Chapter Thirty
Everything Burned
Like our time in the ICU after Lena’s crash, some experiences can only be truly understood if you’ve gone through them. When someone says “I can’t imagine what it’s like for you,” they are right. I’ve even found that as time passes, you yourself can no longer really imagine what it was like.
For us, one of those experiences was having almost everything we owned burn in the Oakland Firestorm of 1991. The fire started just one mile from our house, on Saturday, October 19. We had an interesting time watching the helicopters fly right over our house with enormous flexible buckets full of water. Some water would even drip on us as they passed. There wasn’t the slightest inkling of You know, perhaps we should gather photos and backups and such, just in case.
The fire was totally extinguished on that day, or so they thought. The next day, it flared up again, fanned by violent winds. As that was happening, we were 50 miles away at the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival. We were probably lucky to have been away, since 25 people from our neighborhood died.
According to one neighbor, here’s why so many people perished. This is a story that wasn’t reported on the news. A house near us looked like a junk yard, with “stuff” all over the place. Remember the joke “You may be a redneck if you cut the grass and you find a car”? That was this place.
When the police came and said, “OK, everyone evacuate, RIGHT NOW!” things were getting dicey. The guy who lived in that house had two cars and he wanted to drive them both to safety, so he asked his girlfriend to drive one while he drove the other. The problem was that both cars had manual transmissions, and his girlfriend didn’t know how to drive a stick. At one point, according to my neighbor, the girl stalled the car and no one could get around her. Many of the 25 who died, perished in that mini traffic jam.
Although we were lucky not to be home, we were also unlucky because we couldn’t rescue photographs or computer backups. When I told this story, soon after the fire, people would sometimes say, “Hey, you know, sometimes they can rescue information from damaged disks.” At that point, I would bring out a jar that held the remains of my 3.5 inch floppy disk backups. In the jar only the metal parts of the floppies are present—the disks themselves had been vaporized. Good luck with the data recovery!
Our carefree life changed the moment we saw the smoke in the hills, while returning from the pumpkin festival. We knew immediately what had happened, turned on the news, and didn’t even try to go home. We went straight to Ted and Britta’s house, and they put us up for a few days.
The police took us into the fire zone two days later, and we saw, as expected, that our home had been obliterated. The sound board from the piano was nestled in the remains of our second car, three stories below it. You can see the car and piano parts in the right side of the garage in this photo. Together, they were only two feet high.
While we were there, a news crew interviewed me. That’s right, I was one of those people saying that obligatory phrase; “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Something interesting about that interview: we had lost everything and I was surveying the pulverized remains of our home, yet part of me was thinking “I’m going to be on TELEVISION!” People are weird, huh?
Fortunately, we had good insurance coverage, and by not trying to squeeze every dollar out of the insurance company, we rebuilt our house in one year. Out of the 3,791 homes destroyed, our house was the 51st one to be rebuilt. Every night all the construction workers in the neighborhood went home, and we were left in this spooky zone of wrecks and half-rebuilt dwellings.
It was sad to lose our home, our photographs, our Hummel figurines (just kidding), but mostly it was just a year-long hassle—rebuilding and dealing with the insurance company. On the other hand, I know that now that I’m detached from the event by 22 years, “I can’t imagine what it was like for me.”