SANTA ROSA, Calif. — When a firestorm swept down the hillsides of Sonoma County, bringing terror to this tight grid of thousands of homes, dogs tended to rush to their masters.
But cats went in the opposite direction, ignoring the pleas of panicked owners and disappearing amid the chaotic evacuation.
Finding the missing cats that fled the October wildfires has been an impassioned quest for Jennifer Petruska, an animal lover whose home, pets included, was one of the few in her neighborhood to be spared.
The Tubbs fire that tore through Wine Country in Fall 2017
Ms. Petruska has spent nearly every night since the fires tracking and trapping fire cats, as she calls them, the felines that for weeks have remained missing because of stubbornness, trauma, instinct, or a mix of all three.
Catching cats can be tricky in the best of circumstances but she and her team of volunteers have caught more than 70. They believe many dozens more are on the loose.
Pet Rescue and Reunification, as the volunteers call themselves, have set up night-vision cameras in storm drains and creek beds, where many cats went into hiding. Every evening at dusk they set traps baited with tuna and mackerel, checking them hourly until dawn.
Jennifer Petruska, left, and Barbara Gray set a trap in Santa Rosa, Calif. Ms. Petruska is coordinating an effort to find cats lost during the wildfire. Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Pet Rescue and Reunification, as the volunteers call themselves, have set up night-vision cameras in storm drains and creek beds, where many cats went into hiding. Every evening at dusk they set traps baited with tuna and mackerel, checking them hourly until dawn.
“If you want to catch a cat you have to stay up all night — that’s just the name of the game,” Ms. Petruska said as she prepared for another dark and cold round of cat stalking. “I’ve been a horrible insomniac my whole life, so it suits me.”
Coffey Park, the neighborhood where Ms. Petruska is focusing her efforts, may as well have been struck by a bomb. Well over 1,000 homes were leveled. Ms. Petruska and her team say they realize that with nearly 5,000 homes destroyed in the Santa Rosa area alone their effort is ancillary to the grieving and massive effort of reconstruction that is only just beginning.
The bleak landscape of charred lots is still teeming with creatures stealthily crawling throughout the night, mostly unseen.
Ms. Petruska says she knows there are still many cats on the loose because her motion-activated cameras capture them nearly every night, along with a parade of other nocturnal animals such as skunks, opossums and raccoons.
A cat that was found at the Journeys End Mobile Park in Santa Rosa.
Photo Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Ms. Petruska says she knows there are still many cats on the loose because her motion-activated cameras capture them nearly every night, along with a parade of other nocturnal animals such as skunks, opossums and raccoons.
To the families who lost everything, recounting how Ms. Petruska helped recover their cats often brings tears.
“I just wanted my cat — that was the only thing I wanted back,” said Kelly Stinson, whose home in Coffey Park was destroyed. “I spent hours every single day looking for her.“
Ms. Petruska located Evy and after an evening of coaxing returned a day later and grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck.
Sara Ratekin, a veterinarian who has treated many of the cats rescued by Ms. Petruska’s team, says the fires have shown the ability of cats to survive perilous circumstances. Captured fire cats often arrive in her office with burned paws, singed whiskers — and many pounds lighter than before the fire.
Unlike dogs, cats have an instinct to flee when they sense danger, Dr. Ratekin said.
Volunteers posted flyers of cats found in the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa.
Photo Jim Wilson/The New York Times
“I can explain why they ran away,” she said. “But I can’t explain why they became so wild so quickly.”
In August, during the flooding in Houston caused by Hurricane Harvey, cats were spotted by rescue workers swimming or floating on furniture and debris trying to find high ground.
When emergency medical workers showed up at flooded homes, dogs would often greet them at the door, tails wagging, said Katie Jarl, the Texas director of The Humane Society of the United States.
If cats were still home they would often be hiding — and when discovered would need significant coaxing to leave.
”No matter if it’s fires or flooding, or any type of natural disaster, cats will often hide,” Ms. Jarl said. “It can be days or weeks before they re-emerge.”
Barbara Gray, right, and her daughter Kelly searched through a burned property where cat traps had been set out earlier.
Photo Jim Wilson/The New York Times
To lure Santa Rosa’s fire cats back into domestic life, Ms. Petruska assembles personality profiles of each cat she stalks. One cat likes the sound of whipped cream fizzing from a can. She carries a can in her car. Another cat answers to the sound of the crinkling of a bag of a specific brand of cat treats. She carries the treats.
Unsurprisingly the most effective lure appears to be fish. Ms. Petruska soaks socks in the juices from cans of mackerel and hangs them from trees.
On a recent evening at dusk, she drove through the countless rows of burned out houses to a neighborhood near a small creek. In near freezing temperatures, she hauled a cat trap across the molten remains of a home, careful to step over pieces of roofing and other remnants jutting up through the rubble. She passed a random assortment of household items laid bare in the detritus — a solitary teacup, a blackened metal colander and the burned out remains of a washer and dryer — before setting up a metal trap.
The Tubbs fire that tore through Wine Country in Fall 2017
By morning the trap was still empty. But she has persisted, working through the holidays.
Around 10 fire cats have been found without any clues as to their owners; they are being kept at Sonoma County’s animal services department.
She has found cats even after owners gave up the search. Cindy Fulwider fled her home in the early hours of Oct. 9 as embers the size of golf balls rained down. She was convinced that her cat, whom she calls Sweet Baby, had perished. Then she got a call five weeks after the fire from one of Ms. Petruska’s team.
“I really thought we would never see him again,” Ms. Fulwider said.
