start finding them so that people know that their loved ones were accounted for somebody you know they knew or what have you I mean it every time it was a challenge to get your arms around it you take care of the problem work the problem and then try to get the right resources to it no organization no government could afford enough firefighters to deal with the biggest fires that are going to happen this one was way beyond that but even even regular big fires you need help if I recall at one point there were seven or eight thousand firefighters camped out at the fair grounds there were hundreds and hundreds of fire trucks from all over the place it was the biggest fire camp they ever made we took over the Santa Rosa fairgrounds and we used every every inch of it we had crews out there for four or five days straight and that was a challenge getting people to come in especially the local folks Santa Rosa and the rink and valleys and the Sebastopol's they were out there for a long time I think we had almost 150 officers from out of the area on Monday night and then it grew from there over 250 for Santa Rosa alone and what I tried to do in the morning at 6 a.m. and be there to kind of shake people's hands and thank them because they're coming in trying to help us get a handle on this thing there's no way we could have done it even with I mean I had over a hundred officers almost every shift working even National Guard when we finally got a handle locked down on the neighborhoods and kind of getting control of it the National Guardsmen that gave up you know their personal lives to be there and help and stand a post we went about two weeks where we kept all of the all of the neighborhoods locked down with the National Guard and we pull the team together on the Monday the 16th ultimately was trying to get about 15,000 people back onto the properties it was a challenge I mean it was a mental challenge and we weren't quite yet done with the firefight on one end because we were still seeing some movement over on the east side of town but we still needed to find a way of getting folks back back to their to their properties and we really tried to roll up the sleeves to figure out how is this gonna work and how are we gonna make it so that we're really giving folks that quiet opportunity without having a lot of bystanders who really don't belong there participating in their in their moment I drove into a cul-de-sac up on Fountain Grove and I there were four four or five cars from a neighboring agency a mutual aid agency and I'm going what is going on up here and I get out and there's all these officers digging through the rubble and there's a couple homeowners elderly and they found the woman's wedding ring and at first as you know you know an administrator or manager you're going hey get out of there you don't need to be you know we need to be doing but when you hear a story like that you can't help but go that that made all the difference in the world to that elderly couple what I found is all the titles strip away you're sitting next to the city manager who's in jeans in a ball cap and you've got Ray Navarro your police captain and and any other number of people you would never really see in a setting you know that informally and yet they're just like everyone else and they're just trying to help people people that were usually really well put together were literally in sweats a baseball cap but everybody was busily working to figure out how that room was going to function we had some training in advance but honestly I don't know what kind of training can prepare you for that you do a lot of training but you're never it's never going to be exactly like that when something happens I said I've been through the floods in the river like 10 years 10 times we've activated and it's different every time I said you can't have a drill and you know be prepared for every instance when you look at it from a standpoint from a police department standpoint we don't train to get chased through the city by a fire but the amazing things that employees did are still coming out today I know the city workers were everywhere trying to keep up with us they had flows coming in as fast as they could turn pumps on to keep them coming but like take for example down near Coffee Park or the commercial area off a piner at one point I remember driving by and seeing multiple fire engines hooked up to large diameter hose off a hydrant a hydrant a hydrant well on a perfect day with no fire anywhere else any water systems going to struggle to keep up with that the post office that made deliveries and figured out how to provide service in areas that were decimated the city staff you know you don't think about staff like the water agency staff being a first responder they're not technically a first responder but their response was essential in public safety we're used to kind of dealing with kind of the unknown a lot of other city departments are not they're used to they have a very structured kind of process and what have you but this city and government in general came together during that period of time to get stuff done and I mean I'll give you an example we could not have evacuated some of the areas we evacuated if our city bus drivers didn't get in a bus and drive through smoke they couldn't see to get to us couldn't have done it we didn't have enough people we didn't have enough resources buses showed up loaded people got them down coming to work jumping in buses and driving through flames to get people out of their care facilities you know I I get paid to risk my life they don't those are the kinds of things that went on every day and whether or not it was a bus driver public works guy moving cars so we could get traffic flowing through an area doesn't matter every little bit makes a difference and keeping the community safe but when it all said and done everybody showed up when you take the recreation and park staff let's say who work at family center that turned into an emergency shelter so you go to work thinking you're wrecking parks you do you know you just manage the facility well now all of a sudden people are living there people with different needs wants and not a great situation but they they were very flexible they made it work and then again we talked about the outpouring of community support one of the first times I