On October 8, 2017, the first wildfire in a series in Northern California ignited Napa, Sonoma, and neighboring counties. The fires — including the Tubbs, Nuns, Cascade, Atlas, Sulphur, and Redwood Valley fires — spread quickly, in part due to 40 to 70 mph winds, and burned roughly 220,000 acres of land and over 8,800 structures. 42 people died in the fires. The conflagrations have been declared the most destructive wildfire in California history, surpassing the 1991 Oakland Hills fire that demolished almost 3,500 homes. The Tubbs fire alone burned over 4,650 homes. Though the fires are now fully contained, Northern California faces many immediate and long term consequences.
Now, almost two months later, many families and individuals are left homeless. While some individuals and some hotels around the Bay Area have offered temporary free or low cost housing to victims, and counties have set up shelters, most people have no long term solution to their housing needs. Additionally, the majority of evacuees fled their homes with no chance to gather their belongings and have subsequently lost almost everything.
Entire parts of the Wine Country have been decimated. Sarah Dean ’18, who has since visited Santa Rosa, remarks that “the photos that you see in the newspaper don’t do the landscape justice. It really looks like a warzone.”
In the wake of the fires, counties face difficult, pressing decisions about how to go about rebuilding. While some affluent neighborhoods affected by the fires, including Santa Rosa’s Fountain Grove, already have concrete plans to rebuild, the futures of most neighborhoods in the Wine Country are uncertain due to the ranging socioeconomic statuses of residents and different visions for rebuilding. However, many people believe that the silver lining in the fires’ destruction is that it provides the perfect opportunity to replace sprawling single family home based areas with more multiunit housing, which could help address the growing housing crisis in the North Bay.
The chairwoman of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisor, Shirlee Zane, told The Press Democrat on November 4 that she reimagines Santa Rosa’s previously suburban Coffey Park neighborhood as having “grocery stores, dog parks, smarter senior housing, single-family homes, higher-density stuff — everything, so we can choose wisely. Of course we have to respect the homeowners, but I do think a lot of people — particularly the newer generation — are open to something other than this suburban sprawl we are all so stuck in.”
Even homeowners that are certain they want to individually rebuild face a complicated process. Dean, who worked for a construction company in Santa Rosa for the last two summers, remarks that the company “is already having conversations with several former clients about rebuilding the homes that they had previously built. For those homeowners, if the insurance money has come through then that is something they went to get moving as quickly as possible.” Still, Dean remarks that “Right now there is a little bit of a delay because the government has to certify contractors to clean up the hazardous waste that is what’s left of most structures that burned down.”
Fire destruction amplified the already prevalent housing crisis in Santa Rosa, destroying 5% of the county’s housing. Before the fires, Sonoma County had a glaringly low rental vacancy rate of 2.3%. In contrast, California has an overall rental vacancy rate of 3.3%and the United States has a rate of 5.9%. In the last year alone, before the fire, the average rent price in Santa Rosa had gone up 6.4% due to low supply. According to Rent Cafe, the current average rent price for a 2 bedroom apartment in Santa Rosa is 1,970 dollars per month. The constantly growing tourism industry in the Wine Country has contributed to a decrease of long term residential rental property as many homes have been converted into Airbnb’s or short term vacation rentals. As an attempt to combat this problem, Sonoma and Napa counties have recently prohibited new permits for vacation rentals in select areas.
In Coffey Park, the Santa Rosa neighborhood most drastically affected and the poster child for the fires, over 1,000 homes were obliterated. Before the fires, Coffey Park was home to a diverse group of people with varying professions, socioeconomic statuses and ethnicities that shared a strong sense of community. Now, many fear that due to the financial burden of rebuilding, Coffey Park will lose the diversity that makes the community so unique, and instead become home to primarily wealthier families like many other suburban areas of the Wine Country.
Compared to the entire neighborhoods obliterated by the fires, the impact of the fires on the wine industry is somewhat insignificant. Of the 600 plus wineries in Napa and Sonoma, just over thirty were victims of the fire, ranging from parts of vineyards being burned to entire tasting rooms, wine storage, and vineyards being destroyed. While these individual wineries do face tough decisions on how to recover and some may have to close causing workers to become unemployed, overall many wineries have come out relatively unscathed. Fortunately, most wineries had already harvested 90% of their grapes before the fires.
However, wines currently fermenting in tanks throughout the Wine Country could be impacted by the fires. Fel Wines winemaker Sarah Green told SF Gate on October 11 that the “Fermentation produces carbon dioxide, so it needs to be vented — you can’t have a tank be completely sealed. It’s not entirely clear how the smoke is interacting with the grapes in the tanks.”
The impact of the fires ultimately extends beyond physical damage in the Wine Country. During the week of October 8, 2017, at the height of the fires, air quality throughout the Bay Area was at a historical high AQI number, which signifies incredibly poor air quality. Napa reached an off the charts AQI of 404 and even San Francisco reached an AQI of 189. An AQI of 151 and up is considered unhealthy, and an AQI of 200-300 is considered very unhealthy. In contrast, the AQIs in both San Francisco and Napa are usually in the 0-50 “Good” Range. Though they have since fallen, the incredibly high and prolonged pollution levels in Napa and other North Bay counties are especially concerning, and could lead to respiratory conditions including Asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease in the population.
The harsh reality is that the fires in the North Bay are ultimately part of a larger picture — Global Warming. According to NASA, the first nine months of 2017 have been record breakingly high — second only to 2016. So far, in 2017, over 8.8 million acres of land have been burned in the U.S. alone, compared to the annual average from 2006-2016 of 6.8 million acres.
John Abatzoglou, a professor at the University of Idaho, believes that the extremity of the fires can in part be attributed to weather patterns in Northern California this year and explained to NPR on October 17, “It was a really wet winter in California that produced a healthy crop of fine fuels that helped carry fire. We then just saw the warmest summer on record in California. That part is consistent with a warming planet. And the effect there is to basically help accelerate the rate which fuels dry out, making them more receptive. And then the big driver, of course, is these Diablo winds, these offshore wind events. And it just so happened that we had these strong wind events that come at a time of the year where the fuels were incredibly dry. And we haven’t seen the autumn rains yet.”
In addition to the more tangible damage, many residents of Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counties face emotional trauma from witnessing the fire firsthand, losing their homes and belongings, or losing a loved one. When the fires first started and approached Santa Rosa on the night of October 8, 2017 and in the early morning of October 9, 2017, the lack of effective alert systems meant that many residents were evacuating at the last minute, without adequate time to grab belongings or leave their homes in a safe way.
Maureen Grinnell, 77, who lives in north Napa recalls looking out her window and seeing flames approach her home while she was watching a movie late at night on October 8, 2017. She told The New York Times on October 14, “From when I first realized what was happening until we left, it was no more than seven to 10 minutes but by the time I started to back the car out of the garage, the house was already on fire. We always thought the alert system would give us time, but there was no notice, no warning. We took almost nothing with us. It was me, my husband, who uses a walker, our granddaughter, and her poodle.”
Since the fires, many individuals have returned to where their homes once stood to dig through the rubble in hopes of finding personal belongings. Coffey Park resident Linda Miller and her husband recount sifting through the remnants of their home days after the fire to search for family mementos and told CBS Local on October 27, “There are a lot of memories, a lot of history, a lot of personal belongings in the rubble. Finding something, anything makes searching worth it.”
