Wine Country fires: An unstoppable, deadly inferno’s first hours A monster firestorm became unstoppable almost as soon as it started

Wine Country fires: An unstoppable, deadly inferno’s first hours A monster firestorm became unstoppable almost as soon as it started

His crew had just finished putting out a grass fire when Santa Rosa Fire Chief Tony Gossner’s radio crackled at about 10 p.m.

“We’ve got a fire at Safari West and it’s coming our way,” the dispatcher said.

The wildlife preserve set in Sonoma County’s thickly wooded hills was just 6 miles away, and Gossner knew that it was a uniquely dangerous spot. The winds this Sunday night were stiff, and parched grass and tinder-dry trees filled the valleys leading straight to town. Gossner drove up a hill to take a look.

Off in the distance, as he crested the slope, was an orange glow, angry and wide.

“My God,” he thought. “We’re in trouble.”

9:45 p.m.: It just needed a spark

Sometime in the half hour before that radio dispatch — Cal Fire records say 9:45 p.m. — something had ignited in the woods in neighboring Napa County, near tiny Tubbs Lane just north of Calistoga. October is high fire season in California, and all evening the dreaded Diablo winds, dry and reaching hurricane speed, had been blasting through the area at up to 80 miles an hour in 80-degree weather. All that was needed was a spark somewhere.

The Tubbs Fire grew at an astonishing pace. It would roar through the sloped forests of Napa and Sonoma counties’ fabled Wine Country and head southwest toward Santa Rosa, the biggest city in the region. Within five hours, this fiery monster would be just one of several blazes burning. The Atlas Peak Fire near Lake Berryessa and four others ignited in the central wine region, and another scorched Mendocino County just up the coast.

The fires hit with a collective ferocity seldom, if ever, seen in California. The Tubbs Fire would prove the most lethal and destructive.

By night’s end, driven by capricious winds, the swarm of conflagrations would hopscotch seemingly everywhere across an astonishing 100 square miles of Wine Country, growing into the worst wildland-urban cluster of fires in state history. At least 40 people would die and more than 5,000 structures would be incinerated. One of the nation’s most popular tourist regions would be ravaged, the fires’ unstoppable fury continuing day after day as fire crews struggled to tame them.

Investigators are scratching for clues to what ignited such a huge swarm of blazes. But Jon Keeley, a fire ecologist at UCLA, said the strongest likelihoods are arson or human-induced accidents, a careless match, a spark from a muffler or power lines slapping against trees in the high winds.

“Records show that in the past 96 years, 99 percent of the wildland fires in Sonoma County were started by humans,” said Keeley, who is cataloging all wildfire ignition sources in the state since 1919. “But that having been said, I don’t know that there’s anything those firefighters could have done on that first night.”

Firefighters estimate that at times, the flames raced 230 feet per minute and, inconceivably, threw embers a full mile ahead of the fire front. It moved so fast that chickens, cats and other animals were charred where they stood, left standing like blackened statues.

The fires awed Bill Stewart, a UC Berkeley forestry professor.

“These fires are off the charts,” he said. “There just aren’t enough firefighters in the West to fight that much fire. ... Those trees, on fire, were pure ember machines that really kicked things into a new level. We’ll be studying this for years to come.”

In this multifront fire still burning after more than a week, nothing was as destructive as the flames that struck in its first hours. Thousands of people, many asleep, were so thoroughly caught by surprise that they had mere moments to flee — and not everyone could. Most of the death and obliteration of neighborhoods occurred in the nine or so hours before dawn, when it rampaged unabated.

10:30 p.m.: A ‘freight train’ of flames

Among the first to get a glimpse of the Tubbs Fire was 63-year-old Richard Horwath.

His rock-walled home is on Franz Valley School Road in Calistoga, in a forested area just west of the ignition point. A little before 10:30, as he was getting ready for bed, heavy smoke started seeping through his windows. He tugged on sweatpants and poked his head outside.

“Get out!” a neighbor was screaming. Another was racing up the road in his car, leaning on the horn. Over the ridge above their small country lane, a bright-red gleam stabbed the night.

