Five days after Kelley Magnuson lost her home in the October 2017 wildfires, she went back to work.
Magnuson, Santa Rosa’s deputy director of recreation, had fled to Cloverdale from the Tubbs fire, which destroyed the Mark West Estates home where she’d lived with her son and his fiancée. Her phone had been buzzing the night of the fire, but she wasn’t able to join other city officials to coordinate the local response to the fire after flames jumped Highway 101.
Many of Magnuson’s staffers were busy at the Finley Community Center working to shelter hundreds of people who had lost their homes. While she worked to replace her car, clothes and home, she joined them.
“My co-workers had lost their homes, too, and they were all working,” she said. “So it just felt like the right thing to do was to get in and help.”