In a scorched and leveled neighborhood on Santa Rosa’s northern edge, two dozen yellow-clad search and rescue personnel from Monterey County, Calif., sifted Saturday through the charred remains of a two-story home.
If you stood in the street in front of the house just off Mark West Springs Road and faced east, you’d see a wooded hillside; turn west, and you’d see the decimated and still-smoking rubble in a neighborhood not far from U.S. Route 101 — one of the areas struck hardest when ultra-strong winds blew what would become the Tubbs Fire into the city during the late hours Sunday night.
This house was on the very edge of a once-dense neighborhood. Green trees sat yards from earth that was burnt and gray.
Members of the crew gingerly sifted through the rubble, pouring shovelfuls of debris through fine grates before discarding the rest into piles ringing the foundation of the home. What didn’t immediately fall through the grate was scrutinized by hand, piece by piece, looking for anything that could be human.
Officials from the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office had announced earlier in the week that search and rescue crews had found the remains of multiple people in the area already. Small red flags placed in the ash and rubble of this particular house marked spots where they thought they might find more.
The fire here burned so hot and so fast, that Sgt. Shawn Murphy of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, who had been assisting the search and rescue crew since they got into town on Wednesday, said the crew was sifting for bone fragments — it’s unlikely they’d find anything more in a house that had burned as completely as this.
As crews worked, search dogs would periodically be brought in. When one of the dogs “hit,” or indicated to its handler that it had picked up a scent, that dog would be rotated out and another would sweep the area again.
In the house north of Santa Rosa, with an audience of search and rescue personnel ringing the edge of the foundation, one of the dogs hit and a small red flag was placed in the ash. A second dog was brought in and hit again, inches from the first small red flag.
On the other side of the house, a small group of search and rescue personnel outlined a patch of rubble surrounding one of the flags with pink tape; that patch would remain untouched until a forensic anthropologist arrived.
This crew had been working through the burned areas of Sonoma County since they arrived on Wednesday morning. They’d been working dawn till dusk, 12-hour days every day.
“They don’t stop,” said Joe Moses, commander of search and rescue operations and a sergeant with the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, motioning to the team sifting through rubble. “They won’t stop until they find them.”
Moses estimated it generally takes a team 2 hours to sift through a site, depending on the condition of the structure and how easily the crew can spot remains, but this particular site had taken much longer.
The Monterey County team had been working the site since about 10:00 a.m., and a team from Marin County had visited the site before, passing on word that there was a chance they’d found remains before moving on.
By the time the team from Monterey called in a forensic anthropologist, it was late in the afternoon.
“Other (structures), you might walk up and in 15 minutes you’ve found what you’re looking for. But this is one we haven’t yet,” Moses said.
Murphy said the forensic anthropologist is crucial to the work the search and rescue crew is doing. Their eyes are much more trained to distinguishing a fragment of bone from rock or burnt clay.
“She could do something in 10 minutes that would take us an hour looking at each piece,” Murphy said.
Once the crew determines a likely location of remains, they cordon off that plot of rubble. If the forensic anthropologist agrees, that plot of rubble becomes the responsibility of the Sonoma County Coroner’s Office.
Teams are extremely thorough when sifting through the site as to avoid false positives as much as possible. Despite what they or the forensic anthropologist may find, the coroner’s office gives the final confirmation of remains being found.
The team from Monterey is a mix of volunteers and police officers. They’re trained extensively in search and rescue operations and body recovery, but they’ve never encountered remains that have been subjected to the type of heat and fire that rolled through neighborhoods Sunday night.
Gus Dominguez, a member of the team whose day job is with the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, said they’ve been familiarizing themselves with the state of remains as they find them in order to better be able to identify a bone from other debris.
“Nobody trains for this,” Moses said.
As of Saturday, 22 people have died as a result of the fires in Sonoma County, bringing the total count to 40 persons killed in blazes across Northern California’s wine country.
The list of missing people has been extensive, growing to more than 1,600 people. But detectives and investigators have cut that number to 74 missing; the remainder have been found safe.
Search and rescue teams won’t clear each of Sonoma County’s estimated 5,700 burned structures individually. Rather, they search target locations; homes of missing people who have had zero contact with friends or family members, the missing elderly or those who have known mobility issues.
“At some point we’ve just got to say; ‘Look, we need to just go dig this property and see what we can find,’” he said.
Officials expect the number of dead to continue growing as search and rescue teams continue their push through charred neighborhoods. Steve Crawford, incident operations section chief for the LNU Complex Fire, said number of unsearched areas is daunting in scope — search and rescue operations could last months, if not longer.
Moses said the wake and destruction of the Northern California fires is nothing like they’ve ever seen before, but his team is handling their task well.
“It’s emotionally draining as well as physically draining,” he said. “Sifting through the ashes and having to deal with all this — this kind of devastation, you don’t see it every day.”
“But that’s what we do on a regular basis; we try to recover loved ones for people that are living, so we’re kind of used to that. But this is by far the greatest devastation we’ve ever seen.”
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