About
Paul Gullixson is communications manager for Sonoma County and co-author of "Inflamed: Abandonment, Heroism, and Outrage in Wine Country's Deadliest Firestorm" to be released in print on Oct. 31, 2023 by Permuted Press. He previously worked for 37 years as a journalist, including as editorial director for The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, where he played key roles in several team awards, including the 2018 Pulitzer Prize awarded to The Press Democrat for coverage of the October 2017 fires. He has also received numerous individual awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association and the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club and is a past recipient of the New York Times Co. Chairman’s Award for editorial writing. Paul taught journalism for five years at Sonoma State University, serving as faculty adviser for the student newspaper, and later worked as associate vice president of strategic communications for the university. He lives with his family in east Santa Rosa where they have been repeatedly evacuated due to wildfires…but is thankful that their home has been spared so far. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Inflamed/
Featured Work
Inflamed: Abandonment, Heroism, and Outrage in Wine Country's Deadliest Firestorm
Just after midnight on October 9, 2017, as one of the nation’s deadliest and most destructive firestorms swept over California’s Wine Country, hundreds of elderly residents from two posh senior living facilities were caught in its path. The frailest were blind, in wheelchairs, or diagnosed with dementia, and their community quickly transformed from a palatial complex that pledged to care for them to one that threatened to entomb them. The rescue of the final 105 seniors left behind on an inflamed hillside depended not on employees, but strangers whose lives intersected in a riveting tale of terror and heroism. Headlines blamed caregivers for abandonment and neglect, but the truth proved far more complex—leading to a battle for accountability that stretched from the courtroom to the state legislature, and ultimately, to the ballot box.
Anne E. Belden and Paul Gullixson are professional journalists and Sonoma County residents who spent three years recording each phase of the disaster in agonizing detail—from the botched evacuation and its excruciating aftermath to the investigations, lawsuits, and breakdowns that followed. They tell this harrowing story with a veracity and compassion only achieved by experienced reporters with local roots. Their narrative revisits the horrors of 2017 but also asks the reader to look to the future and consider how their community’s most vulnerable will fare as 10,000 Baby Boomers retire each day, the for-profit assisted living industry rapidly expands, and the climate becomes more volatile. If this travesty can
happen at high-end senior living complexes, it can happen anywhere.
