A walk in the ashes of the Tubbs Fire: 5 years after Sonoma County's worst disaster - The Santa Rosa Press Democrat
The fire would spawn lawsuits, legislation and life-changing appraisals. At first, there was only escape. Piccinini, then the interim chief of the Windsor and Rincon Valley Fire districts, spent the early hours of the night of Oct. 8, at the emergency dispatch center in Santa Rosa, helping to coordinate evacuation orders for an immediately worrisome firestorm. He understood the danger when he got a call from a pair of veteran Cal Fire chiefs, Gino Degraffenreid and Greg Bertelli, not much after 10 p.m. that night. The fire had erupted less than 30 minutes earlier. "Gino said, 'This is a Hanly Fire, Jack. It's coming to Santa Rosa,'" Piccinini recounted. And it did. But circumstances had changed by 2017. Vegetation in the North Bay had grown more chronically parched, the state having just weathered a deep drought, and the winds were fiercer. Many more people also had come to live in the outlying canyons and ravines. Five years later, those conditions st