The Tubbs Fire, October Two Thousand Seventeen

The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning on October seventh, two thousand seventeen. The conditions were the kind that fire scientists call extreme: very low humidity, dry vegetation after a dry summer, and incoming Diablo winds from the northeast. By nine forty-three the following evening, a fire had started off Highway one twenty-eight near Tubbs Lane outside Calistoga. Within three hours, it had traveled more than twelve miles.

That night, in less than four hours of darkness, the Tubbs Fire crossed the hills and descended into the northwest neighborhoods of Santa Rosa. Peak wind gusts reached more than sixty miles per hour. The fire moved faster than evacuation orders could reach every household, faster than people could find their cars, faster than some had time to understand what was happening. At least twenty-two people died in Sonoma County in the fire and its immediate aftermath.

In the Coffey Park neighborhood, approximately thirteen hundred homes, mostly detached single-family houses on ordinary suburban streets, burned to the foundations. The neighborhood had been developed in the nineteen seventies and eighties, and almost nothing remained. On the Fountaingrove ridge to the east, the Fountaingrove Inn, a historic round barn adjacent to it, and a large hotel were destroyed. The Journey's End Mobile Home Park lost one hundred sixteen of its one hundred sixty units.

At the time of its containment on October thirty-first, the Tubbs Fire had burned thirty-six thousand eight hundred acres and destroyed more than five thousand six hundred structures, more than half of them homes in Santa Rosa. It was, at that moment, the most destructive wildfire in California history, a record that would not hold for long in the years that followed.

Coffey Park was rebuilt, largely by the same families who had lived there, in a recovery that planners studied for years afterward. The round barn in Fountaingrove, which had been a Sonoma County landmark since the eighteen eighties, was gone. Some losses cannot be rebuilt.

This is a part of the country where the hills stay dry through long summers, where winds can shift in minutes, and where what happened in October of two thousand seventeen is not finished as a story. It is a condition.