What started out as a North Bay effort to coordinate rebuilding after the devastating 2017 wildfires has turned into a national effort to take lessons learned locally to help burned communities elsewhere quickly organize in the aftermath.

In recent months, Rebuild NorthBay Foundation has become After the Fire USA.

But the transition has been underway for the past few years as megafires have raged across the West, according to Jennifer Gray Thompson, CEO.

“Our name makes a lot more sense,” she said. “We worked with the county (of Sonoma) on COVID response. We do more than build houses.”

That expansion started in 2018 with helping Paradise and Malibu organize after the Camp and Woolsey fires, respectively. Then the group was called in to help after blazes local and distant in 2019 and 2020, from Santa Cruz into southern Oregon. And last year, help was sought for Greenville in California’s Plumas County after the nearly 1 million-acre Dixie Fire in November near Paradise.

“There are a thousand Greenvilles and a thousand Paradises in the American West,” Thompson said. “There is a huge need out there for convening hubs for long-term recovery. What usually happens in a disaster is that a small group stands up to help and then stands down after three years. With megafires, we can get people across a line much faster if we share lessons.”

That’s why the organization focuses on coaching local leaders and doesn’t get involved directly with individual property owners. One frequent partner in its community responses is United Policyholders, a San Francisco-based group that helps homeowners navigate insurance claims after disasters.

“We don’t do insurance at all,” Thompson said.

Since insurance is a big part of any recovery, drawing on United Policyholders’ experience is a good match with After the Fire’s efforts, she said.

The coronavirus pandemic was partly responsible for the Sonoma County-based effort’s transformation into an organization with a growing staff and an increasing toolkit of online resources for far-flung, hard-hit communities, Thompson said.

“With COVID, we were deciding whether we should ramp down or up,” Thompson said about discussions she, the main employee as of early 2020, had with the organization’s board of directors, which includes former Kaiser Permanente Marin-Sonoma executive Judy Coffey and Napa Valley vintner Michael Mondavi.

In the past year, the group has recruited veterans of local organizing efforts to its staff.

A key hire is Pamela Van Halsema, once president of Coffey Strong, which formed after the Tubbs Fire in 2017 to help residents of Coffey Park neighborhood in Santa Rosa. She came to After the Fire to ramp up its online presence and now is director of community and digital programs. The group got permission from Coffey Strong to trademark recovery-effort organizational terms such as “block captain” and “zone captain,” to prevent what Thompson said have been attempts by some companies to profit from trauma. That’s why the organization doesn’t charge for its services to communities.

And three years after Thompson helped guide the creation of Rebuild Paradise Foundation, homeowner Charles Brooks late last year handed off leadership of the Paradise group as rebuilding there had accelerated to 25%. He started working with After the Fire on helping other communities and was set to come on to lead operations. But in early January following work with survivors of the Dixie Fire, which erupted to the east of Paradise, Brooks decided to quietly step back from the role, Thompson said.

Brooks told the Business Journal that seeing the plume of smoke from the Dixie Fire from his driveway and knowing fellow Paradise survivors who had moved to an area threatened by the new fire made him realize that he needed to heed advice he heard about taking care of himself after a disaster.

“If I can share anything with other people is to be very, very focused on that and setting time aside and being intentional about personal recovery,” Brooks said.

After the Fire USA now is gearing up for a trip next month to help local residents and officials in Boulder County, where Colorado’s costliest fire destroyed over 1,000 homes around the end of last year.

Previously, Thompson, board members and partner organizations had been the ones primarily hitting the road to visit California and Oregon communities for initial and follow-up help. Now the effort is taking flight via an agreement announced this month with Alaska Airlines, which flies to Western states out of Sonoma County airport. The arrangement includes a $25,000-a-year travel credit with the airline.

The board approved an expansion of the staff last year, and it now numbers seven, including contractors. The organization is looking to raise $2.5 million to cover three years of operating costs, Thompson said. That would allow the group to dedicate more staff to more communities, such as a request from Boulder County to dedicate one staff member half-time to get that effort kick-started.