drove up to Finley the amount of donations flooding I mean flooding into Finley Center was impressive because everyone wanted to help for the first couple of days it's like okay so how are we going to manage this 24 hours a day without knowing how long we're going to be open so we just had to come up with a plan they were faced with a lot of scared people and you know just so much chaos in the community and I saw them as comforting people and doing a great job and then not only that but with you know supplies were running out the building had to constantly be cleaned they had to come up with a management plan plan for all the donations so not only were they taking care of people but there were all these issues that they were dealing with that we don't normally have at work it was a very interesting thing to visit the shelters during during that time not knowing what to expect not knowing where people are in their place you know it was a very traumatic incident for the entire county really so going there it's almost like kind of reverting back to when I was a cop when you're kind of dealing with people who've been through difficult times it could be it could be a house fire it could be the loss of somebody you know what what do you say and at the end it comes down to just being there it's just being there and giving people an opportunity to share and talk if they want to respecting their space and also respecting their privacy even though they're in this big communal area where there really isn't any privacy but there is still a sense of privacy. Firefighters who lost their home were still at the front line fighting the fire and a couple nights in I stopped by the Union Hall in downtown Santa Rosa and there were a foam bank going of retired firefighters who had come in specifically to start the insurance process for the firefighters still fighting the blaze and it was a pretty incredible moment to see these retired firefighters taking care of their own and really making sure that they're taking care of the people who are taking care of us. Communities outside like the County of San Luis Obispo sent hundreds of postcards from individuals with handwritten notes comforting the people that were in the evacuation center so that was really nice and then at some point it starts to transition into it's crazy like this is our town this is you know many of the people that work with us they grew up here or they've been with us for so long they've got family in the area you know so you start to look at all the historical landmarks that we lost or the significant buildings that we lost I mean to to lose a Kmart in a while and fire is it's crazy it doesn't doesn't doesn't make sense mentally Kmart is been completely destroyed but you don't really grasp the magnitude of the fire until after you come out here and take a look at it in person it's it's just it's incredible you know none of us have ever seen anything like this we're talking to the mutual aid officers that are coming in and they're saying the same thing this is the you know the biggest thing in our in our careers that is that has impacted us it's really difficult to kind of find your way around this whole area we don't have any more landmarks we used to you know even though you we know the streets a lot of times we're coming into areas and we're looking for the landmarks so we know a specific house maybe a color we're coming in here now we don't even recognize anything she's this fire truck it's fascinating to me because I was asking after you know a couple weeks after going hey you know it'd be nice to hear some of the stories and you know the number one comment that people made to me now we're just doing our job it's all good no you don't get chased by fire and that's your job that's not something that we train for it's not something that we do every day it's something that happened you know we gotta really kind of try to acknowledge that it was terrifying and that's the one thing I mentioned to the chief when he was asking about stories and you know we're not getting a lot back from officers and I pulled him my side and I said that's because if we admit that we were pretty scared because we weren't trained for it and we weren't even really we didn't even really have the protective equipment we really did need and that's okay it worked out but I mean if we are honest we're this was a terrifying thing with us 24 people and the reason why we didn't lose more is because the community really came together and helped each other get get out whether it was they didn't even live in the area I'm here in the fire I better call my friend Joe and hey there's a fire what there is you know I don't know how many stories I heard about that or Facebook or text message or pick something we can't do it by ourselves place in fire with something that large there's just there's no way I can't think of one instance for weeks if not a couple of months from the start of the fire two months out where I didn't have an interaction with anybody whether it was a co-worker whether it was a supervisor whether it was somebody member of the public that wasn't completely generous patient thoughtful kind everything was focused on this it was across the board I can't think of one instance where anyone said yeah that's too bad but what about me and I need to get back to my own thing to be honest with you I hear a lot about oh first responders first responders first responder but the reality is if you're a neighbor and you're knocking on doors that is a first responder that helped get people out that woke somebody up who probably woke somebody else up we couldn't have done it without it we would have this disaster would have been much much worse in terms of life if it wasn't for all the people pitching in not just the center of the police department or the fire department of the sheriff's department CHP it was everybody one of the things I did was I went to LC Allen high school where where folks were taking shelter I think there were probably more volunteers than there were evacuees people just wanting to help I went in and I was talking to Mary gill stable on the principal of LC Allen high school she was there at the shelter and two men came in and said that they had they wanted to bring some pizzas to the shelter and she said sure we'll take whatever you got and they said will 75 