Horwath dashed inside the house he had hand-built 31 years ago, crafting its long wooden deck, metal roof and outdoor shed one nail at a time. He roused his wife, Kathy, who was about to go to bed. They grabbed what they could — clothes, shoes, whatever was in the medicine cabinet. They left behind all their documents, artwork, photographs.

In the few minutes that took, 100-foot flames began marching over the ridge, tossing embers ahead like confetti.

“It sounded like a freight train, just this loud roar of noise,” Horwath said.

They jumped into their two cars and tore through the winding country roads, trying to get to downtown Calistoga and stay ahead of the fire. Winds gusting at 60 to 70 mph tossed their cars across the lanes and sent towering oak trees that lined the road crashing to the ground, catapulting debris across the asphalt. Steering through the mess was like being inside a horrific video game. “It was hellacious,” said Kathy Horwath, 55. “I felt like I was in a ‘Mad Max’ movie.”

It took them four hours to make it to town. Usually it’s a 15-minute trip.

Behind them, the Tubbs Fire was gobbling house after house.

12:30 a.m.: ‘We need to get out now!’

The ridge along Mark West Springs Road, 6 miles southwest, was the Tubbs Fire’s next target. By 12:30, flames had formed an undulating wall crawling up its eastern slopes.

The ridge was home to the 400-acre Safari West animal refuge. While its owner hosed down the pens and paddocks on his sprawling compound to protect the hyenas, giraffes and other exotic creatures, residents in homes layering the far side of the ridge were still wondering about the smell of smoke in the air.

"A little after 10 p.m. ... I actually called Cal Fire to ask the status of the fire," said Brian Padgett, 43, who lives on Michele Way. "They said there was a small fire near Calistoga, and the Napa fire, and they said, 'You guys should be fine.'" He, his wife, Michele, and their two young children went to sleep.

Three hours later, Padgett jerked awake, choking on smoke. He pushed open the sliding glass door on the second-story deck and saw clouds of burning embers swooping past the homes on their road.

“We need to get out of the house now!” Padgett barked to his family. As they scrambled to the family cars, the power clicked off in the house. Fire licked the sides of their vehicles as they dashed down the road and blasted tendrils of flame in front of them. They left everything behind — Padgett’s 10 high-end racing bicycles, hang-gliding and scuba-diving equipment, family photographs, computers. Their 13-year-old cat, Tsunami. Their 20-year-old leopard gecko. A rare 1986 Mustang.

There was no time to help anyone else, Padgett said. Finally safe at a friend’s house in Petaluma, they anguished all night about their neighbors, many of them elderly. The fire “was moving so fast,” Padgett said. “We didn’t get an alert or a call, and I suspect if we didn’t, they didn’t.”

They’d learn later that at least two people died on Mark West Springs Road.

1:30 a.m.: Waking Rivera Court

On the first night and morning of the fires, hundreds of firefighters would stream into the region from across Northern California, swelling the front-line ranks to about 1,000. Still, Cal Fire spokesman Scott McLean would say Monday, they were overwhelmed. “It’s a no-win situation. It’s just coming. There’s no way to stop it.”

Officials in Sonoma County — where Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa and the brunt of the deaths were — didn’t want to spread panic. They decided against sending out a mass alert to area cell phones to warn of the swiftly spreading flames. Instead, warnings were sent by radio, email and other means. Many learned of the fire from people who rushed from house to house, knocking and yelling.

Sometimes, it was emergency crews. Often it was neighbors. Like Larry Perez.

Perez, 66, lives on Rivera Court, on a slope overlooking the flatlands of Santa Rosa. It’s part of a quiet community where the neighbors wave hello and everyone knows each other . Their ridge was the next in line for the Tubbs Fire, but it hadn’t yet leaped from Mark West Springs Road when Perez went to sleep just before midnight.

A little before 1:30 a.m., the power in his house went off, then came back on, then off again. He started hearing pops, like the sound of electric line transformers exploding. From his front door, he saw the ominous glow off in the distance. Ribbons of fire, burning on hillsides miles away, were heading his way.

