Today we bring you a special edition of the Sonoma County Correspondent looking at the impacts of the 2017 wildfires, which changed our county in so many ways. This edition contains detailed accounts of not only what happened five years ago but how we responded as a County and, in particular, how our departments adjusted and improved its delivery of vital public services. These changes came at a critical time. They not only assisted in our recovery from the Tubbs, Nuns and Pocket fires, which destroyed 5,300 homes in Sonoma County, they have helped us withstand an unprecedented series of emergencies over the last five years, including four major wildfires, a flood, a drought of historic proportions and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This was very much a team effort. Following the 2017 fires, with extensive input from block captains in neighborhoods ravaged by the firestorm, the county prioritized 10 projects to help our community recover and prepare for future disasters. The initiatives included better alerts and evacuation plans, improved building codes, expedited permitting for fire survivors seeking to rebuild, and expanded efforts to reduce the threat of fires by managing vegetation in key areas. I’m very proud of the progress we have made accomplishing so many of these goals. The stories that follow reflect the work that came with the setting of these priorities. 

Finally, I want to credit the dedication and perseverance of our county employees, who stepped forward during the crisis to offer a helping hand and have been assisting in our community’s recovery ever since. Many did so while facing immense personal loss. More than 150 county employees lost their homes in the 2017 fires. The progress we have made in rebuilding our county, as shown in the stories below, are a testament to the tireless work of these employees and a tribute to the tenacity of our entire community. We still have a way to go in terms of building homes and building resiliency, but there’s no question that we are better prepared now than ever before for what challenges may come our way. We thank all members of our community for being a part of this progress.

Sheryl Bratton

County Administrator

Sometimes it feels like I was awoken in 2017 and never went back to sleep. After waking up in the dead of the night on Oct. 8, 2017 and talking to my cousin as he fled his burning home in Coffey Park, I joined the hundreds of other county employees in responding to the Tubbs and Nuns fires.

That night, and in the days that followed, 24 members of our community tragically lost their lives. They were:

We continue to mourn the loss of everyone who died as a result of the Tubbs and Nuns fires. Those deaths and the loss of thousands of homes catalyzed our response as a county and as a community. We were determined to find meaning in the face of this catastrophe.

In the days, weeks and months that followed, as an organization, the county mobilized like never before. We brought fire survivors together and worked with them on debris removal, finding answers to questions about the insurance process and bringing in as many resources as we could.

At the same time, we overhauled how we approached emergency management, alerts and evacuations. 

As the stories in this special edition of SoCo Correspondent highlight, we committed to building up the county’s resiliency to wildfire by allocating $25 million toward vegetation management.

We built the tools to inform the community before, during and after emergencies with SoCoEmergency.org.

All of these efforts were approached through the lens of equity as we established the Office of Equity.

As a community we’ve all woken up to the threat of wildfire around us. As a county government, we’ve woken up to the scale and scope of the task that still lies before us to continue to build our resilience and to prepare for disaster. And now we must endeavor to remain vigilant, not only about  the risks and our changing climate, but also for the opportunities to continue to improve and build our resilience.

On Saturday, Oct. 8, 2022, we will be recognizing the five years since the Sonoma Complex fires in a ceremony in Coffey Park. We’ll look back with sorrow but also with pride for the accomplishments we’ve made over the past five years.

Please join us at 1524 Amanda Place in Santa Rosa at 10 a.m. Spanish interpretation will be available. For those who cannot attend in person, the event will also be livestreamed via the City of Santa Rosa’s YouTube Channel, Youtube.com/CityofSantaRosa, starting at 10 a.m. It also will be shared on the County of Sonoma’s Facebook page.

The magnitude of the challenge was daunting: Sonoma County needed to rebuild after the October 2017 wildfires, which claimed the lives of 24 people and destroyed 5,300 homes in Sonoma County including in unincorporated areas.

But rebuilding alone was not going to be enough. The county, through the leadership of the Board of Supervisors, made a commitment to become more resilient, better prepared, and more capable of withstanding future wildfires and other crises that threatened the region’s future.

