Ash

A colleague of mine lives in Santa Rosa, or did before the fires came (that's his neighborhood, just chimneys and ash now, above). Now he, his wife, and two baby girls are in a rental they were lucky to get in another town in Marin, happy to be alive, but faced with the colossal task of rebuilding their lives. One of the many challenges they face is documenting their insurance claim, and one of the ways you do that, it seems, is to sift through the wreckage for evidence of the possessions that were destroyed. That's something I can do as well as the next person, so I joined him and a few others at his former house last weekend.

The destruction in the area is unbelievable, as these photos attest:

But that's just the economic destruction--houses, vineyards, orchards. There is the social damage--Santa Rosa alone has lost something like 5% of all its housing, and that in primarily (though by no means exclusively) lower income neighborhoods that will never reform as they were. Then there's the impact on the watershed of the heavy metals and other toxins created and released in the fire; the rains which will bring those pollutants into the waterways are just beginning and the impact is much feared. We wore our N95 masks and gloves for work in the ash--a full Tyvek suit would have been even better--and I was there for only a few hours, but the crews and homeowners who face weeks and months of work in these places will surely suffer for it.

And the work, what a heartbreak it is. There's no question of salvaging anything, all you can do is look for fragments of metal or ceramic--absolutely nothing else has survived--in the hopes that it will provide evidence of what once was. Here's an example, see if you can guess what this is:

The answer, believe it or not, is "a motorcycle." And most of what you see there is actually roofing tiles. When the hammer of the gods falls, it comes down hard.