Page 377 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong
P. 377

 “All the while I was thinking, The sun is going to come up. I’m going to get a strike team of five engines rolling in here and all my work will have paid off. At 6:00 a.m. his neighborhood was still safe, but the fire was encroaching from the north, east, and west. Around 6:30, it hit Broderick’s block and by 7:00, it was everywhere except the six houses he was protecting. “I had done everything I could, but all that work didn’t do any good. By then the wind had died down. It wasn’t blowing through like a firestorm. The fire just progressed slowly, house by house, in a me- ticulous fashion. Around 7:20, I saw the fire start to lick at the eaves of my house. And my escape route was starting to narrow.” Broderick finally left at 7:30. Fire trucks showed up around 10:00 that morning, but it was too late. By
   Top to bottom: Broderick’s neighborhood was leveled in the Tubbs Fire of 2017; Broderick rebuilt in the same spot and moved back in during the Summer
of 2020.
then, most of the neighborhood was gone.
CAL FIRE’s first command and control center had burned down the first day of the fire. They had relo- cated to a small fire station down the street, but it was too small to handle the army of fire trucks com- ing in from all over the state. Strike teams were told to find the leading edge of the fire and attack it. And that was Coffey Park. “If that first command and con- trol center hadn’t burnt down, and there had been a clear directive to send engines where they needed to go, then they might have come to my neighborhood sooner,” says Broderick. “Later, I heard from the Martinez-Berkeley-Richmond strike team that they were supposed to come to my neighborhood, but when the command center burnt down, their orders were unclear. So they went to the frontline in Coffey Park. And once that was contained, they came to my neighborhood.”
In the end, the San Jose, Benicia, Martinez, and Berkeley fire departments had ignored their orders to leave because, by then, the wind had died down. They were able to stop the fire’s progression at Sleepy Hollow Drive, a quarter mile south of Broder- ick’s house and a quarter mile north of his parents— his childhood home.
The Broderick family was able to buy a 28-ft trailer with FEMA funds and live on his parent’s property while their home was being rebuilt. In the summer of 2020, they were finally able to move into their new home, built on the same property in the same neighborhood.
All photos on this spread by Larry Broderick.
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