History and healing after the fire & Pardo household

Oscar and Sandra pardo and their three Children, esteban 16 Amara who's 14 and 13 year old Sophia lost their two story home in Coffey park to the tubbs fire early in the morning of october 9 2017. Oscar is an attorney with Perry johnson, Anderson Miller and

Moskowitz and Sandra is a social worker with the Sonoma County Linkages program. All five members of the family have generously shared their fire stories with us in in that time that I, my son and I walked into to see the devastation. I just remember turning into

our street and almost feeling like I was in this movie, surreal horror movie and almost feeling sort of out of body walking towards that plot where my house stood and thinking there, there was a house there, my home was there and I I walked towards that

part and didn't realize, I don't know how long it took me to me for my son and I to walk there. But I almost felt like I floated there and we're standing by the driveway and my son looked at the house where where was where the

house was and he broke down and at that point I I didn't have time to get emotional. My grieving process was I guess pretty much walking up to that plot because once my son reacted the way he did my job was to comfort him and comfort

everyone else and put everything else aside, whatever was in that house. I couldn't do anything else about it. So my processing was to shut down emotionally, take care of everybody else and then move and that's like sort of been in that state for the better part

of this journey. Just just go, the wind woke us up. So the same wind that caused so much havoc is the same wind that woke us up because Oscar collects planter plants, you know, plants outside. And we had a really nice

backyard and the wind was knocking them left and right. So they were actually breaking um on our patio floor, you know the pots. So that woke us up um and we went outside to check what's all the noise. And that's when we realized it's raining ashes.

The smoke was thick and we're at the very end of barns, Coffey park. So our backyard, you can kind of see Barnes road, the country road and it was back to back traffic and it's a country road. No one travels on the road at two in

the morning. So we realized there's something happening. We take a peek out our front door and there's bumper to bumper traffic and the t uh and we it was a traffic jam and we said, let's there's something happening, let's let's get out um we charge our

cellphones downstairs by the time, I looked at it, we had tons of text from the close cousin that lived around the corner saying, have you evacuated yet? So you know when, when you're asleep, your brain kind of works in bits and pieces and we took us

a good 20 minutes to piece it all together. That okay, grab your bag, let's leave, we need to get out now. It took us about 20 minutes. So I remember leaving our home Um around 2:30 AM. We were all orderly in line in gridlock when the

left side of Santiago way was completely open. You know did anyone of us think to deviate? No, it took a first responder to yell at everyone in gridlock and say go use the other lane now and then it clicked and then you see this massive you

know movement, everyone is just spreading, you know and leaving it felt like an apocalypse. I mean there was a bunch of cars, it was the most crowded I've ever seen that straight ever. You know it's a quiet place where we used to live but that night

there was like everyone just came out of their house. It was like when we were driving out of our street I kind of looked back, I feel like a split second and then I was like, oh what if the possibility that I can't go back but

then I kinda just wanted to focus on the positive stuff at that time because anything could have happened and then um but I think the one who's scared the most was either my mom or my dog because my mom was so like attached to the house

and everything that was there and then my dog was just crying the whole time because it was so scary to her to be like stuck in a car for so long because there were so many people that wanted to leave just like we wanted to, it

was all kind of frightening because we just wanted to get out. We had a lot of pictures of family, a lot of family items and that stuff that's pretty hard to replace, if not irreplaceable, but that was probably the one that hurt the most and all

this stuff like my computer, like my desk and everything that's all replaceable, that meant really nothing to me. I just a couple a couple of months without it, it's fine. But it was the memories that really sucked. I know my we went back to the house

and my mom, the whole family, my mom had us digging for her mom's jewelry and I'm like dang having to look through all this stuff that really meant a lot to her through the fire and knowing that we're probably not gonna find it. That was hard.

That was really hard. And just going through the rubble itself and finding stuff. I remember doing that. Remember that art projects from fifth grade? I brought back a lot of memories, but most of the stuff we made memories on, We never got back. That was that

was a tough part, the irreplaceable stuff. That was the tough part are there times when I sit down here on the couch, you know, on a friday night after a long work week thinking, oh my gosh, you know, my kids baseball glove was in there. My

daughter's art that she made for me was in there. Both of my daughters would do things for me. We had, I'm I'm a sort of a storage kind of a freak. I have storage boxes, I had them all over my house. I must have had about

a good 50 boxes. But six of those boxes were for my kids to each from when they were babies that had their baby clothes, shoes, trophies, perfect, attendance awards, art projects. Everything that reminded me of my kids were in those boxes and when I sit down

and think about and process what happened to me. The emotional aspect, that's where I go, I go to those boxes, I go to the other boxes where my wife's wedding dress was and her mother's wedding dress was, that's where I go. Because everything else in the

house I've learned that I could replace if I wanted to, but I can never replace those. What was in those boxes. You can never replace them when I went back to that house or what was left of the ashes and I, we had to go dig

and I really didn't want to. But the only reason I went there was because I wanted to go to those spaces in the, in that plot where I knew those boxes were, see what I could find. And once I dug around and figured out that I

couldn't find anything that the fire took everything from me, then I had nothing else to go back to. So I stopped digging and I never going back and I think about that, but I can't do anything about it. So I just kind of move on our

coffee park community. I has really opened my eyes to see how, how carrying everyone has been with one another because we might have known maybe a ham, maybe two or three families on our street before the fire. And now after the fire, we have met almost

everyone on our street. Um, and then some, you know, so it's really um, that's a good thing that we've gotten closer in that way. Um And it's kind of sad that we don't take more time to get to know our neighbors, you know, before a natural

disaster happens. And that goes for friendships and co workers as well. You know, I've never had the kind of conversations that I've had with them with a lot of them and I've been working there for 10 years and um and now our conversations are different. I

think it's brought a lot of people closer together to talk about the things that really matter and not just go on our day by day, you know, busy schedules without even taking the time to say, hey, let's go have coffee and let's see how you're doing.

You know, so that's one thing that I think out of all of this, that's been really a positive. It's really hard in the beginning because if you're tied to something for so long and instantly it just goes away, um you're gonna feel like in a state

of shock, like um like it's not real. And the best thing to do at that time is just to say it is real, but it's gonna be okay because a lot of other people have done this in their life and if they can get through that,

then I can get through this and I'm definitely not alone. You know, there's a whole bunch of other people are going through the same thing.