“I really thought we would never see him again,” Ms. Fulwider said.
A version of this article appears in print on January 2, 2018, on Page A8 of the New York Times New York edition with the headline: Skittish and Skulking, California’s ‘Fire Cats’ Prove Hard to Corral. The article has been paraphrased with additional photos and links.
A bombshell book about Donald Trump and his first year in office paints an unflattering portrait of a man who never wanted to be President.
“Fire and Fury,” a stunning expose from author Michael Wolff obtained by the Daily News, details inner-circle secrets from Trump’s campaign and White House aides. It officially hits the shelves Jan. 9 — but early excerpts released Wednesday created an immediate furor.
Based on more than 200 interviews with current and former Trump confidantes and staff, “Fire and Fury” showcases the President as a fame-hungry dilettante wholly uninterested in the complexities of his job.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dismissed the book as a work of fiction “filled with false and misleading accounts from individuals who have no access of influence with the White House.”
Here’s a look at some of the juiciest claims peppered throughout “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”
Trump didn't expect to win the presidency
Trump's "ultimate goal” had never been to win the Oval Office, Wolff said. But he was excited about the exposure and opportunities to develop his brand.
With encouragement from his longtime pal and former Fox News head Roger Ailes, Trump even flirted with the idea of starting his own television network.
“Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn't become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching,” Wolff said.
First daughter for Pres
Ivanka Trump followed her dad to the White House as an unpaid adviser with husband, Jared Kushner.
“The (couple) had made an earnest deal: If sometime in the future the opportunity arose, she’d be the one to run for president,” Wolff wrote. “The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.”
The Constitution
“I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head,” former aide Sam Nunberg told Wolff about the time he was sent to explain the Constitution to Trump early in the campaign.
Inauguration
“Trump did not enjoy his own inauguration. He was angry that A-level stars had snubbed the event, disgruntled with the accommodations at Blair House, and visibly fighting with his wife, who seemed on the verge of tears,” Wolff wrote.
"Treasonous and Unpatriotic"
Bannon and the Russia probe
President Trump’s former chief strategeist, Steve Bannon, described a controversial meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” to Wolff.
The former Breitbart head also told Wolff he expected investigators in the Russia probe to “crack Don Jr. like an egg on national TV.”
Bannon also believed that Don Jr. had taken the Russian lawyer — who was peddling dirt on Hillary Clinton — up to the 26th floor of Trump Tower to meet his dad, Wolff wrote.
"Steve Bannon was certain that after the [July 2016 Trump Tower] meeting, Trump, Jr. had taken the participants to see his father,” Wolff said.
The President has said he was unaware any meeting with Russians took place.
Foul Mouth and Using the C-word
Sally Yates
Trump called his former Acting Attorney General a “c---” when she refused to have the Justice Department uphold his travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries, Wolff said.
“Trump conceived an early, obsessive antipathy for Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. She was, he steamed, ‘such a c---,’” the journalist’s book said.
Sexual Harassment for Entertainment
Infidelity
Trump had a trick he used when he wanted to pursue friend’s wives, according to Wolff.
“Trump liked to say that one of the things that made life worth living was getting your friends’ wives into bed. In pursuing a friend’s wife, he would try to persuade the wife that her husband was perhaps not what she thought. Then he’d have his secretary ask the friend into his office; once the friend arrived, Trump would engage in what was, for him, more or less constant sexual banter. ‘Do you still like having sex with your wife? How often? You must have had a better f--- than your wife? Tell me about it. I have girls coming in from Los Angeles at three o’clock. We can go upstairs and have a great time. I promise ...’ All the while, Trump would have his friend’s wife on the speakerphone, listening in,” Wolff wrote.
"An idiot surrounded by clowns"
Doubtful Aides
Top Trump staffers expressed their doubts about his intelligence with colorful adjectives, Wolff said.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly called Trump a “moron” last year.
“For (Treasury Secretary) Steve Mnuchin and (former Trump White House chief of staff) Reince Priebus, the president was an ‘idiot.’ For (former Goldman Sachs exec) Gary Cohn, he was ‘dumb as sh-t.’ For (National Security Adviser) H.R. McMaster he was a ‘dope.’ The list went on,” Wolff said.
Horrified Allies
Wolff had a lot to say about the head of Trump’s National Economic Council and quoted from an email “purporting to represent the views of Gary Cohn” that circulated in the White House in April.
“It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won't read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant p---k who thinks he’s smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits ... I am in a constant state of terror and shock,” the email said, according to “Fire and Fury.”
Even media mogul Rupert Murdoch, a Trump supporter, hung up the phone after a conversation with the President about H-1B visas for select immigrants and said, “What a f---ing idiot,” Wolff wrote.
Trump didn't know who John Boehner was
Ailes, who often whispered advice in Trump's ear, encouraged him to pick a “son of a b---h as” his chief of staff, offering former Speaker of the House John Boehner as a suggestion.
Paranoia:
Trump eats fast food out of fear
"He had a longtime fear of being poisoned," Wolff wrote, "one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald's — nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade."
Wolff said the fear also has Trump stripping down his own bed and he’s ordered housekeeping not to touch his toothbrush and other personal belongings.
Trump also has his own bedroom at his D.C. lodgings, marking "the first time since the Kennedy White house that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms,” Wolff said.
Just for Men: That Orange Hair
Dutiful daughter Ivanka wasn’t above a chortle with her friends about her father’s infamous orange comb-over.
“She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate -- a contained island after scalp reduction surgery — surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men — the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond color,” according to page 79 of “Fire and Fury.”
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