Wichitans’ winery tour weekend turns to fiery flight

Other than the Kansas-force winds that were blowing throughout Napa Valley on the morning of Oct. 8, the setting at Wichitans Tom and Kyle Futo’s Futo Winery was ideal for a visit by four Wichita couples.

“I remember just sitting there and looking out,” physician Joseph Galichia said. “I thought this has just got to be one of the best places in the entire world to live.”

He admits to a bit of envy at the Futos getting to “live in a wonderful, wonderful part of the world.”

Hours later, he and his party had to flee the Hotel Indigo in the middle of the night as wildfires began sparking and jumping throughout the area.

A week and a half later, the fires have yet to be extinguished. At least 41 people are dead, about 60 are unaccounted for in Napa and Sonoma counties and more than 210,000 acres are scorched along with thousands of structures.

“You could see the flames behind the hotel when we left,” Galichia said. “I thought, man, there’s no way it’s going to go somewhere else.”

The Hotel Indigo was untouched, and most of the Futos’ two properties are fine, but it wasn’t clear at the beginning of the ordeal that that would be the case.

The couples – Galichia and his wife, Stella, Pat and Sylvia Do, Betsy and Scott Redler and Todd and Ellen Winter – bid on the weekend trip as part of a fundraiser.

At 2:30 in the morning of Oct. 9, Ellen Winter awoke to the kind of darkness that happens only when the power is out.

Winter said she began investigating and wanted to call the front desk, but the phone wasn’t working. Her husband awoke.

“I said, ‘Do you smell any smoke?’ ” Ellen Winter said. “Because I could just smell a little bit of smoke.”

Then there were sirens. She worried the hotel was on fire, but her husband assured her there would be alarms if that were the case.

“I laid back down in bed, and we listened to the sirens go by,” Ellen Winter said.

They speculated about what was happening but had a nagging feeling.

“Well,” Ellen Winter said, “do we need to get up?”

The Redlers were having a similar conversation down the hall.

“Nothing really registered until someone was pounding on the door,” Betsy Redler said of a hotel employee. “And then it was like, ‘Oh, man.’ ”

Wildfires in the area had started mid-evening the night before, but it wasn’t immediately evident that that was the issue.

Pat and Sylvia Do, who are both physicians, and the Galichias feared the hotel was on fire and immediately went to the lobby. Eventually, though, everyone returned and took a quick, though difficult, five to 10 minutes to pack before leaving.

“You can’t see,” Sylvia Do said. “You use your phone, but then it takes one of your hands out of the equation.”

Betsy Redler said there was “a sense of urgency but not panic.”

The couples had taken Uber from the airport when they arrived and then limousines to some wineries before Todd Winter decided at the last minute to get a vehicle that would hold all eight people. Each of the couples met the others at the car.

“I’m not sure what we would have done if we didn’t have a vehicle,” said Scott Redler, operating partner of Freddy’s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers.

“When we started thinking about that, it was kind of terrifying,” Ellen Winter said.

Joseph Galichia said the wind was blowing so hard that “you had to work on keeping your balance.”

“The smoke was heavy,” Betsy Redler said. “You could see flames … in the hills. I just didn’t realize … how erratic it was.”

On the advice of someone they didn’t know in the parking lot, they decided to head south.

“For all we know, we’re heading into the fire,” Todd Winter said.

“I was feeling pretty anxious,” Joseph Galichia said. “I’ve seen people who have been in house fires and things, and it’s terrible.”

There was smoke and falling ash as Todd Winter drove, but he said he could still see. He pulled off near the Napa airport, but Winter said the smoke was worse, and the party decided to drive on. Several people checked their phones, but information was scarce.

“That was unsettling to me to not be able to make decisions based on good knowledge,” Ellen Winter said.

“My worry was traffic and then fire crossing a road,” Joseph Galichia said.

Todd Winter said he felt the weight of responsibility driving his friends.

Most of the passengers didn’t feel relief until they arrived within miles of San Francisco, where they took a brief respite with some welcoming employees at a Marriott before booking flights home or, in the Winters’ case, to the National Business Aviation Association annual trade show in Las Vegas.

“I was tempted to just stay at that Marriott,” said Todd Winter, who owns Mid-Continent Instruments and Avionics. “I was tempted just to say I just need a little time out after that.”

Winter said the situation gives him new perspective on people who have to evacuate hurricanes or who are refugees.

“It was a pretty intense experience,” he said. “I can’t even imagine what it must feel like leaving your home.”

Along with the practical concerns of the situation, Pat Do said, “I immediately thought of my kids.”

All the travelers said they’ll approach staying in hotels more carefully in the future by plotting exit strategies.

“It really made me think,” Sylvia Do said. “It is a lesson about how do you respond? How do you get out and just paying a little more attention to where you go.”

Stella Galichia said, “You always need to be alert.”

And pay attention to your gut feelings, Ellen Winter said, such as “when you wake up and your intuition says you need to check this out further.”

The Redlers said they could still smell smoke on themselves when they got back home to Wichita.

“It was almost surreal, like we don’t really think we went through that, but we did,” Scott Redler said.

Betsy Redler said in the moment, she “didn’t have time to get worried about it, you just had to move. I didn’t get scared till I got home, frankly, and saw the news.”

In addition to feeling fortunate, the group feels for Napa Valley and its residents.

“It just breaks my heart,” Betsy Redler said.

“I know we all really feel a tremendous amount of empathy and concern,” Ellen Winter said. “This is a terrible tragedy for this region and the state.”

Todd Winter said there will be prolonged consequences, but he said he’s confident the area will bounce back.

“California normally does.”

This story was originally published October 17, 2017 at 6:47 PM with the headline "Wichitans’ winery tour weekend turns to fiery flight."