10/11/2026
Safari West owner’s saved the animals during the Tubbs fire.
Peter Lang was 77 when the Tubbs Fire reached the hills above Santa Rosa, California. He sent his wife, his staff and 30 overnight guests down the hill and stayed behind with the animals.
That was the night of October 8, 2017, nine years ago this week. Lang owned Safari West, a wildlife park of 400 acres that he and his wife, Nancy, had opened in 1993. More than 1,000 animals lived there, most of them African species, with giraffes, rhinos and cheetahs among them. The fire was coming from the direction of Calistoga, and there was no time to move the big animals out.
Lang picked up a garden hose and spent the night going around the enclosures and putting out spot fires. At one point he had 10 hoses joined end to end. When flames got too close to a pen, he moved the animals in it to another one, the hyenas included.
His own house stood half a mile away. He could defend the house or the park, and he chose the park. The house burned down.
By sunrise every animal at Safari West was alive, and on October 10 Lang was back at work with his staff. He told the Press Democrat, the Santa Rosa paper, why he'd stayed. "I have a thousand souls I'm responsible for," he said.
