On October 8, 2017, wildfires ignited in multiple spots in Napa and Sonoma counties, seemingly all at once, amid a dangerous windstorm that helped the fires to spread rapidly and disastrously, especially for two residential neighborhoods in Santa Rosa.

This week marks the eighth anniversary of those fires — known as the Tubbs Fire (Santa Rosa), the Nuns Fire (Glen Ellen/Sonoma), the Pocket Fire (Cloverdale), and the Atlas Fire (Napa), with the three Sonoma fires becoming known as the 2017 Sonoma Complex fires, and the whole, including other NorCal fires, dubbed the October 2017 Fire Siege. While homes were lost in all of the blazes, the Tubbs Fire was by far the most destructive and deadly, leaving 22 people dead and destroying more than 5,600 structures.

The fires reached Santa Rosa and Glen Ellen, doing the greatest amount of damage, eight years ago today, on the morning of October 9.

The destruction included the entire neighhorhood of Coffey Park, and part of the neighborhood of Fountaingrove. While Coffey Park is mostly rebuilt, save for a few lots where owners likely didn't have insurance, or enough insurance, there is still fairly constant construction in Fountaingrove, eight years on, as KPIX reports this week.

Similarly, in Glen Ellen, you can still see the scars of the Nuns Fire, with hillsides covered in dead but still standing trees, and a handful of properties along Trinity Road and elsewhere that have not been rebuilt — some with concrete foundations that still remain as reminders.

Many of the homes that have been rebuilt across Sonoma County are more fire-resistant than the ones that were destroyed — though a blaze that arrived with the force and speed of the Tubbs Fire, fueled by fierce Diablo winds that were clocked at up to 60 miles per hour, would likely do similar amount of damage if it happened again.

A subsequent post-fire report on vegetation and resilency in the county discussed how similar firestorms had happened in the same or similar footprints of these fires, on an eerily regular schedule of every 40 to 50 years. Previous firestorms around the same point in fire season had burned similar areas of Santa Rosa and Nuns Canyon/Glen Ellen in 1964 — at a time when they were considerably less populated, though non un-populated — and also in 1923, and in 1870.

The September 17, 1923 event coincided with a historically disastrous fire that destroyed over 640 structures in Berkeley on the same day, and another 1000 structures in other parts of the Bay Area.

Since the 2017 fires, parts of Santa Rosa, Kenwood, Calistoga, and St. Helena were destroyed in the Glass Fire three years later, in September 2020. And the Pickett Fire this past August caused minimal structure damage in part because it was contained within much of the fire scar left by the Glass Fire.

While the cause of the Tubbs Fire was determined to be sparks from a private electrical system on a property in Calistoga, the cause of the Nuns Fire involved PG&E equipment — specifically a tree falling onto some power lines. Victims with lost property in the Nuns Fire became eligible for settlement funds after PG&E's 2020 bankruptcy — as part of a $13.5 billion trust the utility established which also went to the thousands of victims of the 2018 Camp Fire one year later.

A new documentary short about the Tubbs Fire, from the perspective of a Chronicle photographer, is titled "Weathering the Storm: California Tubbs Fire." It can viewed on the Hearst-owned video app Very Local.

As photographer Gabrielle Lurie recounts, "My first impressions of Coffey Park were almost that something unnatural had happened, an entire neighborhood decimated."

Santa Rosa resident Nicole Veum also appears in the doc, talking about being in labor while having her first child when the Santa Rosa hospital she was in had to be evacuated.

"I didn’t think a city like that could catch on fire," Veum says.