SANTA ROSA — When fast-moving flames threatened the town of Geyserville on Wednesday night, dozens of people were rushed to a shelter in nearby Healdsburg.
Less than three days later, some of the same evacuees found themselves once again fleeing for safety — from the same center where they found temporary shelter.
Fire authorities issued a new mandatory evacuation order Saturday covering a vast swathe of northern Sonoma County, including the shelter they were sleeping at.
“It feels like the fire is chasing me,” sighed Madonna Tavares, who was woken up at 5:30 a.m. Thursday to see a firefighter knocking on her door and the hills behind him alive with flames. After spending a night in the Healdsburg shelter, she and her husband Victor planned to sleep Saturday night inside their car in a Santa Rosa parking lot.
That even an evacuation center had to be evacuated showed how dangerous authorities expect the Kincade Fire will become Saturday evening as it’s whipped by historically strong winds. Firefighters worry powerful gusts to the southwest could push the fire into a string of towns along Highway 101.
After the fire sparked Wednesday night, about 90 people stayed at the Healdsburg Community Center shelter, which is being run by the American Red Cross. They were taken to the Santa Rosa Veterans Center on Saturday afternoon, as the evacuation zone expanded to cover all of Healdsburg.
“I’m a refugee, man,” said Mario Lopez, who was staying with friends in Geyserville when the fire started. “When you’re escaping a bad situation, you expect to go to a place that’s secure — not a place that’s just as chaotic.”
Now, “I don’t know what I’m going to do next,” he said as he sat in the shelter cafeteria wearing an FC Barcelona tank top.
The Tavareses — who fled Geyserville with their two terriers, Jake and Savanna — spent Thursday night at the Healdsburg shelter before moving into a Best Western hotel Friday afternoon.
“We took a shower last night, we got comfortable, we had breakfast,” Tavares said. “And then my phone buzzed” — with an alert letting them know their hotel room was in the middle of a new evacuation zone.
“I was shaking my phone, like, nooo, not again!” she said. “I’m about ready to give up.”
The evacuees also included more than 40 guest workers from Mexico who were working at a local vineyard on seasonal visas and living in housing threatened by the flames, said Leticia Romero, an organizer with the nonprofit group Corazon Healdsburg.
Adrian Orozco, 30, who worked on the vines since May, said he and his roommates could see the flames on the hills above their living quarters Wednesday night. The workers stayed in the Healdsburg shelter for three nights before being taken to Santa Rosa.
In a sign of the confusion surrounding the quick evacuation, they were told Saturday morning they were being bused to Oakland for a flight home to Mexico, Orozco said. Instead, they were dropped off at the Santa Rosa shelter. Now they’ve been told they’ll get to fly home tomorrow.
“I’m just tired,” Orozco said. His wife in Guanajuato had been texting him worriedly about the fires, and he’s excited to be back home with his young daughter and son. “I’m probably going to sleep for three days when I get home,” he said.
As the hours ticked by Saturday, more and more evacuees arrived at the Santa Rosa shelter. Some set up lawn chairs in the parking lot, while dog owners took their pets for walks around the building.
Dorothy Hammack, 79, said the news that she had to leave her home in Windsor wasn’t the worst thing that happened to her this week — she was diagnosed with breast cancer two days earlier.
“If I can get through the fire, I can get through the cancer,” Hammack declared, saying she was determined to focus on one thing at a time.
She and her fiancé, Aldo Lovati, planned to spend the night in her 1992 Mercury Grand Marquis, instead of sleeping inside on a cot in a room with dozens of other evacuees.
Dorothy Hammack was diagnosed with breast cancer two days ago, and had to evacuate her house today. She and her fiancé Aldo Lovati plan to spend the night in her 1992 Mercury Grand Marquis. “If I can get through the fire, I can get through the cancer,” she says #KincadeFire pic.twitter.com/BJwMNGXxG8
— Casey Tolan (@caseytolan) October 26, 2019
Worry about the growing fire — along with multiple Pacific Gas and Electric Co. outages — has caused “so much pent-up anxiety over the last few days, it felt like a pall hanging over the whole town,” said Tony Klisura, who evacuated from Windsor with his wife Denise and their three dogs.
“You go about your daily life not really thinking about it, and then all of a sudden, it’s your turn,” he said.
A steady stream of volunteers came by the shelters in recent days to drop off donations of food, clothing, pet food. Someone brought the Healdsburg shelter a chrysanthemum set for every cafeteria table.
“I’m sure many of the people who came in here to donate things are now being evacuated themselves,” said Barbara Wood, a Red Cross volunteer, as buses idled outside the Healdsburg shelter waiting to bring evacuees further south.
Some of the volunteers came in costume. Santa Rosa residents John Jarvis and Kyle Baxter showed up at the veterans center Saturday in full spandex as Spider-Man and Captain America, hoisting cartons of bottled water and high-fiving kids. They got a round of applause as they posed in the veterans hall, with several families snapping photos.
“What they’ve been through is like something out of the movies,” Jarvis said of the kids who got evacuated, “so we wanted to bring the movie magic to them.”