Perez woke his wife, Liz, 64, then began running through the neighborhood. One by one, he banged on doors, calling each neighbor by name: “Ryan! ... Karen! ... Dennis! ... Jay!” After nearly two hours, the skin on his knuckles had rubbed raw, and blood splattered each time he pounded. He kept knocking.

“I got everybody up,” Perez said. “I didn’t leave one behind.”

By 2:30 a.m., the ugly fire had reached Rivera Court. He and Liz piled suitcases, their dog and their turtle into the family car and fled downhill to the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, where an evacuation center was already set up.

The worst of the monster fire was still ahead.

Wine Country ablaze

Gently spread across Napa and Sonoma counties, the region known as Wine Country is a slow-paced land of vineyards, ranches, suburban tracts and touristy getaways connected by winding, tree-lined lanes and a few key highways. A woodsy cousin to San Francisco, it’s a land of stone-castle tasting rooms, ramshackle farmhouses, old family homes and placid suburbs. Visitors flock to its wineries and world-renowned restaurants throughout the year.

Sunday night in the Indian summer of October is usually a time for barbecues or dinner out at a tony restaurant. No one expected the tragedy that was unfolding this Sunday. It seemed like the entire Wine Country was ablaze.

About 20 miles southeast of Calistoga, and 20 minutes before the Tubbs Fire ignited, another huge blaze had broken out on Atlas Peak Road between Lake Berryessa and the town of Napa. It took longer to carve its path, but by the time it reached full fury that first night, it had scorched more than a dozen of the area’s most storied wineries. Some, including Signorello Estate and White Rock Vineyards, were largely destroyed.

Mike Hirby’s Relic Winery is just a stone’s throw from Atlas Peak Road. He was driving home on Highway 12 about 11:30 p.m. when the winds buffeted his car so violently that he had to pull off the road. As he waited, his cell phone lit up with text messages. Is your winery OK? friends asked.

He started driving again, trying all night to get to the winery, but police lines blocked the way. “After a while, I had to just figure the whole place was gone,” he said. “There was too much fire everywhere.”

Several miles to the west on a ranch in rural Kenwood, Jeffrey Mayo looked outside and saw “a massive fireball in the sky.” He and his girlfriend quickly fled his 40-acre Mayo Winery.

When he made it back early Monday morning, he found flames creeping up the hill to his ranch but, amazingly, not actually touching it. Dressed in the flip-flops, T-shirt and shorts he’d thrown on in his rush to flee, he teamed with his caretaker and the caretaker’s wife, trying to fight off the fire with a rake and a shovel.

"We tried as hard as we could," he said. "The fire eventually enveloped the hill. When I left, the flames were 30 feet high." He didn't have time to grab much — no extra clothes, no family pictures. But he took a briefcase full of business records, and grabbed 12 of his favorite bottles of wine, including a legendary 1996 Petrus.

3 a.m.: A neighborhood vanishes

From its ignition point near Richard Horwath’s house to Santa Rosa, the flames of the Tubbs Fire chewed like a rototiller through 12 miles of hills dense with ash trees and oak and sprinkled with rustic old houses and newer estates. After a half-decade of drought followed by a wet winter that sprouted now-dried vegetation, the area was kindling ready to be lit.

At 3 a.m., the fire surged down from Larry Perez’s ridgeline neighborhood into the flatlands of Santa Rosa. It hit like a blowtorch. Embers set fire to far-off roofs and trees while the fire front zigzagged through neighborhoods, devouring houses and businesses. A Hilton Hotel sprouted flames. So did a Kohl’s department store, the Fountaingrove Inn and rows of cars and trucks.

The fire then began to consume the Journey’s End Mobile Home Park, a retirement community just east of Highway 101.

Priest Morgan, 62, woke up just after 3 a.m. to find everything but his row of trailers on fire. His first impulse was to run, and he did. “But just for a little bit, then I thought, ‘What the heck am I doing?’” he said. “I wasn’t going to leave those houses alone. Those are all nice people, mostly older, a lot of them disabled. I can help.”

