Bill Lynch: A terrible monster returns

The terrible, fire-breathing monster came out of the northeast so fast, residents barely had time to escape with the clothes on their backs.

It was born in Napa County miles away, then, blown by devil winds, it moved west, growing and devouring all in its path. When it was done, Boyes Hot Springs, Fetters Springs, and Aqua Caliente were gone.

The year was 1923. The date, late September.

Fast forward to the fall of 1964, when a wind-blown spark from a power line ignited some tinder-dry brush on Nelligan Road between Glen Ellen and Kenwood. Then hot Santa-Ana type winds caused that little spark to explode into a raging brush, timber and grass fire that consumed 19 homes and 10,000 acres from Glen Ellen to Boyes Hot Springs over the next two days.

It took 700 firefighters with more than 75 pieces of equipment, plus aerial tanker bombers, to stop the fire before it consumed all of the Springs, as the previous big fire (of 1923) had done.

Fall is the monster’s favorite season. When conditions are just right, it can appear so suddenly that those of us in its path have little choice but to run for our lives.

This month, it came in the dark of night, howling like a banshee, as frightening, devastating and remorseless as ever. Wherever it found a spark, the spark became a flame, the flame a torch, and all over our country and Valley our family, friends and neighbors fled with little but the clothes on their backs.

For those of us with history here, it was an all too familiar nightmare made real.

When I got home from Vietnam in 1969, I served as a volunteer fireman for the City of Sonoma for a number of years. Structure fires were not all that common inside the city limits, but our department had a mutual-aide agreement with the Shell-Vista Fire Department for the hillside areas to the north and northeast of the city. One of Schell-Vista’s trucks was permanently stationed at the Sonoma firehouse and Sonoma volunteers manned that truck when fires broke out.

There was never a fall when we did not have to respond to wind-blown grass and brush fires. Our wooded hills, tinder dry from a long, rainless summer provide the perfect fuel.

What we feared most was the wind from the northeast that could grow from a gentle breeze to a full-force gale in a matter of hours, usually after sunset.

Dry, hot and gusting like a gigantic blacksmith’s bellows, it could turn even the smallest spark into a raging inferno in minutes. Worse, the flames didn’t just move along with the brush they consumed, they streamed ahead horizontally, like tracers from a machine gun, crossing roads and open fields to ignite other fires blocks away.

I don’t exaggerate when I say that fighting such fires is like trying to extinguish a blowtorch with a water pistol. More often than not, luck and dying winds allowed us to stop those fires from becoming the kind of ugly monster that has consumed our community in times past.

We’ve had many dry fall seasons over the past two decades, but the monster kept its distance, striking in Lake County and other areas safely distant.

This week, we were not so lucky, the monster returned, reminding us once again how vulnerable we are.