California wildfire victims start to return home, but face long road to recovery

Aug. 27--As firefighters continue to make progress on the blazes incinerating wide swaths of Northern California, evacuees are trickling back into their neighborhoods and looking ahead toward a hopeful -- but uncertain -- future.

Evacuation orders were lifted Thursday for parts of Vacaville in Solano County; areas of San Mateo County including La Honda, Pescadero and San Gregorio; and Scotts Valley in Santa Cruz County -- allowing residents to return home after, for some, suffering more than a week in limbo.

"We know people are anxious, they're stressed, they want to get back," said a spokesman, Sgt. Juan Valencia for the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office, where communities including Guerneville, Rio Nido and the outskirts of Healdsburg remain under evacuation. "And we're working behind the scenes really hard on getting people back -- but only when it's safe."

But as residents return to burn-scarred neighborhoods, they face a long road back to normalcy, dotted with daunting questions. Should we rebuild or move away? Can our business survive, or will we have to close?

Despite cooler weather that helped firefighters contain one-third of the LNU and SCU Lightning Complex fires in the North and South Bay, and 21% of the CZU Lightning Complex Fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the thousands of firefighters on the front lines won't be sent home to their families anytime soon. They still have months of "mop-up" -- or extinguishing hot spots -- ahead, and it likely will be another four weeks before Cal Fire hands the reins back to local fire departments, agency spokesman Dan Olson said.

"We're dealing with large, 100-year-old redwoods, that once they start to burn, it takes a lot to suppress," he said. "This isn't something that will be resolved in days or even weeks."

The three fires, sparked by lightning two weekends ago during an extreme heat wave, have so far consumed nearly 820,000 acres. The fires have damaged or destroyed more than 2,000 structures -- that number is expected to grow -- and forced tens of thousands of people to flee. Six people have been killed.

In the North Bay, residents may be able to return to the areas around Fairfield and Winters within the next 72 hours, Cal Fire officials said Thursday. But new evacuation orders came down in Colusa County -- making it clear the fires remain a very real threat.

As residents return home to assess the damage, some are finding that surviving the fire was just the first step.

Marcia Ritz is lucky. Her general store, Spanish Flat Country Store & Deli in Napa, was left standing after the Hennessey Fire swept through her community on the western shore of Lake Berryessa. But almost everything else in the neighborhood -- including the mobile home park where Ritz lived -- was destroyed.

Now, Ritz thinks she'll have to close her business.

"There is no customer base. There are maybe two houses remaining on the hill," she said, waving her hand to gesture down Berryessa Knoxville Road.

Still, Ritz is glad to have her life, and the lives of her friends, after a close call with the fire that had her fleeing -- in a group of about 10 people -- in a pontoon boat to the middle of the lake the evening of Aug. 18. As the fire surrounded them, they got into the boat and set off, watching the hills around them burn. They stayed on the water -- staring in awe and terror -- for four or five hours.

"We drove out and you could see the devastation," she said. "Trees were smoldering."

In rural Vacaville, Carol and Bruce Schafer, who came home Wednesday to find their 20-acre property reduced to smoldering rubble, now face a tough choice. Should they take the insurance money and buy a house somewhere else? Or do they rebuild their dream home -- a replica of George Washington's Mount Vernon -- in the community they've loved for the past 31 years?

Carol Schafer guesses they'll probably stay.

"We're going to have a busy couple years, I think," she said, chuckling as she looked across the blackened hills near where her home stood a week ago.

After evacuation orders around UC Santa Cruz were lifted, Cheryl Penn returned to her home on campus Thursday -- just in time to celebrate her 48th birthday the following day.

Penn, who creates internal training programs for Google, and her husband Peter Sardellitto, a retired university staffer, were unloading from their two cars what they'd fled with a week ago -- including 16-year-old sibling cats Obie and Joco, and a potted basil plant looking a little worse for wear.

"That was our joke, that all five of us made it out," Sardellitto said.

Once they finish unpacking the car and returning their belongings to the small condo where they've lived for 10 years, "It's cocktail time," Penn said.

Whether from a basil plant, their neighbors or the resilience of nature, residents whose lives have been upended by the fires are drawing hope from wherever they can.

On the shore of Lake Berryessa, Ritz believes in her community's ability to come back. She looks forward to the blackened ashes fading into new growth and to people returning to the water for boating, fishing and swimming.

"Next spring it will turn green," she said of the hills that roll around the lake. "Then gold."

Staff writers Dylan Bouscher, Evan Webeck and Fiona Kelliher contributed to this report.

___

(c)2020 the Palo Alto Daily News (Menlo Park, Calif.)

Visit the Palo Alto Daily News (Menlo Park, Calif.) at www.paloaltodailynews.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.