VIDEO - When Terry Sanders saw the glow on the horizon on Oct. 8, and felt the heavy wind in his face, he knew there was trouble.
But the Santa Rosa resident and Oakland firefighter didn’t realize the magnitude until he headed a few hundred feet down the road from his home to talk to the only man left at Fire Station 5.
“I knocked on the door and said, ‘So I’m sure you know about the fire,’” Sanders remembers. “And he goes, ‘Which one? There are six of them.’”
The first wave of North Bay fires destroyed Sanders’ Fountaingrove neighborhood that night; even Fire Station 5 was reduced to ashes. Sanders, a musician whose previous band once opened for Sammy Hagar, lost a custom amplifier and more than a dozen guitars, including one gifted to him by Carlos Santana.
What happened next still has his friends in awe.