Memorial at Santa Rosa park to commemorate lives lost in 2017 firestorm

About a year after the 2017 North Bay firestorm, as Sonoma County and Santa Rosa began to climb out of the grief and trauma of the deadly disaster, some, particularly those whose loved ones died in the fires, were feeling left behind.

Jessica Tunis was one of them. Her mother, Linda Tunis, was among the 22 people who died in the Tubbs Fire, Sonoma County’s most calamitous wildfire. Altogether, 40 people lost their lives in fires that raged across Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino and Lake counties starting on the night of Oct. 8, 2017.

They were siblings, parents, children and grandchildren.

As recovery and rebuilding efforts got underway, Tunis said she and others mourning loved ones felt alone in their grief and not yet resilient, as so many slogans on T-shirts and bumper stickers touted at the time.

“A lot of people were part of a community that helped them get through this and the people that lost loved ones were not part of a community,” Tunis said. “We were dealing with it on our own.”

The disconnect became apparent to Tunis and her friend Cathie Merkel, whose mother, Sharon Robinson, also died in the Tubbs Fire, when in 2018 when they spotted a Facebook post from Sonoma County Supervisor James Gore celebrating local fire block captains with a meal.

The post was well-intentioned, Tunis said, but it brought up her grief and frustration.

So Merkel commented on Gore’s post, sharing how she, Tunis and others were still struggling. It had only been a year or so since their mothers’ names were etched into a memorial wall on the grounds of the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts with the names of the 24 Sonoma County fire victims. However, Tunis said she did not have an opportunity to participate in the creation of that memorial.

A few messages with Gore turned into meetings and those meetings eventually turned into an organized effort to create a memorial for the people who died in the 2017 wildfires and the families grieving their loss.

In 2022, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors established a task force of residents to work on the project under the wing of Creative Sonoma, the county’s public arts agency. In March of this year, the board approved a $536,000 budget for the project, with the majority of funds coming from the county’s general fund and some grant funding.

The board also approved the task force’s site selection for the memorial: on the western edge of the Santa Rosa’s fire-scarred Fountaingrove neighborhood in Nagasawa Community Park.

The task force needs the city to authorize the selection, but Tara Thompson, Creative Sonoma’s director, is hopeful the county and city can reach an agreement. Those talks are set to begin in a few weeks, she said.

The task force looked at 32 potential sites, but Nagasawa Park was the unanimous favorite, Tunis said.

She visited the top six contenders for the memorial, taking time to sit and imagine herself at the memorial. Some spots were too noisy, she said. Nagasawa Park was “a hidden gem.”

“This isn’t about cutting ribbons and doing parades,” Gore said. “That’s why the (task force) chose the site that’s secluded and that’s peaceful.”

The task force will soon be requesting proposals from local artists interested in creating the memorial. Once an artist is selected, the task force plans to hold community engagement sessions to design a memorial. Installation is expected to be complete by September 2025.

“This is a difficult and challenging project to undertake given that it encompasses community grief and recovery and varying levels of impacts,” Thompson said, later adding, “Approaching it with sensitivity and emotional awareness of what people are going through is super important.”

Both Thompson and Tunis hope the community-based design process will draw input from more family members.

Though the process was meant to include people who lost loved ones in the fire, Tunis is the only such task force member. Some relatives have preferred to linger at the edge of the project — Tunis keeps a few updated via Facebook — but the project has not attracted the level of input Tunis hoped for.

Still, she has found the experience cathartic.

“It has been a healing process to be a part of creating a memorial where our loved ones will be remembered,” Tunis said. “I personally am feeling more resilient now.”

Anyone interested in learning more about the memorial project on Creative Sonoma’s website at Fire Memorial Public Art Project — CreativeSonoma.org.

You can reach Staff Writer Emma Murphy at 707-521-5228 or emma.murphy@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MurphReports.