GUERNEVILLE — People living in the Russian River Valley often say the area only has two seasons: flood season and fire season, with little rest in between.
Nearly six months after the region saw the worst flooding in 25 years, residents are now bracing themselves for the possibilities of a fast moving wildfire hitting the area while major roads are still closed.
“That thought terrifies me,” said Sonoma County Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, who represents Guerneville. "We just have so much fuel loading right now in our forests, so many dead standing oaks. It scares me to think about high winds and a catastrophic wildfire.”
With flood recovery still underway, there is little time for local leaders to get a head start on fire season. “We don’t have a break. We’re always either preparing, or recovering, or both," said Hopkins.
FEMA has yet to approve funding to clean up debris on several major roads, which means mudslides and washouts still block key exit routes.
“That’s what people are concerned about if we get a big fire,” said Monte Rio Fire Chief Steve Baxman. “How are we going to get everybody out of town?”
Baxman has served the region as a firefighter for 49 years and says Guerneville is now more crowded than ever.
“It’s not just a backwoods town anymore. We’re on the map," he said. "We’re a main thoroughfare to the coast.”
And the danger only grows as temperatures heat up. “When it’s 100 degrees in Santa Rosa, everybody will be heading to the ocean to cool off. Weekends, the place is just jammed," he said.
While local leaders continue to lobby the federal government to fund the cleanup effort, it is a battle that is not likely to be resolved in time for this year’s fire season.
Baxman has watched the river flood, the mountain slide and roads cave in. But he says the delay in getting debris flows cleaned up is the longest he can remember. “This is real slow in comparison, especially these big ones. Little ones, you can still get around and block them up," he said. "But these bigger ones that block a whole road, you’d think they’d get in and take care of them.”
“We have about 13,000 people between Forestville and Duncan’s Mills. There are really only two main arterials, there’s River Road and there’s 116,” saud Hopkins. “In the event of a major wildfire that is fast moving – I stay awake at night thinking about how hard it would be to get all of those people out safely.”
“And what actually terrifies me even more is that we don’t have any sufficient emergency notification systems. We tried a wireless emergency alert out in downtown Guerneville. It was a miserable failure.”
That could present an even bigger problem if a fire hits during peak tourism season.
“Tourists – they don’t have landlines. They could be at the river when the fire is happening,” said Hopkins, who worries tourists will not know they need to evacuate, or where to go, until it’s too late. “What we need are boots on the ground. We need more firefighters; we need more sheriffs’ deputies. We need people who are gonna be knocking on the door getting people out.”
Maintaining a robust firefighting crew is a problem the region has been grappling with for some time. The Monte Rio Fire Protection District has a staff of just six, all volunteers, so they instituted a stipend training program that has proven to be popular. But trainees have little motivation to stay on as a volunteer when they could turn their experience into a career.
“One for the army, one for the forest service, two for Cal Fire, one for a fire department job in Arizona,” said Baxman, ticking off a list of recent trainees. “We started them here; they put in a couple months or half a year here, then they move on to something else.”
The demand for workers is high across the entire county.
“If you can swing a hammer, you can make more money in Santa Rosa doing construction,” said Guerneville chef and restauranteur Crista Luedtke.
Yet Luedtke is confident that the community will rise again. “We’re here and we’re thriving. And in fact I feel like the town of Guerneville looks cleaner and more alive than it has in many years.”