pizzas be enough and so I asked them you know where you're gonna get 75 pizzas and they said well we're mountain mikes they lost one of their restaurants in the fire up by Kmart so here they are they've just suffered a serious blow to their business and they're they're going around asking how many pizzas do you need dozens of community members driving around in their personal vehicles with brown bag lunches that them and their kids made and I could just picture this family with you know jars of peanut butter and jelly and bread spread all over the counter like an assembly line making as many sack lunches as they could and just driving around giving them to our National Guard soldiers our police officers deputies allied agencies just making sure we were taking care of I was out kind of in the rink and ridge part this person flagged me down and said you know we need help well there's a there's a cat in the storm drain and someone needs to rescue the cat and about the time that I'm sitting in my car trying to figure out which number I'm gonna call here comes the guy from the neighboring property with a ladder and they plug in and start going down and then they rescue this cat that had been down there before I even was able to to get someone on the line to get someone over there to help and assist them I mean people were definitely there to help other people for our department the message from the top all the way down is anything and everything you can do to help facilitate housing development do it our life really took off after that because we were front and center with trying to rebuild so you know other staff members and we had all you know some role in it had to rewrite the rules because they didn't really exist how do you take subdivisions that were built in mass and now rebuild them one lot at a time where everybody wants to do something a little differently the rules really weren't set up for that I think that thought process started at that moment we're thinking about how do we put the fire out how do we help people immediately but we know there's this huge lift that that we've got to help support the community through met a couple of other families up in the Fountain Grove area one of them was really focused in on that okay I'm I'm ready I'm ready to go to that next step and they wanted me to start talking to them specifically about where are we going what's the next step why can't we get there faster what's the process going to look like it's also materials supplies people so every every as we go through the development you know first where are we getting all this concrete who's going to be able to clear clear these sites how are we going to do every single phase you drive through coffee park today like we did two days ago you see a lot of homes starting to go up which is I think helpful it's part of the healing process to see people come back and people move back in and move on talk about bittersweet those folks are out there building their homes and they're not all the same house there's some real creative changes happening out there so it's bittersweet you know you still see a lot of clear cut or charred trees but the grounds are ready for for building but you can see people's homes going up an interesting thing about all of this you know we've mentioned the regulations and we've revised them we've looked at alternative ways to redevelop and I think through that we're learning lessons that you know you always look in the tragedy where's the good can you find any good out of it and if anything I think we're showing that we can rebuild we can build in a expedited manner and do it in a high-quality fashion and it's not going to destroy all of the things in the city that we love and so hopefully some of those things will be able to translate and I say hopefully they are actually they're translating citywide to make development and permitting a better process for people I'm just amazed everybody's going a hundred miles an hour still and I don't hear people complaining about it I see how hard people are working I'm glad to have a role and a purpose and be able to contribute to to the cause and I think that everybody feels that way the thing I'm absolutely the most proud of is that we the citizens the community Sonoma County firefighters law enforcement everybody save lives I work with the best people in the world and to come in and and deal with what they dealt with through that night my hats off to they they were truly amazing especially the fact that our communication level was was almost zero somebody came up to me who wasn't from the area after the fire but who had been here and was here after the fact to help us rebuild and kind of get going again and he did this for a living he moved around to disaster ravaged communities and tried to help them streamline their policy process and and get people connected with resources to recover and I remember that he said that there was a lot of things being done right there were some things being done wrong in this community but the one thing for sure was that he has never seen a community as compassionate as Santa Rosa what was really unique was I was seeing the community give to the evacuation center it was just amazing to watch the outreach and the caring within the community it was also amazing to see my staff every day just coming to work and being so happy to just help the people that were there some people talk about the first responders as you know the heroes and they are without question but there's thousands thousands of heroes just in the different neighborhoods where they're they're watering their neighbors yard making sure the 90-year-old in your family in your neighborhood is being taken care of that they're getting out safe taking responsibility and not waiting for the city the county or anyone else to do what needs to be done just taking action working together with the common goals you know I am constantly amazed at the generosity of this community I mean just disaster aside the generosity of this community and giving in the community-based organizations and everything else during the fire this community came together and galvanized in a way I've never seen before I never explained this much love that comes from everybody and part of what kept me going is when I see the community how much they care this fire brought love to this city