Oct. 21–Last year's Tubbs fire not only took away their hospitality jobs. It also broke up a collection of workers who soon missed each other's company.
So former staff members of the burned Hilton hotel in Santa Rosa on Saturday held their first reunion since the fire. The gathering at Finley Park in west Santa Rosa included hugs and smiles and stories about new jobs elsewhere.
"I just really wanted to get together and see how everybody fared a year later," said Barbara Winters, who helped organize the reunion.
Winters got a new job one day after the fire waiting tables at a Petaluma hotel. Even so, she said she missed her former Hilton colleagues.
"One day you're together and the next you're not," she said.
The North Bay wildfires claimed 40 lives and caused nearly $10 billion worth of damage across the region. The fires rank as the most destructive in state history.
In the hospitality sector, seven hotels and inns were damaged or destroyed by flames, as were nine restaurants and fast-food eateries. Many businesses, including the Hilton, were burned by the Tubbs fire, which began late on Oct. 8 near Calistoga and reached Santa Rosa overnight.
The 250-bed Hilton Sonoma Wine Country on Round Barn Boulevard had employed about 130 workers in such areas as housekeeping, front desk, maintenance, food service, banquets and management.
Many of the roughly two dozen former colleagues who gathered Saturday recalled the shock of hearing their hotel had burned.
"It was kind of an eerie feeling," said Tom Schuman, a Windsor resident who had worked for five years at the Hilton as its chief engineer. "Sunday I had a job. Monday I didn't."
Schuman noted the yearslong efforts to improve and maintain the hotel, calling it "sad to see all our work go down the drain."
Others focused on the breakup of longtime colleagues.
"It's like losing a family," said Lou Ortiz III of Santa Rosa.
Ortiz had worked the front desk and a variety of other jobs at the hotel during the past five years. He went on to work at another hospitality job and this spring he took a job as a bank teller in Healdsburg.
Patricia Miller of Rohnert Park had worked at the Hilton for a decade as an accountant. During those years, she said, colleagues got well acquainted.
"We'd see people get married, have kids," said Miller, who now works at a Petaluma hotel.
The area's hotels generally had staff openings before the fires, so many Hilton staff "got snapped up really quickly" a year ago, said Lenora Olson, the hotel's former human relations director.
Olson said she took part in the company's efforts to help her colleagues find new positions. Losing a job is a scary thing, she said, so finding new employment for the former Hilton workers helped them "get stable again."
Schuman credited Olson with helping him get a temporary job at a hotel in Milpitas that has lasted almost a year. "She was doing it very well," he said of her work to place the former Hilton workers.
After the fires, some colleagues left the area. Winters said the night auditor, who played a key role in evacuating guests after the power went out on the night of the fire, moved to Southern California. And a sales staff member moved to Redding, only to have her home burn there this summer in the Carr fire.
