Wildfire evacuees return to where they built their lives. Most find nothing

It had been 11 days since they last saw their homes.

In the morning hush, residents presented their driver’s licenses to National Guardsmen posted outside the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa. The uniformed sentries had turned them away every day for nearly two weeks. “Not yet,” they said. The search teams, the cadaver dogs, the utility crews were working.

But on Thursday night, the Santa Rosa Police Department announced that the subdivision was reopening to residents. On Friday, they came to see what was left.

There wasn’t much.

For block after block, chimneys stood in the rubble. Then, suddenly, they didn’t. In some places, the Tubbs Fire had been so intense that even the fireplaces were leveled.

The street signs were gone, so utility workers spray-painted the names on the pavement. No one could find their address without a GPS.

Lisa Sharp, who lived on Dogwood Drive with her husband and two children, had pored over photos of Coffey Park online. She wanted to prepare for the worst possible outcome. One map showed aerial footage of the neighborhood shot in 2015. Red and yellow letters were superimposed on the subdivision, marking destroyed and damaged houses.

“The amount of red was just incredible,” Sharp said, standing in her driveway for the first time since she left in the early hours of Oct. 9.

Witnessing the nothingness of it all was even worse. Sharp’s teenage children dug through the debris wearing yellow plastic suits and gas masks. The 15-year-old, Noah, unearthed the husk of his PlayStation 4 in what was probably the living room. They couldn’t really tell.

“It’s always going to be in the back of my mind,” Sharp said. “We all lost something: innocence, a sense of home. We are all dealing with trauma. Sometimes I’m not sure how we’ll get through it.”

Coffey Park was a good neighborhood, she said, the kind of place where children from other subdivisions wanted to trick-or-treat on Halloween. The candy there was better. Now the carved pumpkins are rotting on some front steps. “RIP,” reads a melted decorative headstone.

One day there will be neighborhood barbecues again in July and Christmas cookie exchanges in December. But the attendees won’t all be the same. Some neighbors were saying goodbye to each other for good Friday.

Melissa Geissinger sat on a tarp in the driveway sorting through rubble. She rested a hand on her growing belly. Her first baby is due in December. She and her husband, Cole, have given him the nickname Squiggy. The night before the fire, they had painted the nursery and shampooed the carpet.

They already know the baby has a heart defect and will need surgery immediately after birth. That was more than enough stress. Then came the fire.

“Owning this home was the culmination of our lives, dreams and goals,” Geissinger said. “They were manifested in this place. It looks like the kind of disaster zone you see on TV. Everything you work for your entire life is all in one place. There’s nothing left.”

She had drawn a rough floor plan of the house on a sheet of paper with their possessions marked. It’s like a treasure hunt. “Bottle opener,” said one highlighted “X.” “Gnome, wine rack, jewelry, brand iron,” said others. Maybe they could excavate something in the ruins.

It was possible. In the ashes, there were recognizable items: a vase painted with roses. A doll head. A toy.

And a wedding ring. In a nearby lot, John Pittman’s son, Noah Shura, shouted out, “We found it.”

Shura was on his knees sifting through the dust of his parents’ home on El Camino del Prado. Pittman and his wife, Donna, had celebrated their 30th anniversary in August. They bought new rings to celebrate. His had a small diamond on the band.

Pittman never took it off. But before the Tubbs Fire all but demolished Coffey Park, he did. He’s not sure why.

When the couple ran, the ring stayed behind, abandoned on the fireplace. His military awards, including a Purple Heart he earned during the Vietnam War, went up in flames. So did Donna Pittman’s family trees tracing her ancestry back to Italy. But the ring was there.

On Friday he slid it onto his ring finger, hands shaking.

His wife barely noticed. She was sobbing. He helped her climb onto the concrete foundation.

“Was the park always that close?” she said, looking at the open space that shares the neighborhood’s name. “Look how far we can see, John.”

The plastic playground equipment was suddenly visible beyond the ruined lots of their neighbors. She had watched every news broadcast on TV, checked every post-fire photo she could find, but nothing had prepared her for this.

“I had just organized my jewelry,” Donna Pittman said. “It’s all gone. I wanted to be here to connect to this spot. I needed to lay my eyes on it, to stand right here. It’s stunning.

“A neighbor came over to me,” she said. “She had been living across the street for years, living her life, just as I had been doing mine over here. You never realize how close you actually are.”

She looked down at the ash. There was nothing left to mark it as her home.