“We’ve learned from our four years of experience that most communities are well on their way after three years, but we ask communities to then mentor other communities,” Thompson said. It’s what the group calls the Wildfire Resiliency Network.

That funding would also go toward at least three years’ use of a civil-engagement online platform called Social Pinpoint that community leaders and residents can use to see best practices used by burned communities across multiple states to rebuild, recover and build resiliency against future fires .

Until wildland-urban interfaces — where forests meet neighborhoods — are hardened and woodland fuel loads are brought into balance, communities in the West will likely need more help with recovery from megafires, Thompson said.

“We have a really rough decade ahead of us,” she said.

The organization has received a $4.9 million grant from the US Department of Agriculture to work with Cal Fire, Clear Lake Environmental Resource Center and resource conservation districts in Colusa, Mendocino, Napa, Solano, Lake and Yolo counties on land-management practices that help prevent forest fires.

Jeff Quackenbush covers wine, construction and real estate. Before the Business Journal, he wrote for Bay City News Service in San Francisco. He has a degree from Walla Walla University. Reach him at jquackenbush@busjrnl.com or 707-521-4256.

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A year after a massive forest fire devastated California’s oldest state park, Big Basin Redwoods, the cleanup is in full swing.

Over the past few weeks, construction workers in hard hats have been cleaning up the debris of all the burned buildings and charred vehicles in popular Santa Cruz Mountains Park – from the bent metal and blackened granite of the park’s headquarters from the 1930s to the broken glass and broken propane tank inside its popular museum and once busy campsites.

More than 3,300 charred trees, mostly Douglas fir, that threatened to topple along the winding 6-mile driveway of Big Basin, were felled and hauled away. Burned out power lines were dismantled and destroyed wooden bridges replaced.

Almost every one of the Big Basin’s famous ancient sequoia trees, which can grow up to 90 meters tall and are 2,000 years old, survived, biologists say, although many have burn scars on their trunks or scorched branches that will last for decades.

“It was remarkable how much work was done in the park. I’m confident about the future, ”said Chris Spohrer, superintendent of the Santa Cruz District of the state park. “Every time I go in there are more green sprouts.”

Others who have worked to restore the park agree.

State parks, CalOES and contractors are reviewing the protection of the culture and natural resources at the Old Lodge site, where the stone fireplace and chimney will remain. (Courtesy California State Parks)

“There is a lot of sunlight. It’s warmer and drier than before. But the landscape doesn’t look so wounded. Green is everywhere, ”said Sara Barth, managing director of the Sempervirens Fund, a Los Altos nonprofit group that has bought and protected 35,000 acres of sequoia forests in the Santa Cruz Mountains since 1900. “It’s surprising how much better it looks with the ruins and infrastructure gone. It’s peaceful again. You hear birds. It feels better and looks better than it was. “

But it will be a while before visitors are allowed to return to the park.

State park officials this week launched a new website at reimaginingbigbasin.org to track the progress of the rebuilding.

Spohrer said public meetings to plan the rebuilding of the parks will begin in two or three months. The planning process will take about a year, he said.

After that, it could take another two or three years for the large buildings to be rebuilt, he said. At some point along the way, the redwood portion of the park will be partially reopened to the public, possibly with guided tours.

“After we have made the main access roads safe, the question arises of how much effort it takes to make the paths safe,” said Spohrer. “I have no estimate.”

The crews have already removed more than 15,000 trees that have fallen, fallen, or threatened to fall in popular areas including campsites and access roads that rangers use to access the Big Basin hinterland. Almost all of them were Douglas firs, brown oaks, madrons, and other trees that are not as fire resistant as sequoias.

Amazingly, some trees still burn for a year after the fire.

For months after the fire, the crews put out small fires that were ignited by winds blowing up the roots of some trees that were still red-hot. More recently, said Spohrer, embers have been found in the crowns of the old sequoias that are still glowing.