He returned home to find fire crews too busy evacuating patients from the nearby Kaiser Permanente Hospital to continue defending the mobile homes. Morgan, who trained in firefighting when he was in the Army in the 1970s, told them, “Hey, let me at it if you can’t do this.”

“Damned if they didn’t give me a 2.5-inch hose, so I went to work,” Morgan said. “I sprayed down everything I could. It was a struggle, and after a little bit the captain brought me three more guys.”

They fought the flames “for a good three hours,” he said, and saved the last line of mobile homes. “Everything else was gone.”

Morgan also found a Journey's End neighbor abandoned in her home in her wheelchair and got her to safety. But lying in the ashes of another unit was the body of 69-year-old Linda Tunis. She'd moved there from Florida in January to be near family. A proudly independent woman with a failing memory, she was just getting to know her neighbors.

“She was a very nice lady, I remember her face,” Morgan said, his voice filled with frustration. “It’s a terrible shame, what a nice lady.”

Death came in many forms that night, striking with haphazard cruelty. One woman died in her husband’s arms while they took refuge in a swimming pool. An 80-year-old couple perished as they tried to flee their Santa Rosa house. The victims known so far ranged in age from 14 to 100. Investigators say they are certain to find more as they pick through smoking rubble.

3 a.m.: Flames jump the highway

While Morgan was spraying down his trailers, Santa Rosa Fire Chief Gossner was setting up a command center at the Kmart store parking lot across Highway 101. The six-lane freeway, he figured, would be a good firebreak. He’d long since launched three strike teams and mustered every firefighter he could, but with embers swirling everywhere and new fires exploding constantly, he was losing the battle.

No matter where their fire rigs planted, it wasn’t enough. At one point, an exhausted firefighter slumped against a wall near the fully engulfed Schmidt Firearms store, listening to the explosions inside. His truck was the only one nearby, and the crew was busy tamping down flames shooting into the night sky from the neighboring furniture store. They had to give up on the gun shop.

“No one else is coming,” the fireman said flatly. Every firefighter available was already on the job.

“As I’m looking out ... there was fire — fire to the left of me, fire to the right of me,” Gossner recalled. Standing in the Kmart parking lot, he heard propane tanks exploding all around. The winds were howling through Santa Rosa at 45 to 50 mph. “It was just unreal,” he said.

Then the flames lunged across the freeway, and the Kmart store caught fire. Gossner called out to his crew: “We’ve got to get out of here!”

Just then the dispatch radio rattled: “We got houses gone in Coffey Park .” Gossner knew the neighborhood well, a 1980s-era development of upscale homes. “OK, we’ll get on it,” he thought. “OK, a few homes. We’ll douse them.”

What he saw when he got there made his stomach sink.

3:30 a.m.: Escape from Coffey Park

Before they’d gone to bed late Sunday night, 13-year-old Jaden Frank had tried to persuade his father, Jimmie Allen, that something was wrong.

He smelled smoke through his bedroom window, and the glass was shaking in its frame. In the front yard, leaves were falling off the elephant tree. The sky was a black pit — too dark to see the moon and stars. Somewhere, it sounded like a neighbor was cooking popcorn. Pop-pop-pop.

“Go back to sleep,” his dad said groggily. He had grown up in Lake County and was used to fire season. “It’s probably nothing,” he said. “Maybe a kitchen fire.”

Toward 3:30 a.m., the popping became small explosions. The air was now choked with brown and black smoke. Allen rolled off the couch, where he’d fallen asleep watching baseball on his new 55-inch television. He looked outside: Flames were shooting high over rooftops a few blocks away. Sirens tore the air.

Allen brushed his teeth and changed clothes while Jaden emptied his drawers and threw his PlayStation 4 into a bag. His Halloween costume, a camouflage disguise, had recently arrived in the mail, and he packed that too. Miley Allen, his 9-year-old sister, grabbed her Kindle and two pillows. Both kids were still in pajamas.

Before they left, Allen took a Snapchat image of his new TV. “I’ll be upset if this burns down,” he captioned it in jest.

“We will be back soon,” he told the kids as he packed them into his pickup truck.

