Mixed grades on personal disaster readiness 2 years after North Bay fires

You’d think by now I’d know better.

Living in Napa Valley, my family has experienced floods, earthquakes, wildfires and the occasional school lockdown.

Ask me what I’ve done to prepare us for the next emergency or disaster, however, and I’m embarrassed to report almost nothing.

We have no emergency water or food supply, no “go bags,” no backup power source and no organized plan for evacuating our home, much less an idea where we’d go should we be forced to leave in a giant hurry. About the only preventative step we’ve taken is attaching a wrench to the gas meter in case we need to turn it off.

If disaster prep were a class, I’d receive a failing grade.

I can’t pinpoint one reason why this is so. Denial maybe? Feeling overwhelmed most of the time by other demands? Money?

Recently I shared my story with Pete Parkinson, former director of Sonoma County’s planning department, whose Bennett Ridge home was destroyed in the 2017 Nuns fire. If anyone knows the value of good planning, it’s a guy whose professional life was structured around that premise.

Sitting at the dining room table in Parkinson’s spacious new home, built on the site of the old one, we looked out picture windows at a wall of thick morning fog, which obscured otherwise magnificent views of Trione-Annadel State Park and the Mayacamas Mountains rising above Sonoma Valley.

Parkinson’s dog, Olive, sat nearby, shaking. She has a nervous nature, he said, but the fires seemed to ramp up her anxiety.

The night of Oct. 8, 2017, Parkinson, 65, and his wife hastily gathered their 9-year-old son, Henry, plus Olive and a few belongings and drove pell-mell out of their neighborhood ahead of flames racing across the ridgeline. When they returned a few days later, everything was gone.

Parkinson’s concern at the time wasn’t with wildfires. As a fourth-generation Californian, he was raised to fear earthquakes. In 1989, he was working for county government in Santa Cruz when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck.

“It turned my professional life upside down for a couple of years. It was really traumatic, and so I was always worried about earthquakes here,” he said.

Asked to grade himself on how well he was prepared for disaster prior to the 2017 blaze, Parkinson gave himself a C. And now? He made the case for a B.

Parkinson views disaster preparedness mainly through the lens of structure and design, which in the case of his new home, includes the latest in modern fire-resistant construction, as well as landscaping designed to provide defensible space.

Two weeks after the family moved into their new home, November’s Kincade fire sparked fresh anxiety across the Bennett Ridge community. Parkinson said he and his wife have not made a disaster plan or otherwise checked off any boxes on the recommended list of things to have on hand during emergencies.

But, he said, they’ve been pretty busy.

“In fairness to us, we did just move back in, and that’s a job in and of itself,” Parkinson said.

My excuse? I don’t have one.

The night of the 2014 South Napa Earthquake, my wife and I were jolted awake at 3:20 a.m. by a demonic force that kept us pinned to our bed for 21 terrifying seconds.

When the shaking stopped, we threw on some clothes and ran across the hall to our kids’ rooms. When I tried opening our son’s door, I found the way blocked by his dresser. Putting my shoulder into the door, I managed to push it open far enough for him to scramble over the furniture and into my arms. We raced down the darkened hallway, catching up to my wife and daughter as they bolted for the front door.

The night of the North Bay fires in October 2017, my family attended a dinner party at a friend’s rented home at the base of Atlas Peak, northeast of Napa city limits. A few hours later, the house burned down and our friends barely escaped with their lives.

So I should know better. It’s even more embarrassing when you factor in my career as a journalist covering all kinds of emergencies and disasters. After every one, my wife and I discuss the urgent need to get better prepared. But then time passes, and we move on to things we think are more important in the here and now, like organizing playdates for the kids.

Susan Sloan empathized with those in my state of inaction when we talked recently about the challenges of disaster preparedness. She and her husband evacuated their Wikiup home north of Santa Rosa city limits in October 2017 as flames from the Tubbs fire raced to within 400 yards of the structure.

Sloan, 49, works for Sonoma County’s information technology department as a disaster recovery analyst. But prior to the 2017 firestorm she, like a lot of us, was not nearly as prepared to protect herself and her family as she could have been. Her self-assessed grade for that time: an abysmal D.

It’s not as if she took a dim view of preparedness.

“On ski trips to Tahoe I was always the nutty mom making sure we had blankets, food and water in case the car broke down on the side of road. I’ve always been that way,” she said.

During the 2017 fires, Sloan worked in the county’s emergency operations center helping coordinate response to the deadly and destructive blaze. That experience, coupled with having to evacuate her own home, dramatically increased her appreciation for being ready.

Sloan and her husband have spent thousands for an arborist to remove more than two dozen trees from their wooded 1-acre property to make more defensible space for firefighters.

The couple have go-bags for each other and their dog, a communication plan and locations for where they will go first in the event they are evacuated. They put hard copies of their most important documents in their go-bags and also saved them to a USB drive. They gave copies of everything to Sloan’s mother.

They have two weeks’ worth of food and water in their house and they purchased a generator for when the power is turned off by PG&E.

Sloan leads her neighborhood’s Citizens Organized to Prepare for Emergencies group, and she and her husband both took courses in wildfire prevention assessment, which allows them to counsel others on how to mitigate fire risk.

Sloan now gives herself a B in disaster prep, but graded on a curve, it’s a safe bet she would score much higher.

“It feels good to be prepared,” she said. “It takes that fear out of it. With this last evacuation (during the Kincade fire), I was just, uh, OK, here we go.”

Long ago, a teacher who recognized my tendency to procrastinate on school assignments told me the only way to get through some things is to just start. The rest will take care of itself. This was prior to Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign, but the same sentiment applies.

And so, I am committed to making 2020 the year I finally take steps to protect my family.

“You’re not powerless and helpless,” Parkinson said as we sat by the fire in his Bennett Ridge home. “There’s a lot you can do to help yourself be more resilient.”