For several days, the police kept everyone but journalists and rescue workers out of the neighborhood. No one could have expected to return home to a moonscape. But that’s what I found when, after a hasty return from an out-of-town trip, I climbed the hill with two Red Cross workers who specialize in tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes.
I knew there was trouble when one of these case-hardened fellows whistled and said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” The entire hillside looked like a Hieronymus Bosch view of hell. With the exception of two chimneys, the neighborhood was completely flat: no decks, no stairways, no second stories. It was still smoldering; the stench of smoke was everywhere. Down the street from me, police used German shepherds and bone sifters to search for physical remains. (One rock held a sign: WE LOVE YOU JACK, WHERE ARE You?) Other policemen stood guard against looters. The Red Cross workers groped for comparisons: one said Beirut, the other, Saigon. We briefly poked around in the rubble that once was home, trying to find a fire safe. No luck. “Things vaporize,” one of the emergency workers told me.
The flames that swept through my neighborhood on a quiet Sunday morning reportedly started the day before as a small grass fire near the site of an illegally constructed cabin. The Oakland Fire Department put out the brush fire and periodically rechecked the scene. The department has been criticized for not stationing a 24-hour watch to make sure the fire didn’t rekindle; there have also been complaints that the department delayed calling in aerial support until it was too late. But Oakland Fire Chief Lamont Ewell, on the job for just 14 days, insisted that a round-the-clock watch wouldn’t have made any difference given the abruptness of the flare-up and the severity of the winds. Those conditions were exacerbated by hills that were tinderbox-dry after five years of drought, by Californians’ penchant for living in scenic, hard-to-reach wooded areas and by budget cuts that left the fire department undermanned. All together, they, seem to have made disaster inevitable. The fire was particularly demoralizing for an area that only two years ago suffered through a shattering October earthquake. State Sen. Nicholas Petris ruefully told the San Francisco Chronicle that Oakland should ban October from the calendar.
With the fire blazing so quickly through the hills, virtually no one had time to rescue belongings. New Mercedeses, Saabs and BMWs, looking as if they had been firebombed, are now worth about $50 in scrap. Distraught pet owners immediately set up a hot line to help locate missing dogs and cats; one family in Montclair freed their hamster and rabbit before they fled themselves. Three people waited out the fire in the water of a swimming pool, the tarp pulled over their heads to keep out the asphyxiating fumes. Some who tarried to pick up treasures paid a high price. One elderly man’s hair was set afire by flying embers. At least 10 people were burned alive in their cars.
It’s horrible to lose everything one owns, but it’s survivable. My new novel, 200 pages long, is gone. (Maxine Hong Kingston also lost her house, together with the computer disk containing the only copy of her latest book; Reggie Jackson, living through his second house fire, lost baseball memorabilia.) But my eight neighbors are already discussing plans to form a consortium to rebuild the neighborhood. In the end, a certain optimism sets in: you owned too much stuff in the first place, you tell yourself. Then it starts to rain, and you think: I’m certain I have an umbrella. Or did.
