Surviving a California Firestorm

October 22,1991: I’m standing at the top of Swainland Road in the Oakland Hills looking down at where my home stood yesterday morning. All around me, a war zone. Everything is dead. What is left of the mostly oak trees still burns, little puffs of smoke sliding out from within the trunks. Chimneys stand like sentinels guarding nothing. Stone and brick staircases climb up to nowhere. The air is still, no birds, no animals, no sounds at all. It’s like the earth has stopped breathing. The ground is charred, black, brown, russet.

Photo taken by anonymous

Less than twenty-four hours ago, I was told to evacuate. I stare down the long winding block of Swainland Road from where I stand on Broadway Terrace 1000 yards away. I’ve been robotic doing what I was told. Packing the car, though I couldn’t think clearly what to take with me. Driving to safety along with the rest of the neighborhood; a long meandering snake that had to keep adjusting as the fire jumped from hill to roadside to median.

My home is gone. Tears fill my eyes but I don’t have time to cry. There is no one else around. I snuck behind police lines desperate to return and find my second cat, Squeak, who didn’t make it out with me. I couldn’t find him. My home, my first home that I’d bought with my own money, that I’d lovingly decorated with anything I could find that made it mine, was gone. Burned to the ground.

Photo by Anonymous

I walk down Swainland, passing one lone house that stands on the righthand side of the road. It seems in perfect condition, blue with grey trim, a child’s bicycle at the front door. Only later, do I find out that it had a new up-to-date roof, three months old. These fires jump from roof to roof. I can smell wood smoke, usually one of my favorite smells. At my property, I find my bike and an old wooden milk wagon under my large oak tree. The fire jumped over them. I walk up the sixty stairs (this is the Oakland Hills) to where my front door should have been. The railing had been wooden. Nails lie side by side on the left of the stone steps all the way to the top as if someone had arranged them in perfect symmetry. Near where my bedroom had been, tree trunks were burning. Red-orange coals are visible when I look down inside. Looking up, I can see for miles. San Francisco and the Bay to my right. Only two years earlier, the 1989 Earthquake had destroyed part of the Bay Bridge. Downtown Oakland and Lake Merritt in front of me. There is nothing to block my view.

I find the dishwasher and nudge the door open. Broken plates and some pots in good condition lie within. Ashes look like sculptures. I see a long line of books that I know were once my journals. In perfect shape except they are ash. I reach out my right index finger and lightly touch one. The whole structure collapses. Thirty years of recording my joys, my sorrows, my breakups, my love affairs. Poof. Gone like smoke and ash. Literally. Funny elongated pieces of silver show up on the ground. It takes me a few seconds to realize this is the remains of the silverware my mother had sent last month.

I walk around in ever widening circles calling Squeak’s name though I know that the likelihood of surviving the 2000 degree heat is nil. I see small blue tiles scattered all over that had been stored in the basement. I pick up distorted glass perfume bottles that look beautiful in their bizarre shapes.

I’ve had enough. I want to leave. I hear a ‘meow’. Squeak emerges from seemingly nowhere covered in the tan liquid that had been dumped out of helicopters yesterday in an attempt to slow the fire’s progress. I scoop him up and, standing atop my lonely hill, I hug him. I finally sob my heart out.

*** ***

Photo by anonymous

People always want to know about the day of the Firestorm. There is no doubt that it was dramatic, exciting in the worst sense of the word. The papers and TV were filled with Hollywood-like photos of firefighters vs nature. And losing. I filled a scrapbook with a year’s worth of news, mostly for me to remember, to slow down and integrate that this had happened to me. But the real horror didn’t begin until a few months later. In 1991, California fires of this magnitude happened every twenty years or so. Now they seem to occur every twenty minutes. Insurance companies have all but abandoned California to disasters, natural or otherwise. My fire was the beginning of their trek out of state.

I was insured by Allstate. The afternoon of October 22, I called my friendly insurance guy who made sure I got $5000 to replace clothes. I learned through the Survivor grapevine that FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) was setting up posts all over Oakland. We were to show up, be interviewed and advised what to do next. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, my community of Montclair Village, was generous. People donated clothes and utensils to the Montclair Presbyterian Church. We fire survivors were invited to go “shopping”. Their largest meeting hall was filled with hundreds of racks of clothes in every size for every need. Clothes had been cleaned and were hanging beautifully as if in a store. The same church invited the entire community to celebrate Thanksgiving dinner. No one was asked if they were a believer or what faith they practiced. They loved us, cared for us as we traipsed through unknown roads trying to figure out who to call or who to write. We were held in the arms of our community.

Christmas and New Year’s came and went. 1992 began and the world moved on. They left us behind. Insurance companies were balking. Some of us were lucky enough to find rentals within the community. Many of the homeless had to move into neighboring towns or even further. We were on hold at the mercy of the insurance companies. I didn’t hear anything that resembled a resolution until the end of August 1992, ten months after the Fire.

After six months, friends remarked on the fact that my emotional state was not getting better. I was depressed, I was stuck. The husband of a friend of mine told me “You’ve been depressed long enough. It’s time for you to get over this.” What I heard was: “we are tired of feeding you meals, entertaining you. You are a freeloader”. I, like so many of the other survivors, withdrew from those people and only communicated with new friends, other Fire Survivors, who understood what we were going through. FEMA had provided for support groups, but that money ran out pretty quickly. Six of us formed a group of our own and told stories of our lives from week to week to week. We talked about the hell of having to fill out long lists of what we had lost and the approximate worth. Of waiting, always waiting, on insurance companies. The weight of making the decision to rebuild or to move and to where. We accompanied each other to endless meetings often led by the leaders in our communities who rose like cream in milk to explain to us shell-shocked Californians what to do next. We let each other know if we learned of a discount that a store or organization was offering to survivors and helped each other shop. We laughed with each other as our worlds got smaller. And we drank a lot.

The day of the Firestorm was dramatic, a day you do your best to survive, a day your emotions get tossed up in the sky like a high flying kite and you hang on for dear life. You rescue what you can then follow the long line of cars driving to safety.

But it’s the next two, three, four years that make or break you. Like with a surgery when all your helpful friends tell you about the day of the surgery and what to expect but neglect to tell you about the recovery, how hard it is, how long it takes, how you have to do exactly as instructed or it gets harder and longer. That you can’t make time move faster, that you don’t know if you’ll ever feel whole again, that decisions have to be made on a dime when often your brain feels too fatigued to even hear the options.

When I saw the fires the day they broke out in Los Angeles, my first thought was “Thank goodness I don’t live in California anymore. I don’t think I could live through that again.” Then my heart started breaking for what the next days, months, and years will be like for all those Fire Survivors.

I wish I could say to all Fire Survivors, something I learned, something that would make their recoveries easier. What I learned is that I can survive a disaster like this. I do not want to ever find out if I could do it again.

A Bientôt,

Sara