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 still exist. When I made a second September trip to Bennett Lane, the temperature approached 100 degrees. The sun-faded grasses looked normal enough, but the trunks of some trees still bore the evidence of a half-decade-old burn.

Though Pacific Gas and Electric Co. was not faulted by the state for starting the Tubbs — investigators determined it began with private power equipment stretching off the PG&E grid — the utility giant would ultimately include Tubbs Fire plaintiffs with victims of other 2017 and 2018 wildfire disasters in a roughly $13.5 billion settlement.

In the driveway of the hillside property at the ignition point, someone had recently spray-painted "NO PGE." But it was no political statement, just a guide for utility workers.

Suddenly, the quiet was broken by the complaint of warning sirens in the distance.

It was a regularly scheduled test of Calistoga's fire system. This was the only North Bay town under full mandatory evacuation during the Tubbs Fire, and two years later, the city council there voted to buy three new sirens to supplement the two it already had.

1.7 miles from ignition: Pochini Family Farm

When the winds started latticing his driveway with fallen trees, Bud Pochini knew it was time to get out. He ran his daughter, Allie, up the hill to his sister's house, then jumped in his Knights Valley Volunteer Fire Department truck.

Pochini lives just over the hill from Calistoga, on the Sonoma County side of Highway 128 where it cuts through the mountain gap at the northern end of Napa Valley. He drove toward the fire that was being reported on his radio scanner. As he rounded a curve and his view widened, he saw a wall of flames 50-100 feet high, as tall as a five-story apartment building.

"It just started five minutes ago, and it went a mile," he told me. "If it's there in five minutes, people have gotta get the hell out."

Bud and Allie, 17 at the time, spent the night driving up and down Knights Valley, a plain of vineyard land in the shadow of Mount St. Helena. They cleared the roadway of downed trees so firetrucks could get in and terrified residents could evacuate.

Pochini hadn't really slept by 2:30 the next afternoon. The winds had long abated by then, and he and other members of the nonprofit volunteer company were finishing off a fire line at Storybook Mountain Vineyards, just uphill from his property.

Then he heard the explosion of burning gas from a propane tank below, and he knew his house was gone.

The loss was especially frustrating, Pochini told me, because he had driven by the property shortly before. He saw one firetruck in the driveway of his mother's old house and another two just across the highway.

"You got this?" he asked an out-of-area firefighter.

It was under control. But Cal Fire commanders pulled the helpers to another location, leaving the Pochini property, which his parents bought in 1974. The remnants of the fire crept around the hillside until it had engulfed the two houses at the site, along with Bud's welding shop and several outbuildings.

"That's one thing that can use some work," Pochini said. "They need to leave someone behind just to watch for stuff like that. Because they left these properties…."

He began to point around the immediate area, counting up the losses — "one, two … probably a dozen houses burned. And they could have stopped it here no problem."