Drivers clogging Kerry Lane wouldn’t let him pull out of the driveway. They sat idling as embers the size of dinner plates rained down on roofs. The smoke was so thick Miley thought she was going to vomit.

Fifteen minutes passed, and there was no break in the traffic. Finally, Allen hit the gas and cut in front of a car. They were moving.

Kerry Lane to Hopper Avenue to Barnes Road. Nothing looked familiar. The freeway was shut down. Houses were disappearing into flames. Even the railroad tracks seemed to be spitting fire. Panicked faces peered from car windows as police directed traffic, yelling, “Go, go, go!” The air was a murky stew of sparks and smoke. Sirens competed with the roar of burning buildings.

Already, Allen knew he would be thinking about this moment for years. Of all the odds and ends he didn’t grab, of the time they had wasted.

When Gossner’s crew screeched around the corner, the homes of Coffey Park were lighting up like matches. One roof would ignite, then a yard, then a tree, then another roof, then a wall. The flames were in front of them, behind them, then skipping to the sides, then behind again, a maddening maelstrom of fire.

“We couldn’t get out in front of it,” Gossner said.

Through the night and into the morning, Gossner and his crews fought a running battle, dousing anything they could and pulling people out of their homes. At times the blazes were so fast, the flames so huge, they could only watch powerlessly as houses exploded in flame.

The same was true all over Wine Country. Even with 1,000 firefighters — a force that would grow to more than eight times that many by week’s end — nature imposed its will.

7 a.m.: Devastation dawns

The winds backed down in the growing gray light of dawn and everyone took hope that maybe some relief was in sight. It was not to be. A long, hellish week lay ahead.

When the sun finally crested the horizon around 7 a.m., the smoldering tableau of Santa Rosa instead drove home a sense of hopelessness.

“I looked around at the mobile home park, the burned-up hotels, everything around me, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God,’” Morgan said. “It looked like London after the blitz.”

Gossner had only a moment to take in the sight. “The sun came up,” he said, “and ... holy smoke.”

A firefighter for 27 years and a chief for four, he has spent his career fighting fires, trying to save lives. This one left him at a loss for words.

“It was just ... unstoppable,” he said. He pursed his lips, struggled to keep his face a mask of authority. But sadness in his eyes betrayed him.

“You get a pit in your stomach,” the chief managed. “It’s terrible.”

Loss, luck in the fire’s wake

At least 40 active-duty firefighters are believed to have lost their homes while working to contain the cluster of blazes this past week. In that erratic way of all fires, the flames spared some things, obliterated others. Coffey Park was leveled as few housing tracts ever have been, but here and there were oddities left intact. A perfectly preserved jack-o’-lantern sat on the porch of a flattened house. A redwood tree neighbors had loathed as a fire hazard remained standing where everything else was gone.

Listen: Stories from the Firestorm

In Calistoga, the Horwath family home stood untouched, surrounded on every side by the husks of torched homes. The Relic Winery suffered little damage, and though the Mayo ranch lost two houses and grapes left unpicked may be ruined by smoke, most of the spread remained intact. Safari West was scarred by fire, but lost none of its menagerie of 1,000 animals.

Larry Perez still doesn’t know if his house is standing. Jimmie Allen’s house was incinerated. So was the Padgett home, now just a heap of powder with the hulks of a car, a water tank and a few other bits of metal poking up.

A few days after the fire claimed his home, Padgett broke into sobs. “This is very hard,” he said, choking out the words. “We’re just trying to take it minute to minute. We hug each other and tell each other we have each other and that’s really all that matters.”

For the families of those who perished in the fires, like Linda Tunis of Journey’s End, there is no such relief. There are only whatever shreds of solace can be pulled like threads here and there.

Tunis was on the phone with her daughter, Jessica, when the Tubbs Fire engulfed her trailer.

“I was telling her I loved her when the phone died,” Jessica Tunis said.

Chronicle staff writers Jill Tucker, Lizzie Johnson, Peter Fimrite, Marissa Lang, Kurtis Alexander, Esther Mobley and Michael Cabanatuan contributed to this report.



Graphics by John Blanchard.



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