Sonoma family rebounds after losing home and school in fires

The night that the fires raged across the county last October, Erin George couldn’t believe what she was witnessing.

“I’ve heard before that if a UFO landed right in front of you, you wouldn’t even see it because your brain couldn’t process what it was seeing,” George said, looking back now after a year has passed. “It was interesting to reflect on that, because I felt like that in many ways when I saw the fires.”

George, a real-estate agent with Sotheby’s International Realty in Sonoma, was living with her husband Joe, an operations and distribution manager, and their son Nicholas, in their home in Santa Rosa off of Mark West Springs Road. They had purchased a house in Santa Rosa to be closer to Cardinal Newman, where their children, Jacquelyn, now 20, and Nicholas, now 17, were in school.

Erin and her family smelled the smoke the evening of Oct. 8, but weren’t fully aware of what was happening around them until their neighbors called to wake them up after midnight. When she looked out the window, George was struck with shock and disbelief.

“I typically think of myself as being a pretty optimistic person, but I realized the gravity of what was happening,” she said. “All the electricity was off and the wind was howling.”

George and her family saw the fire subside for a moment, only for it to then “kick up like a dragon,” blowing embers and smoke into the air. They left their home within the next half hour.

George’s daughter, Jacquelyn, who was at college in Arizona, called to alert her family that all of Santa Rosa was burning and that the fire had already jumped Highway 101, which was hard for George to believe until she saw it herself.

“Driving over 101 on River Road, watching the cars turn around on the southbound lane was very baffling to me,” George said. “Even though (my daughter) told me what to expect, there were many times that night and early morning that I just said, ‘What is this?’ My brain couldn’t wrap itself around what we were seeing. It was just beyond anything that I had ever experienced.”

That night, the family evacuated to Sonoma.

“The night of the fire, before we even knew that we lost our home, our good friends Tom and Becky Larson reached out to us at about 2 o’clock in the morning,” she said. The Larsons had just finished building a guest house, where George and her family were able to stay there without having to evacuate again. “The Larsons really are our heroes,” she said.

By 9 a.m. on Oct. 9, the George family confirmed their home was gone when Joe and Nicholas hiked in to survey the damage.

One year later, Erin, Joe and their two children are living in their Sonoma rental house near the bike path. They had been renting the house out while living in Santa Rosa.

“But we knew we always wanted to come home to Sonoma after the kids graduated from Cardinal Newman,” said George.

Immediately in the wake of the destruction that the fires brought, the George family struggled to find their footing. “In the few days after the fire, I was wondering when it would stop and when I would feel the ground underneath me,” she said. Recovering their sense of normalcy was further hindered by the burning of portions of the Cardinal Newman campus. After having relocated to Santa Rosa so that her kids would be on the road less, driving to and from school, George’s son Nicholas had to commute to various church meeting rooms all over the county for class.

Reflecting on her family’s experience following the fires, she said, “I was 47-years-old when I lost the house, and that was 47 years’ worth of things, and that included antiques that came from my great-grandparents’ house that are gone now. How do you ever rebuild that? I think the reality of it is that you just shape a new beginning and feel so grateful that you have the memory of being able to have your child sleep on your great-grandfather’s bed.”

In the days and weeks after losing their home, the George family was met with support from all corners of the community. St. Francis Solano made copies of Jacquelyn and Nicholas’ class pictures, the Rotary gathered kitchen supplies for the Georges’ home, and Phyllis Wakefield, a psychologist in town, organized and led a group called Heart of the Home for women whose homes had been lost in the fires.

“I have rebuilt my life with the help of so many people,” George said. “Normally, it was very hard for me to accept the help of an outstretched hand and, really, in those few days, it was essential to have that help. It was this real collective sense of love and respect and people saying ‘yes’ and ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ That was something that I’ll always remember and take with me forward.”

Though the George family is still feeling the effects of the fires in many ways – from weekly calls to insurance companies to continually acquiring items for their home – Erin George still maintains a positive outlook, even when reflecting back on her family’s loss.

“Even two months ago, I was feeling like I had spent this last year putting my fingers in the dike of a dam that was broken,” she says. “I had a good friend say, ‘Hey, let’s take a step back and really look at what you have accomplished this year.’ It’s really important, especially when you’re going through something like that, to look for the good. If you don’t, it’s easy to miss. But if you do, it’s amazing how it can carry you through.”