California state park crews are installing a makeshift bridge on May 1, 2021 to replace a wooden bridge that burned in the CZU Lightning Complex Fire in August 2020. (Photo: California State Parks)

The fire that devastated the Big Basin was the worst in the history of the region. Triggered by multiple lightning strikes on August 16, 2020, the fire, the CZU Lightning Complex Fire, burned 86,509 acres in the rural districts of Santa Cruz and San Mateo, an area almost three times the size of the city of San Francisco.

Flames destroyed 1,490 buildings, making it the twelfth most devastating fire in the state’s history and a disaster that caused more damage to the Santa Cruz district than the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

In total, 97% of the Big Basin’s 18,000 acres were burned.

But Big Basin isn’t just any state park. Its landscape of giant trees, thick ferns, waterfalls, misty forests, ranger chats, scouting jamborees, and marshmallow roasts has been central to generations of families since the park was founded in 1902. That year, San Jose photographer Andrew P. Hill convinced California lawmakers to Buy the Old Trees northwest of Boulder Creek because lumberjacks turned the nearby old forests into fence posts and railroad ties.

“These trees, because of their size and age, were among the natural wonders of the world and should be saved for posterity,” Hill wrote in his memoir.

Rebuilding the Big Basin after the fire started slowly. But after reporting and attention from environmental groups and political leaders, Governor Gavin Newsom has included in his revised May budget the entire $ 186 million that park officials estimate will go towards rebuilding the campsites, visitor center, utilities, bridges, the Hiking trails and other facilities are required.

The new facilities are unlikely to be rebuilt in the same places as the old ones. Shops, parking lots, and other buildings were built on the root systems of some ancient trees a century ago. Rangers who evacuated more than 1,000 visitors during the fire are skeptical of an increased risk of fire in the coming decades.

Some new facilities could be built outside of the park, perhaps in Saddle Mountain or Little Basin a few miles southeast. Buildings are made of more refractory materials. An outdoor parking lot and a shuttle bus system can be created for the busiest weekends.

“In our view, protecting the redwood forest and enjoying it for people needs to – those things don’t have to conflict,” said Sam Hodder, president of the Save the Redwoods League in San Francisco. “Here there is an opportunity for us to find a better balance between the natural ecosystem and the experience of the public.”

The campfire amphitheater in Big Basin Redwoods State Park on the 30th. (Photo: California State Parks)

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Everyone knows that San Francisco was ravaged by flames after the 1906 earthquake. However, it is less known that the city was also destroyed by a series of fires during the gold rush.

No less than six devastating fires devastated the infant city in just 18 months – the largest number of major fires that has ever struck an American city in such a short time.

San Francisco gold rush was a tinderbox. Most of its faint structures were made of canvas, oilcloth, or wood, heated and lit by wood stoves and oil lamps, and ventilated by primitive chimneys or chimneys protruding from the walls of the canvas. Flammable objects were piled up everywhere, heavy drinking and cigar smoking were common, and bad actors had ample motivation for arson.

As Roger Lotchin writes in “San Francisco 1846-1856”, “widespread negligence and malice” were responsible for many flames: “Again and again camphene lamps burst, candles that fell against curtains or fabric walls, or discarded“ sea gars ”set off fires. “Add that the young town’s few cisterns were empty at low tide and that there was no organized fire department, and the wonder is that San Francisco didn’t burn down more often than it was.”

The first of the great fires struck on the morning of December 24, 1849 at 5:45 a.m. It started on the east side of Portsmouth Square in a “hell” of gambling called Dennison’s Exchange. A young Swiss named Theophile De Rutte left a vivid description:

“The cry of ‘Fire!’ so terrifying to the city of San Francisco, built of wood and canvas, reverberating in the air and spreading rapidly from person to person and street to street. … It started between Clay and Sacramento streets. This was the district of the wine and vegetable stalls and also the timber merchants. Alcohol and wood! The most insatiable fire couldn’t have looked for a stronger combination!