As a result, the Board has committed tens of millions of dollars in federal funds, PG&E settlement dollars and other funds since 2017 to help the county achieve those objectives. Today, the county is far better prepared for disaster than it was when wind-whipped flames ripped through neighborhoods in the dead of night without warning. Here are 10 key actions the Board has taken to bolster Sonoma County since the fires occurred.

Many lessons would be learned during the 2017 wildfires. To implement them, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors created the Department of Emergency Management in 2019 and empowered the new agency to lead disaster planning, response and recovery.

The launching of the DEM has led to significant improvements, including:

• Faster alerts, in English and Spanish, with alternative ways of warning residents of impending danger.
• A network of cameras, powered by artificial intelligence, to quickly detect fires in remote areas at any hour of day or night.
• Improvements in evacuation planning, including enhancements in services provided at emergency shelters.
• Better communications, including closer coordination with local, state, federal and nonprofit organizations.

Few county departments played a more pivotal role in providing information and direct support to the community – and saving lives – following the outbreak of the Sonoma Complex fires than the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office.

Since then, the Office has fine-tuned evacuation plans and zones, implementing an efficient process that has proven to be effective even under the most unpredictable of circumstances. The Sheriff’s Office has also improved communications and response by implementing bilingual Nixle alerts, hi-lo sirens, evacuation tags, and a gate code registration program, all as a result of the most important lessons learned from the 2017 fires.

Every home rebuilt after the 2017 fires needed a building permit. Sonoma County’s permitting authority was at the forefront of the recovery, rolling out a new expedited permitting track for fire survivors as they began the process of rebuilding not only their homes but their lives after the fires. Permit Sonoma embraced many of the lessons learned through the tragic fires, and subsequent disasters to bring improvements to its customers as a whole.

After the 2017 fires, county leaders concluded that better vegetation management would help reduce the severity of future wildfires, improve evacuation access, and save lives and property. The Board of Supervisors invested $25 million to create a wide-ranging vegetation management program that has funded 46 projects to date. Ranging from community chipper programs to landscape-scale projects that help create shaded fuel breaks along prominent ridges to protect communities, the vegetation management program is helping to make Sonoma County a safer, more resilient community.

An ongoing feature series highlighting your public servants across a variety of departments at the County of Sonoma.

Name: Nicole Grace

Title: Senior Communications Dispatcher, Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office

Years with County: 20

What is your role during a disaster? I am a dispatcher. My role is always, first and foremost, a dispatcher. All county workers are disaster workers, regardless of their position, but during a major disaster such as the 2017 fires, my responsibility is to the dispatch center. It is an all-hands-on-deck, emergency staffing situation. We often need extra hands to answer phone calls and help people seeking emergency assistance. Dispatchers must be available to work at a moment’s notice. During a disaster, I come in early, and I stay late. This is what we do. We are here to get the resources to the people of Sonoma County, and to support the deputies in their duties.

How has your job changed since the 2017 fires? Our jobs have evolved since the 2017 fires. Dispatchers are now trained to send out Nixle alerts in the event that a watch commander is not in a position to do so. We also keep updated maps of evacuation zones on hand during major incidents and are regularly updated as things change.

But my day-to-day tasks really haven’t changed since the 2017 fires. There may be a few more calls whenever there is smoke in the air, which is to be expected. Not a single person living in this county wasn’t affected by what happened in 2017 and we all feel a little of that trauma when it gets smoky. However, we still function in the same ways we have always strived to do.

Before the devastating October 2017 wildfires, mass evacuations were relatively uncommon in Sonoma County. Since then, county leaders have launched a comprehensive initiative to prepare for disasters that occur without warning. Innovations that emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic and recent wildfires have completely changed the way the county Human Services Department activates evacuation hubs and emergency shelters.

“We have learned a lot since 2017, and we’ve worked very hard to be prepared for future disasters,” said Angela Struckmann, director of Human Services. “We’re ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice and serve the public when they need us the most.”

