MENDOCINO CO., 10/14/25 — Eight years ago, Cross Creek Road, a winding street in Santa Rosa’s upscale Fountaingrove development, was flanked by oak woodlands and grassy meadows. Then the 2017 Tubbs Fire burned through the city. The blaze – one of the worst wildfires in California history – killed 22 people, destroyed 5,643 homes and other structures, and burned the vegetation down to mineral earth. On Cross Creek Road, the heat was so intense that metal streetlights half-melted, tilting at odd angles like Dr. Seuss illustrations.
Fountaingrove was particularly hard hit, with entire neighborhoods reduced to smoking rubble. But today, Fountaingrove has recovered. New luxury homes rise magisterially where blackened foundations once stood. Almost 80% of the homes burned during the Tubbs Fire have been rebuilt. For many, that is indicative of the community’s indomitability, a sign that it is rising phoenix-like from the ashes.
But some wildfire experts warn intensive rebuilding in burned-out areas might not always be optimal, given that catastrophic wildfires tend to recur in some portions of the so-called wildland/urban interface (WUI) with alarming regularity. And it’s not just areas adjacent to towns and suburbs that are vulnerable to re-burn impacts. The 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire – the third largest in state history – ripped through large tracts of remote woodland and rural ranchland that had burned in earlier fires.
The path of fire
The Tubbs fire closely followed the same path as the 1964 Hanly Fire. Did time and a lack of institutional memory lead to Tubbs because a primary lesson – don’t rebuild where earlier fires raged – was lost?…