At its peak, the Sonoma County Fairgrounds’ RV park was home to 120 trailers brought in by FEMA to shelter homeowners and renters whose homes were incinerated in the October 2017 wildfires, which destroyed more than 5,300 homes in Sonoma County.
FEMA had previously set Friday as the last day renters were eligible for its temporary housing program. At the last minute, seven renters who lost housing during the fires were given a reprieve allowing them to remain in a FEMA trailer until July 10.
The extension came too late for 15 renters who relinquished the keys to their government trailers Friday to comply with the FEMA deadline. Five others are in the process of losing their trailers because they violated agreements with FEMA, said David Passey, the agency’s regional director of external affairs.
Pam Peavler, a Healdsburg native, moved into a FEMA trailer in November 2017 shortly after the Tubbs fire destroyed the Santa Rosa house she was renting. On Friday, she was hauling her belongings out of the trailer and into an RV while her boyfriend, Scott Struckman, busied himself preparing the vehicle for the couple to move on.
Peavler said the couple did not have a permanent destination in mind but hoped to become camp hosts, perhaps somewhere farther north. T-shirts on hangers and socks strewn on a rack had yet to join the rest of the couple’s stuff as noon approached, with bundles of bedding and crates of clothes marking Peavler’s moving progress.
“I’ve got laundry coming out of my head,” Peavler said.
In all, FEMA supplied temporary housing to about 230 Sonoma County families after the 2017 wildfires, said Brandi Richard, a spokeswoman for the agency. She could not say how many got FEMA trailers and how many were housed by other means, such as a government lease of an existing apartment.
FEMA typically provides trailers to displaced disaster survivors for 18 months, setting April 10 as the end of the program for October 2017 wildfire survivors. Earlier this year, Santa Rosa and Sonoma County secured extensions from FEMA, which pushed back the deadline for homeowners by three months to July 10. But renters, many of them lower-income, received just one extra month, giving them until Friday to find an affordable rental in Sonoma County’s tight housing market.
While Peavler and others in the RV park prepared to leave, local leaders including Santa Rosa Mayor Tom Schwedhelm and City Manager Sean McGlynn traveled last week to Washington, D.C., making last-ditch efforts to persuade federal officials to extend the deadline for renters.
Mike Gossman, the county’s director of recovery and resiliency, said FEMA officials had been concerned that local officials weren’t doing enough to house people. Local officials said the city and county were doing what they could, including the issuance of 48 city housing vouchers to displaced renters facing the deadline to leave the fairgrounds, he said.
“We’ve been able to get a lot of people housed,” Gossman said. “To me, that’s a compelling argument for us to have a few more months.”
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