History and healing after the fire & Weil-Mollard household

emergency room. Doctor josh Weil was having a most unusual night at work. As he reached by telephone, his wife Claire miller is a veterinarian and their youngest daughter. Sophie as they fled their home off Mark West Springs Road just ahead of the tubbs fire. The two

older Children, Sydney 22 Caleb who's 20 were away at college. The house was destroyed in a short while later Dr weil made the decision to evacuate the Kaiser hospital in santa rosa. I was in charge that night but I had to make decisions based on what

I knew in a context that I had never experienced before. We drill, we practiced but nobody ever plans on having to go from thinking about a surge event to evacuating in in an hour to suddenly the fire knocking on your door in ways that you couldn't

imagine there's a lot that goes into making decisions about how you're going to manage the hospital hospital is actually pretty safe building. If there's a building that's going to survive a fire there's a building that's built to code that has everything in place to try and

sustain it. You know it's a hospital and to move patients puts them at risk. Um But at the same time we're watching the fire close in, we're watching what was happening to the roads. Um So at 3 30 the fire team, the incident commander from the

fire came in and he said um And I'll remember these words forever. We're making a last stand. So they were using the last two explained they were using the last two rows of of trailers and the dry creek bread that's right there between the Kaiser campus

and journey's end to make a last stand that used that to try and prevent the fire. And so at that time I said um okay it's time for us to evacuate. And they actually said we're not advising that um because they are looking at it from

a different perspective, but I had to think about um in my mind, I thought it's one thing to try and evacuate now when they're holding off the fire it's another but if they come in and say the fires jump that line and now with fire coming

down on the building I have to try and evacuate. So I made that decision. But there was a part of me that I'm gonna get in trouble for for this, you know making that decision, making that call. In retrospect, it was clearly easy in the right

thing, but in the moment, you know, it was it was and and there was no had no basis for making. I mean I've never been through anything like that before. Um I've come into disasters after they've occurred um and and we drill some things but I've

never been in a in a moment like that. I didn't know if the hospital was going to survive, Josh went to work at 10:30 and we were texting back and forth, there's a fire here, there's a fire there and I was wandering around the house and

trying to go to sleep and not succeeding. And then at one maybe 1230 the lights started to flicker and I could hear kind of some booms in the distance. We live kind of right next to some power lines and there was weird flashes so and maybe

quarter to quarter to one. I texted him and said there's you know, there's something really weird going on with the electricity. And then at one he called and said there's a fire, you know, a couple of miles away, why don't you get up and um just

start moving, moving things out, you know? And I did at one o'clock um I got up, I got dressed, went out and moved the truck a little closer to the house and I couldn't see the fire at that point. Um I came inside and called the

neighbor and she said oh we got an evacuation notice. Um uh she said we're just about ready to go, okay. I ran you know, some things out to the car and I could see this glow in the distance. And I thought oh that looks big. And

I went inside and I said to Sophie you have to, you have to get up honey. Um we're gonna have to at that point when I saw the glow I thought oh okay we have to go and I ran out and now that little glow down

there was like up here and I could hear the fire and I don't think a lot of people talk about the noise of the fire, but that's what struck me. I mean the noise of it was so big that I mean that's kind of what impressed

me was that thing to make that kind of noise is that's got to be big. So I ran back inside and I grabbed Sophie and um the dog one of the dogs and ran back to the car and um then I could see the fire coming

up over the hill, so now it's moving so fast and uh I ran back inside and I grabbed the other dog and came out and now the fire is at our property line and threw the dog in the car and I said to Sophie, I just

have to try for the cat and she said um don't go in, mom, please don't go in. And I said I just have to try for the cat, I just have to try for the cat. And I ran back in and of course it was pitch

black at that point, we had lost power and I came running back out and then the trees were on fire and it was just like this um this monster, it was, it was loud and like just raising ahead of itself grabbing the air and the air

was just red and alive with it uh with the wind and the pieces of fire and the ash in the air and and it's like for a moment time stopped and I just stood in this space and and I just, it was almost like a movie,

it was so surreal and I just thought this is real, this is real and you have to keep moving. And at that point I jumped in the car and Sophie was on the phone with josh and she couldn't even speak. There was just this scream and

it was this like high pitched, breathless scream, not like a rollercoaster scream, just this high pitched scream and I could hear josh on the other end saying just slow down your breathing. Sophie just slow, slow down your breathing and I was just shouting at him, I'm

driving, I'm driving, there were branches on the road and fortunately in the highlander and just clunk, clunk over over things and uh you know at one point the fire was on both sides and we just had to just drive through and um you know, smoke is

not fog and you can't see through it and it's just driving blind and it's just a little bit like there's the road just, you know, I know where it is, just drive and to break through that and then down into the lark field neighborhood and it

was just chaos in the neighborhood, you know, that's where the cops were, the firefighters and um people were just pouring out of the homes and throwing things in the cars and josh was just shouting, I could hear him on the phone just come to Kaiser just

come to Kaiser. So so that's what we did we and so we were down at Kaiser you know I don't like by 1 20 or maybe 1 30 at the outside. So it all happened very quickly but I have to say when I when I got

there I just felt like getting out of the car and dancing, I just felt like we survived, we survived. You know it was like that was just I am going to get out of here, I am gonna get out and I'm gonna get my daughter out,

I'm gonna get my dogs out and we did and we did, we made it I think uh I think it was a bad couple of minutes for josh when he called and all he could hear was Sophie screaming on the other end of the phone. I

think that was I I don't know what he possibly could have thought then but that was uh that was hard, that's I was very glad to be alive. I am very glad to be alive