“Fed by a strong north wind, the flames made great strides. … It was a terrible yet spectacular sight. With every new rum, brandy, or grog shop it devoured, the intensity of the fire doubled and at the same time it changed its color. It resembled a great display of Bengal lights with tones of red, yellow and blue or a giant punch bowl lit by Satan and constantly stirred by the demons of Hell. “

The fire burned 290 buildings and caused $ 1.5 million in damage. According to Robert Graysmith, in “Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer – and the Mysterious Fires That Christened the Gold Rush Era in San Francisco,” former New York firefighter and future Senator David Broderick helped keep the flames off stop by blowing up buildings with gunpowder.

But most of the passing gold prospectors that made up the city’s population did not exactly cover themselves with civic fame.

The previous trivia question: What are the chain brakes of a cable car made of and how do they work?

Reply: The chain brake is a block of wood. When pushed onto the track, it slows the car down through friction.

This week’s trivia question: Which San Francisco attraction was Normandy Lane?

Every corner of San Francisco has an amazing story to tell. Gary Kamiya’s portals of the past tell these lost stories and shed light on the extraordinary history of San Francisco in a specific location – from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach, to the gold rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday.

Do you like what you read? Subscribe to the Chronicle Vault newsletter and receive classic archive stories in your inbox twice a week.

Read hundreds of historical stories, view thousands of stock photos, and sort through 153 years of classic Chronicle front pages at SFChronicle.com/vault.

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In his 1850 book, El Dorado, or Adventures in the Road of the Empire, journalist Bayard Taylor writes: “In times of extreme peril, hundreds of idle bystanders refused to lend a hand unless they were paid enormous wages. One of the main dealers, I was told, offered a dollar a bucket of water and used several thousand buckets to save his property. All the owners of the property worked non-stop and were supported by their friends, but at least five thousand spectators stood idly in the square. “

In one pattern, rebuilding began while the ashes were still smoking and within a month there was no sign of the damage.

The second major fire occurred less than five months later, on May 4, 1850. That fire also started in the square, consuming 16 blocks and 300 buildings, and causing $ 4 million in damage. Arsonists were suspected and a $ 5,000 reward was posted for information leading to their arrest, but no culprit was found.

Again, bystanders refused to help unless they were paid. According to historian Doris Muscatine in Old San Francisco, a group of men who had volunteered at the time requested payment from the city after the fire. The city council got fed up and instead passed a law requiring residents to fight fires with a fine of up to $ 100. Another law stipulated that each household had to keep six full buckets of water. The city also issued California’s first building ordinance that prohibited the construction of buildings made of cotton cloth.

Rebuilding began even faster than it did after the fire on Christmas Eve: The Annals of San Francisco reported that workers began removing embers and trash from one end of an apartment building while the other end was still blazing. “In a wonderfully short time the entire burned room was covered with new buildings and looked like there had never been a fire there,” continued the “Annals” before adding ominously: “It was generally noted that these were even less essential and flammable than those that had just been destroyed. “

The third fire occurred just six weeks later, on June 14th. It started in a broken chimney in a bakery, raged for three days, consumed several hundred buildings and caused losses of nearly $ 5 million. The fourth followed by three months.

The fifth of the great fires was also the largest. It erupted on May 4, 1851, the anniversary of the second, and burned the entire business district of the city. 16 blocks and between 1,500 and 2,000 buildings were used up. The damage was estimated at $ 12 million.

The sixth fire occurred just a month later, causing losses of $ 3 million. This was the last of the great fires in the gold rush era – afterwards, improved building materials, cisterns and fire fighting techniques helped prevent further disasters.

Estimates of the combined death toll from the 18 months of the fires range from 300 to over 1,000, with most perishing on May 4, 1851. Some unfortunate people who bought “fireproof” metal houses were roasted to death when the intense heat swelled the houses and made it impossible to open the doors.

After the first fire, it was clear that the city urgently needed a fire brigade. At a mass gathering in Portsmouth Square, three volunteer engine manufacturers were organized – the start of a unique and popular San Francisco institution. The colorful and competitive history of the early city’s volunteer fire service companies will be the subject of the next portals.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the bestselling book, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco, which won the Northern California Book Award for creative non-fiction. His new book with drawings by Paul Madonna is “Ghosts of San Francisco: Travels through the Unknown City”. All material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read previous portals in the past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archive, visit sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com

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