(MONEY Magazine) – AFTER THE FIRE

On a June afternoon in Oakland, California, a teenage girl opens a front door. The day is hot--hot and bright and dry, with a sharp tang of pine and eucalyptus in the air. But inside the house, everything is dark and modern and cool to the touch. Kate, the girl who answers the door, calls out for her father, Peter. Then she disappears.

Waiting by the living room windows, I take a quick mental snapshot: an elegant, airy house perched high in the Oakland hills. Peter Scott strides into the room, loosening his tie and rolling up his sleeves. "This view is the reason we came back," he says, gazing out at the evergreen forest across the canyon. Peter first designed this place in the early 1960s as a home for his mother, just after he got out of architecture school. In the mid-1980s, Peter and his wife, Teresa Ferguson, moved here themselves with their two girls. Then, 10 years ago this month, a wildfire burned the place to cinders.

The October 1991 fire took a devastating toll on Peter and his family. It also destroyed more than 3,000 other homes in the Oakland and Berkeley hills and left 25 people dead. The East Bay hills fire, as it's commonly known, was the most destructive urban wildfire in U.S. history, wreaking some $1.7 billion in damages, reducing leafy middle-class neighborhoods to ash-gray moonscapes and pitting legions of homeowners against insurance companies in battles that in some cases stretched for five years.

Even now, a decade later, those who survived the fire still struggle with its aftermath. A few months ago, wondering how they had put their lives back together in the years since their homes and neighborhoods were ravaged, I headed to the Oakland hills to hear residents talk about what they've been through. For the families I met, Oct. 20, 1991 is a clear demarcation. There is life before. And then there is life after. One could say that they've learned as much about coping and rebounding in the 10 years since the fire as many of us gain in a lifetime. On a purely pragmatic level, they now understand the financial mistakes that they made at a vulnerable moment and can tell you what they would do differently if they had another chance. They can explain how minor details--like the fine print in a home insurance contract they had forgotten long ago--have changed their lives forever.

But the fire has also made them ponder a raft of deeper issues. What does it feel like to lose everything? What does it take to recover from such an emotional and financial disaster? And which possessions do you discover have value once you've lost them? They dwell on this last question often. Because unlike many of us, they've been forced to spend 10 years thinking about the answer.

AN EMBER, FLYING

It's difficult to imagine a better place to live and a worse place to be stuck during a wildfire than the Oakland and Berkeley hills. The homes here, many of them built in grand proportions for the Bay Area's more affluent residents, offer dazzling views of the San Francisco skyline to the southwest and of wild, forested hillsides to the northeast. But the neighborhood roads are narrow and almost unimaginably twisting and steep--a nightmarish place to drive a fire truck or navigate an 11th-hour escape from smoke and flames. That fact might have turned away new residents, but it hasn't. These days, there's a new home under construction on nearly every neighborhood street, each a $500,000-plus replacement for a home burned back in 1991. By most estimates, the devastated area is 80% to 90% rebuilt. It takes a keen eye to spot an empty lot where the owners, for reasons either financial or tragic, never sold the land or came back; dry grass grows quickly on the Oakland hills and covers over almost everything. Still, the evidence is there if you look hard enough: a subtle square depression where a foundation once sat, for instance, or a curb that marked a driveway that has now vanished.

There are no piles of debris left--partly the result of a massive cleanup in the months after the disaster, but also because the fire consumed almost everything in its path. Historically speaking, that kind of intensity was not unusual. The East Bay hills have been hit with several big fires over the years, and huge blazes raged through the community as recently as the early 1970s. In 1991, an extraordinarily dry summer and high autumn temperatures began making the Oakland fire chiefs nervous. They knew the hills were dense with fallen leaves and dry underbrush. They likewise knew that many of the houses, built during the 1920s and 1930s, had cedar shake roofs that could ignite in an instant. On Oct. 19, a small ground fire, its cause unknown, sprang up on Buckingham Road, just a mile or so from where Peter Scott and Teresa Ferguson live. City fire fighters extinguished the flames and kept watch until nightfall; the next morning, a crew returned to see if any patches were still smoldering. A hot wind was picking up, blowing off the mountains east of the city, first at 10 mph, then gusting up to 30, 40 and 50 mph. As fire fighters watched, the wind stoked buried embers from the previous day. They hosed the area down again. But then an ember blew into the air and into a tree and that tree exploded into flames. And then things got out of hand.

