It's worse than that. Several months ago, I drove out to the end of a cul-de-sac in the hills of Santa Rosa, California. There are a lot of really beautiful homes on this street I think you could recognize the water heater. EH: And the barbecue.
But we spent a couple of weeks coming back over sifting through the rubble looking for stuff. We found a pair of her diamond studs just purely by accident. Most of the jewelry was melted. T he studs were melted, but the stones were still there. They looked perfect. Ed and Kathy are in their sixties. They met on match. Standing there on their lot, it was easy to see the path of the fire.
The two homes to the left of their house also burned to the ground. EH: Yeah, that's where the we caught on fire as it came over that little crack right there, over that where the first step is.
The fire started in the middle of the night last October. Ed and Kathy were sleeping when they heard banging on their front door. It was their neighbor. EH: And as soon as we opened the front door, over in that direction, it was just a huge arc of orange glow covering that whole quadrant of the sky. EH: We were. We felt that way. We actually weren't in danger at that time. But when we looked out and you see the fire coming that way and the wind's blowing towards us at 60 miles an hour, we thought we better go.
SL: And climate change has created this situation of drought in California and that has exacerbated just the ferocity of these fires. And Lake County has been hit particularly hard by fire in the last four years. SL: I mean every summer you would smell smoke, you know, a number of times, but we never had to evacuate. And it seemed like they always kind of got it under control pretty easily. And then in the recent years that's obviously changed.
