North Bay rebuild extended by 2020 fires

With the massive 2017 North Bay wildfires as a guide, it could take several years to rebuild the homes and businesses, including several wineries, destroyed in this year’s back-to-back giant blazes.

Half the property owners affected in the county by the 2017 blazes have submitted applications on rebuilds, according to the Napa County planning and building department. Issued so far have been 258 building permits, and 75 of those projects have been completed. Another 53 permits are being processed. That leaves 344 properties with nothing submitted.

“Some may have settled with their insurance companies in the past year or so, and for some it can take two or three years,” said David Morrison, director of Napa County Planning, Building and Environmental Services. "The fire can destroy in two weeks what it takes five years to rebuild.”

For the two major wildfires this year, there so far have been only casual conversations with planning staff about rebuilding, as many of the affected properties are still involved with cleaning up debris, Morrison said. Some are assessing what insurance will cover and what they want their reconstruction to look like.

From the 2017 fire, Signorello Estate Winery recently resented its pitch to county officials about upgraded experiences for the rebuilt winery, which is still underway.

The county has completed phase 1 of this year’s fire debris cleanup, and phase 2 is beginning. However, many of the wineries don’t qualify for the state picking up that task, so they are using private contractors, he said.

A swarm of roughly 11,000 lightning strikes during high fire danger in mid-August touched off wildlands fires across the state, including the North Bay conflagrations that came to be called the LNU Lightning Complex Fire. The 363,220 acres burned largely were focused in the Walbridge Fire in the hills around Lake Sonoma and in the Hennessey Fire that mostly ringed Lake Berryessa in Napa County, threatened Middletown in Lake County and scorched the fringes of Vacaville in Solano County.

Nearly 1,500 structures were destroyed or damaged, and thick smoke filled the sky in the North Bay, greater Bay Area and beyond for weeks. Certain communities in Sonoma, Napa, Lake and Solano counties in the path of the flames were evacuated.

While the LNU fires were burning, embers from wind-whipped flames the evening of Sept. 27 sparked on the east side of Napa Valley ignited on the west side of the Napa River. The Glass Fire had cut across the valley and headed into Sonoma Valley.

By the time the Glass Fire was extinguished, 1,520 structures were destroyed or damaged. But also damaged was key tourism traffic because of the smoke and evacuations, in a year already hit by limits on visitation because of the coronavirus pandemic. And the toll on the wine grape harvest cut short by concerns of “smoke taint” won’t be fully known until the first official tally in early February, but some early industry estimates put the scale of crop not picked or used as high as 200,000 tons in Sonoma and Napa counties, out of a North Coast crop that typically approaches 600,000 tons.

Jeff Quackenbush covers wine, construction and real estate. Before the Business Journal, he wrote for Bay City News Service in San Francisco. He has a degree from Walla Walla University. Reach him at jquackenbush@busjrnl.com or 707-521-4256.