Glass Fire evacuees able to return home in many Santa Rosa neighborhoods

Monday, October 5, 2020
SANTA ROSA, Calif. (KGO) -- Thousands of evacuees in Santa Rosa were able to go home. Evacuations orders were reduced to evacuation warnings in several areas on Sunday.

In total 5,201 people are now under an evacuation warning. 1,070 are still under evacuation orders.

LIST: North Bay wildfires prompt evacuation orders & warnings in Napa, Sonoma counties

"You just don't know what way those winds are going to blow," says Melania Kang of Santa Rosa.

It's that uncertainly that seems to come up with just about every person we talked with in Santa Rosa. People like Kang and her husband Steven Baker who were evacuated but are now back home.



They are not resting easy even with the good weather.

"It's kind of a very weird way to live, we're always anticipating the next disaster. So for right now, things have calmed down," says Kang.
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Sunday evacuation orders were reduced to evacuation warnings for many in Santa Rosa, meaning that thousands who were evacuated can now go home.

RELATED: Some Glass Fire evacuation orders downgraded to warnings, North Bay residents anxious to return home

"An hour later where you two were standing this looked like a river of flashes. It's all burning embers and I said let's go," said Robert Frost of Santa Rosa.

Frost evacuated last week and came home on Sunday.



While most of the Oakmont homes were untouched, there was a handful damaged by the fire.

"I don't mind the evacuation, I don't want to see my friends' homes burn. We need to get the state and the federal government together and start cleaning up our forests because otherwise, this is going to go on for I don't know how many years," says Frost.

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Steven Baker and his wife lost their home in 2017 and says that they've thought of moving but the fire problem isn't unique to just Northern California.

"It's burning up in Washington and Oregon and the southern part of the state so if you could think of any place that we could go to that doesn't have earthquakes, fires, and floods call us," says Baker.
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