By early afternoon the fire, fanned by unrelenting winds, had spread east and south, jumping an eight-lane highway in the process, and had begun heading northwest toward downtown Berkeley. It was no longer controllable. At one point, some members of the fire department feared it could go all the way to San Francisco Bay--five miles away--burning everything in its path until it hit the water. In one Oakland hills neighborhood, the fire incinerated 400 houses within 15 minutes. By then, the blaze had reached crematorium-hot levels, exploding the tarmac, melting aluminum (1,200[degrees]F), softening copper (2,000[degrees]F) and fusing silicon chips (2,600[degrees]F).

By approximately 1:15 p.m. it had burned the home of David Kessler and Nancy Mennel on Vicente Road. By 1:25 p.m. it had burned the home of Betty Ann Bruno and Craig Scheiner on Buena Vista. And by 1:30 p.m. it had burned the home of Peter Scott and Teresa Ferguson on Alvarado.

FRANTIC

On the morning of the fire, David Kessler and Nancy Mennel smelled the smoke hanging in the air. They could see it too. At 11 a.m. David took his dog for a walk and noticed the sky turning extraordinary shades of orange and pink in the distance. He wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Back in the house he made some bread dough, put it aside to rise and set some marinara sauce on the stove to simmer. He was planning on making pizza for dinner.

David and Nancy's home was one of a kind--a two-bedroom cottage built in the early 1900s that once served as a bunkhouse for the workers of a long-gone Oakland hills dairy. Nancy's father had bought the place for $17,000 in the early 1970s, back when it was abandoned and choked--both inside and out--with wild blackberry bushes. The floors were mismatched, nothing was plumb, but over time its ramshackle charm had grown on them. And it was convenient. David worked at the UC-Berkeley library, just a few minutes from home; Nancy had a job 10 miles away in San Leandro as a psychiatric social worker.

As David puttered around the kitchen on that Sunday afternoon, Nancy climbed up to the roof to wet down the shingles. The smoke was getting thicker and thicker, she says, and she was concerned about a spark landing on top: "When I got up on the roof with the hose, the water suddenly stopped." The pumps for the entire neighborhood had lost power. She and David had been worrying that their home and belongings would suffer smoke damage--but what if things got really dangerous? They decided that it was time to go. Nancy took the dog in the car along with some computer disks, a pair of binoculars, some cameras, a few photo albums and a change of clothes. David hopped on his bike. It was about 12:30 p.m. They decided to meet up at David's mother's house in central Berkeley; then, if necessary, they would head to a friend's house in Albany, just north of Berkeley.

In the meantime, Betty Ann Bruno was worrying about her own roof a few blocks away. Everybody in the Oakland hills knew Betty Ann--if not personally, then from KTVU television, where she worked as one of the station's on-air news reporters. As the fire came closer, floating embers began landing on her wood shingles. Craig, her husband, had driven to the store; their four kids were grown and living on their own. So Betty Ann clambered up alone to see what she could do. "I was going to save my house," she recalls. In the deafening wind, with sparks flying though the air like shrapnel, she worked in a frenzy, prying the burning shingles off with a crowbar and flinging them onto the lawn. For 20 minutes or so, her world narrowed to this task. Then she became aware of people shouting at her from below--a crew of firemen telling her to leave immediately. "And at that point I looked around," she says, "and saw that the entire block was on fire."

