I was nine years old when the historic Hanly Fire burned through Sonoma County in September of 1964. My grandmother, who had borne witness to similar conflagrations in 1900 and 1923, tried to explain to me that growing up in Petaluma Valley meant learning to live with periodic wildfires — that while nature was something to love, it was both a refuge and at times a destroyer.
It was a lesson I conveniently forgot, believing the traumatic Hanly Fire to be a once in a lifetime event. My grandmother knew better. The lesson had been passed on to her by her parents and relatives, who, like the other early settlers to the valley, first witnessed nature’s wrath one early October morning in 1869 when a small straw fire on a Rincon Valley ranch turned into a firestorm that raged for days.
The Diablo winds — literally a devil’s brew of high temperatures, low humidity and strong northeast gales from the Great Basin — filled Petaluma with such a thick veil of smoke that residents believed they were surrounded by fire on all sides.
They were. Fires were consuming forests north of the Santa Rosa plain as well as fields planted with wheat and hay both east and west of town. Fortunately, a change in weather spared the town.
Prior to the arrival of settlers like my ancestors, large, catastrophic fires occasionally swept through pre-colonial Northern California. As a preventive measure, local Miwok Indians set deliberate fires in order to reduce fuel loads. They also applied selective burning as a broad-based means of pruning and weeding the valley. The burns decreased plant competition and controlled insects and diseases that threatened their food sources, including acorns, which formed a staple of their diet.
The Spanish padres and soldiers who first entered the valley in the 1820s believed it to be a wilderness. It was actually a subtle working landscape carefully managed by fire.
That long tradition of stewardship came to an abrupt end when General Mariano Vallejo banned the Miwok’s deliberate burns in order to introduce large herds of cattle and sheep to the valley.
Following the wildfires of 1869, Sonoma County’s next major firestorm arrived on the morning of Sept. 19, 1900. This time, abundant underbrush and dry, imported pasture grasses provided ready tinder.
A fire started in the woods near Cazadero divided into three branches, with one branch burning toward Sebastopol, a second toward the coast, and the third bearing down on Valley Ford.
Together, they burned 100 square miles. Fires also raged between St. Helena and Healdsburg, in Kenwood, and south of Petaluma on Mount Burdell, where flames started from a charcoal pit burned 18,000 acres of oak trees before heading west toward Nicasio, where it torched herds of grazing livestock.
Wildfires returned to Petaluma 23 years later, on Sept. 17, 1923. Strong Diablo winds blew over dozens of small poultry houses that dotted the hills and then ignited a fire near Nicasio. The infreno once again spread across Mount Burdell and down to the Petaluma Creek. Fire also burned through the redwood groves and cottages along the Russian River, through the forest outside Cloverdale, and down the Sonoma Valley to Boyes Hot Springs.
The eight-day Hanly Fire that I experienced as a boy in 1964 started on Sept. 19 in two spots — from a blown transformer east of Glen Ellen and a hunter’s cigarette on the southwest slope of Mount St. Helena. Spread by hot winds of up to 80 miles per hour, the fires quickly spread toward Calistoga, Sonoma Valley, and northern Santa Rosa along Highway 101, torching 60,000 acres and 151 homes.
One year later, almost to the day, Petaluma was surrounded by a ring of ten fires fed by strong winds reportedly blowing up to 100 miles per hour, the largest of which burned in Crane Canyon north of town and out west between Eastman Lane and the D Street Extension.
Jack Kessler, head of the state’s forest fire fighting effort at the time, pointed out that the problem was bound to get worse as long as people insisted on building homes in highly combustible areas.
As we witnessed in the fall of 2017, Kessler’s prophecy has come to fruition, most tragically in developments like Santa Rosa’s Fountaingrove and Coffey Park, both built well after the Hanly Fire. The question now is whether in the coming years we remember the lessons of the past, or continue to willfully ignore and arrogantly defy the wisdom of living with wildfire.
A version of this article appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier November 2, 2017.
