DCWelch Blog: Ramblings

My wife and I are approaching the age of 65. Like most couples, we have experienced a life with many episodes of heartbreak and trauma. The death of our parents, deaths of siblings and friends, loss of jobs, etc. Losing our house to fire is very different than anything else we have experienced. For one thing, its unexpected. You knew your parents would pass away some day, losing a job happens everyday in Silicon Valley. But this is different. It was not expected. It came out of nowhere. No warning. And in the end, it is absolute. The end of something. I don’t think we know what.

There is a community of people in Santa Rosa we read about and encounter as we go about our business. I think everyone is going through the same sort of things. Trying to recover, get to some level of normal, plan for the future. We finally were able to get into our lot about 2 weeks after the fire. The plan was to document the damage and sift through the ashes with an attempt to find certain things; computers, jewelry, silverware, china. Everyone sifts through the ashes. Some people find things. A story about a women who found her wedding ring. We found relics. Melted silverware, carcasses of burned out computers, shards of dishes, melted pots. Nothing that could ever be used again. We now have a box of these relics. I am planning on doing a photo project of them. What the hell. We have a blob of molten aluminum and rock that sits on our coffee table. Art or memory. Not sure.

So now, time to move on. Daily work with the insurance company. Endless spreadsheets to document what we lost. Working on house plans. Trying to find a builder. Hoping that the debris gets cleared soon from our lot. Reading all the stories. Thinking about building a new house is fun and daunting. My wife can’t imagine the level of effort to build and then furnish and decorate. Is it worth it? This same fire happened 50 years ago. Are we nuts to build in the same area? I don’t think we know. But what do you do instead? Its only one month, and I think we still are searching.

Posted on November 10, 2017 by DCWelch | Comments Off

Tubbs Fire

Posted on October 11, 2017 by DCWelch

It’s been awhile since I wrote anything in this blog. I spent last weekend revving my website and getting this blog back in usable shape. Then, on Sunday night, disaster hit. The Tubbs fire.

Step back for a moment. Lydia and I had relocated to Santa Rosa about a year ago, after retiring from Adobe in San Jose. We had lived in Santa Rosa before, and loved the area and lifestyle. We had purchased a house that met our needs, although needed some tender loving care. Over the last year we had done much to get the house into the shape we wanted.

We were both out of town on 10/9. I was up at our place in Lake Almanor and she was in NYC visiting our son. I started to get texts at about 1 AM from PG&E that the power at our house in Santa Rosa was going off and on. I thought, whatever, and rolled over. Then around 3:30AM, I got a text from our good friend, John, asking if we were OK. I responded telling him we were not there and asked what’s going on. “Fire” was his response.

Shortly, I started to get texts and calls from Bay Alarm saying that the fire and smoke alarms had triggered. I talked to their central monitoring and was told that many alarms were coming in from the area and she wanted to be sure we were out of the house.

Well, it’s a saga after that. Being the nerd I am, I logged in to my alarm panel and watched the events coming from the house sensors. It started with the upstairs smoke detectors, and then moved down through rest of house. One by one, each window reported an event, and finally, the alarm panel itself reported a “tamper” event. As I now have learned, that was each window blowing out, as the fire took the house. The whole series of events took less than hour.

The saga will continue. This picture is from our neighborhood, but not our house. It comes from the Press Democrat newspaper. Kent Porter, a superb photographer for the paper has been capturing much of what is going on with this horrific fire. We are in an evacuation zone, and containment, is after two days, 0%. I don’t know when we will be able to get back in and see what we have left. I’m pretty sure it will be nothing.

We are all OK, that is the good thing. And we are more fortunate than many. We have a second home, clothes, and good insurance. We will recover. My thoughts and prayers with everyone affected by this horrible tragedy. It will be a long and difficult road back.