Victims of the wildfire in California are starting to return home, with a long way to go

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As firefighters make progress on the flames burning wide beaches of Northern California, evacuees are dropping back into their neighborhoods, looking forward to a hopeful – but uncertain – future.

Evacuation orders were lifted Thursday for parts of Vacaville in Solano County; areas of San Mateo County including La Honda, Pescadero and San Gregorio; Scotts Valley in Santa Cruz County; and all areas of Diablo Grande Parkway and the Diablo Grande community in Stanislaus County – allowing residents to return home, for some, suffering more than a week in limbo.

“We know people are scared, they are scared, they want to go back,” said a spokesman, Sgt. Juan Valencia for the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, where communities such as Guerneville, Rio Nido and the edge of Healdsburg remain under evacuation. “And we work very hard behind the scenes to get people back – but only if it’s safe.”

But when residents return to shores with fire damage, they stand for a long way back to normal, littered with terrible questions. Do we need to rebuild or move away? Can our business survive, or will we have to close?

Despite cooler weather, the fire department helped one-third of the LNU and SCU Lightning Complex fires in the North and South Bay (both were at a 35 percent limit), and 24% of the CZU Lightning Complex Fire in Santa Cruz Mountains, many of the thousands of firefighters on the front lines will not soon be sent home to their families. They still have months of “mop-up” – or extinguishing of hot spots – ahead, and it will likely take another four weeks before Cal Fire returns the slate to local firefighters, bureau spokesman Dan Olson said.

“We are dealing with large, 100-year-old red forests, that once they start to burn, it needs a lot to suppress,” he said. “This is not something that will be resolved in days or even weeks.”

The three fires, caused two weeks ago by lightning during an extreme heat wave, have so far consumed nearly 820,000 acres. The fires have damaged or destroyed more than 2,000 structures – which is expected to grow in number – and forced tens of thousands of people to flee. Six people have been killed.

In North Bay, residents will be able to return to the areas around Fairfield and Winters in the next 72 hours, Cal Fire officials said Thursday. But new evacuation orders came down in Colusa County – making it clear that the fires remain a very real threat.

When residents return home to assess the damage, some feel that surviving the fire was just the first step.

Marcia Ritz was lucky. Her general store, Spanish Flat Country Store & Deli in Napa, was shut down after the Hennessey Fire swept through her community on the west shore of Lake Berryessa. But almost everything else nearby – including the mobile home park where Ritz lived – was destroyed.

Now Ritz thinks she should close her business.

“There is no customer base. There are maybe two houses left on the hill, ‘she said, waving her hand to send Berryessa to Knoxville Road.

Still, Ritz is happy that she has her life, and the lives of her friends, after a close call with the fire she had fled – in a group of about 10 people – in a pontoon boat to the middle of the lake the evening of August 18 When the fire surrounded them, they got into the boat and set off and saw the hills burning around them. They stayed on the water for four or five hours – staring in fear and terror.

“We advised and you could see the devastation,” she said. “Trees smoldered.”

In rural Vacaville, Carol and Bruce Schafer, who returned home on Wednesday to find their 20-acre property reduced to smoldering debris, now face a difficult choice. Do they have to take the insurance money and buy a house somewhere else? Or are they rebuilding their dream home – a replica of George Washington’s Mount Vernon – into the community they have loved for the past 31 years?

Carol Schafer advises that they are likely to stay.

“We’ll be having a busy couple of years, I think,” she said, grinning as she looked over the black hills near where her house stood a week ago.

After evacuation orders for UC Santa Cruz were lifted, Cheryl Penn returned to her home on campus on Thursday – just in time to celebrate her 48th birthday the next day.

Penn, who runs internal training programs for Google, and her husband Peter Sardellitto, a retired college employee, were unloaded from their two cars they fled in a week ago – including 16-year-old cousins ​​Obie and Joco, and a potted basil plant looks a little worse after wear.

“That was our joke, that all five of us made it out,” Sardellitto said.

Once they unpack the car and return their belongings to the small apartment where they lived for 10 years, “It’s cocktail time,” Penn said.