Still Standing

 

Well, we got to go back home yesterday and check things out. It was such a relief to see our town was still there, and our house too. There's a lot of damage visible on the mountain across the valley from us. It's a huge fire scar that will take years to re-grow. Almost 1,000 homes were lost in the fire, a huge percentage of the houses up here in the mountains. It's terrible and survivor's guilt is going to be a thing for a while for a lot of us. There are going to be lots of groups getting going to help people, one of which is...of course...a quilt group to make quilts for people who've lost everything. More on that later!

There was so much ash outside, and a lot of partially burned/charred leaves. We are so very very lucky that no spot fires happened on the east side of the highway from everything that was getting blown around ahead of the fire as it came down the mountain towards town.

I was so excited to see that our son's garden partly survived, we even have some lovely cherry tomatoes to come home to!

It wasn't too smoky in the house which was a great relief to me, I was very worried about having to go through a whole smoke remediation thing. The main smell was from The Refrigerator of Doom. No power for two weeks. And we'd just re-stocked on the Sunday before we were evacuated, including a nice big piece of salmon. And a five pound bag of shellfish in the freezer for cioppino. 

Thankfully it hadn't leaked all over the kitchen floor, I had really been dreading that.

We struggled to get it out of the house, and some of the liquid inside of the fridge did get on the floors. We thoroughly mopped up afterwards and I hope it really did take care of the smell, it was really something else. Once we got the refrigerator outside on the driveway, we opened it up and took pictures of the contents, maybe for an insurance claim. I'm not sharing those, they are Unecessarily Gross. We bagged up every single thing and threw it out in a community dumpster down in town. Thank goodness we still have a pickup truck, I would not have wanted to put those bags in a car. All the shelves and drawers were taken out and we sprayed them down with the hose. We left them out there overnight. 

These are our faces of horror after finishing. Thank goodness we still had some of the N-95 masks, they really helped a lot. I can see that there is mold inside the parts of the refrigerator that don't come off for cleaning so I think it's a goner unfortunately. Hopefully we can get a new one delivered soon. It's Labor Day weekend, isn't that a time for appliance sales?

We're going back for good hopefully, this afternoon. We're taking the pets and everything we evacuated with more than two weeks ago. There's still a Do Not Drink/Do Not Boil water order, only water usage is toilet flushing. The water district is testing lots of spots around the town and getting the results early next week, so hopefully we'll really know what's going on with that. We're looking into getting bottled water delivered and getting a water filtration system installed. Meanwhile I've purchased a bunch of water vessels of various sizes which we're taking over filled with presumably safer Saratoga water. It's going to be hard, but hey, flush toilets, power on (unless it's turned off because of the excessive heat this weekend) and internet and cell service too. 

Big sighs of relief as we drove back to my folk's house. It wasn't as bad as we were imagining. Even with all of this we are feeling very very lucky at this point. It's actually really nice to have these problems compared to having your entire house burn down. I need to keep this perspective going.