Dozens of Sonoma County’s most vulnerable residents were swiftly evacuated Sunday night as the Glass Fire approached.
Los Guilicos Village is made up of 60 tiny homes and opened earlier this year as an emergency homeless shelter near the community of Oakmont.
“You know, this is going to be fine, there’s not going to see a fire here. We’re not even going to see flames,” thought Jack Tibbetts, Santa Rosa City Councilmember and executive director of St. Vincent de Paul, when he first saw reports of the fire. “But let’s be aggressive about this and treat this like it’s a serious event… my gut tells me we need to just do an evacuation.”
So he and the shelter’s director Chris Grabill quickly mobilized to organize the evacuation, making sure residents had everything they needed in their go bags. When county buses did not arrive, they organized people into two St. Vincent de Paul buses and the resident’s own cars to get everyone to safety.
“We were able to move people off all in one fell swoop. There was no coming and going back and forth,” said Tibbetts. But just to be safe, he and Grabill stayed behind for another 40 minutes in case anyone came back to the site.
That was enough time for the fire to spread from the county line up to Highway 12.
“And that was the point at which we got really scared because the flames were now well down the ridge, they were in the valley,” he said. “I mean it was like an explosion of fire, probably 100, 120 feet in the air and it was moving so fast towards us.”
Thankfully everyone was able to make it to an evacuation center at the Santa Rosa Veteran’s Building, where they then distributed residents among various county shelters and a secondary shelter in the county fairgrounds parking lot.
Four of the units were completely destroyed and many others sustained smoke damage, creating uncertainly about when the residents will be able to return to something like home.
St. Vincent de Paul is raising funds to repair the damage.