The 1,369 miles of roads in unincorporated Sonoma County provide critical evacuation routes for rural residents during wildfires. Keeping them safe and clear is just one job of the county Department of Transportation and Public Works.

The firestorm caused tens of millions of dollars in damage to public property. Road damage alone, including damage to roads while removing debris left by the fire, was $80 million. Other infrastructure damages, including the cost of removing hazardous trees, totaled $13 million. Repairing the damage – while fortifying public property to withstand future fires – was essential.

In response, the county launched multiple initiatives to expand vegetation removal programs along county roads and increase support for rural residents seeking to reduce fire fuels on their properties.

After his Coffey Park home narrowly avoided burning in the Tubbs Fire, Brian Whipple, Sonoma County Animal Services operations manager, experienced the dizzying tempo of days of power outages at the county’s main shelter and weeks of animal rescues in the aftermath of the 2017 firestorm. Once the emergency subsided, Whipple and the dedicated staff at Animal Services started planning for the future, creating systems to serve more community members faster, saving more animals and being in more places at once during disasters.

With more than 16,000 acres of park land to steward, the Regional Parks Department staff have worked constantly since 2017 toward the goal of adapting to climate change.

By building up capacity to accomplish critical fuels management projects, prescribed burns, livestock grazing and drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Regional Parks puts in the intentional effort to meet the challenges that were so tragically visited on the county. Educational outreach is another major effort, as experts in the treasured ecosystems of the county regularly present to the public, lead guided hikes and seek to further develop a communal effort toward climate and wildfire adaptation. 

The Sonoma County Office of Equity was officially formed in 2020, but the seeds of its creation stem from the revelations of inequities that were highlighted during the response to the 2017 fires. Most official messaging at the time was sent out only in English and those in the Latinx, undocumented and monolingual Spanish and Indigenous communities lacked appropriate information to react, to keep their families safe and take advantage of community resources for help. In the aftermath, as the county listened to the community, it became clear that more work was needed to mitigate these shortcomings.

As subsequent disasters struck the county, the importance of the work by the Office of Equity became even clearer and, with the American Rescue Plan Act, the county began investing in those impacted communities.

The Fire Prevention Division of Permit Sonoma continues to expand useful programs such as its Curbside Chipper Program as demand continues to soar. The lessons learned since 2017 for Fire Prevention have been manifold but still are dwarfed by the growth of awareness that the community now has around the risk of wildfire. This makes the job of Fire Prevention much simpler. Instead of trying to convince people of the risk, they can now focus on educating county residents on how to lessen it.

Every county employee has two jobs: the one they are hired for, and the one they can be called upon to fulfill during an emergency. All public employees are disaster service workers, a designation that obligates them to step forward during an emergency and work where they are most needed for the public good. Supporting these employees is the job of the county Human Resources Department.

“Our employees play an essential role in the county’s ability to serve the public during emergencies,” said Christina Cramer, director of Human Resources. “We have worked hard to minimize the risks they face and help them cope with the tremendous pressure they experience while serving our community during a disaster.”

The 2017 wildfires forced the county to rapidly change the way it served the public. The county developed new rules to keep farmworkers safe while providing agricultural companies access to their properties during a disaster.

It developed plans to help the business community get back on its feet and chart a course for economic recovery.

It created a new website with detailed information to help residents understand current emergencies, connect with recovery resources and prepare for future disasters.

Its lawyers played a critical role in shaping the response to the fires while helping local and state officials craft new measures to fortify the county against the next crisis.

And it helped families obtain the financial support they deserved to care for their children.

Interested in what's going on at the County of Sonoma?

Sign up for the SoCo Correspondent here.

¿Está interesado en leer sobre lo que hace el Condado de Sonoma cada mes? Regístrese aquí para suscribirse a nuestro boletín, el SoCo Correspondent.

A publication of the County Administrator’s Office – Communications Staff