She had only a few minutes to get away. She pulled the car out, drove down the street and paused for a short while at a nearby intersection to watch the top floor of her house tremble and then burst into flames. Then she drove down the hill to look for a friend of hers--a producer at KTVU who lived nearby. Betty Ann met him at his house, and then the two walked over to the roof of a nearby apartment building, where a KTVU crew was just arriving. It was 2 p.m. when a reporter from the station asked to interview Betty Ann. "This was what I had done so many times before--interviewing someone in a state of personal loss," she recalls. "But here I was on the other side of the microphone." Dazed and shaken, still not sure of what she would say, she agreed to answer some questions. Then the cameras rolled.

At this time, Peter Scott and Teresa Ferguson still didn't know about the fire. In fact, they didn't hear the news until 4:30 p.m., during a long drive home from Monterey, where they'd spent the day. At first, it wasn't their house they worried about--it was Peter's mother, an invalid, who had been home alone that day. They phoned their house frantically from the car that afternoon, always getting the same rapid busy signal. Peter and Teresa then tried to remember how to spell their neighbors' last names so they could call information. The hills had become like that, says Teresa--a place where neighbors didn't really know one another anymore. Still, they kept trying to think of neighbors who could tell them what was happening. As Teresa recalls, "Peter would say, 'Try Mr. Arkelian,' and then I'd get the number and get that same sick busy signal. And I said, 'Peter, you don't get it. They can't answer the phone. They're not there. There's nothing there.'"

They made it to Oakland as it was getting dark. By that point, the wind had stopped and the fire was dying along with it, but the area was still smoldering, and police barricades prevented Peter and Teresa from getting into their neighborhood. Had the house survived? No one could answer that question--yet there was some good news. Peter's mother had been rescued. At least that's what fire and police officials told Teresa, who in turn called the hospital where rescuers said they had brought her. But something wasn't right; no patient fit the description of Peter's mother. So the family began to drive around the East Bay, visiting hospitals in an effort to locate her. They found nothing. They tried convalescent centers. Still nothing. They went to the morgue. Again, nothing.

Frustrated, confused and exhausted, the family headed away from the chaos of the hills to Peter's cousin's house in Berkeley. "And that's how we ended the night," remembers Peter--unsure whether his mother, or his home, had survived.

FROM HEARTBREAK TO WINDFALL

If David Kessler could turn back time, he would like to relive the morning before he left his home 10 years ago. "If someone had said, 'You have 20 minutes to get your most valuable things. You're never going to see anything you leave behind again,' we would have acted differently," says David. This is a conversation survivors of the fire have over and over again, almost to where it seems a kind of exquisite self-torture. Yet the fantasies are almost never materialistic; in their dreams, nearly all of them walk through burning houses gathering objects that are valuable not because of price but because of sentiment. For Nancy, it's the old leather-bound Bible, inherited from her grandmother, that she left behind; inside was her family's long American ancestry, recorded in hand-written entries dating back to early-18th-century Maryland. For David, it's his mother's paintings--her best artwork, saved especially for him--that adorned the walls of the old bunkhouse. They wish they had thought about this kind of thing beforehand.

As it was, David and Nancy were left with just a smattering of possessions--some of which they had salvaged from the house during their hasty exit, some of which were purchases or gifts in the days after the fire. Everything they owned fit into three brown grocery bags. The couple spent the first 10 days after the fire at their friends' house in Albany. "On Wednesday [the police] let us come up here [to the house]," says David. "And coming up here was one of the most wrenching experiences you can imagine. Things were still smoking. After poking around in our ruins for a while, I headed up the hill. And the farther up I went, the more I cried. It was just so sad. Everything completely ruined, as far as you could see. It looked like Hiroshima."

They had returned to their jobs that week, traumatized, disoriented and unsure of what to do next. Their first challenge was to find a place to live--a problem solved with a rental apartment in Berkeley. Then they began to think about rebuilding. "I didn't want us to get beaten by this fire," says David. Still, there were logistical hurdles. "After the fire I think most people figured, well, we'll just call up our insurance company, they'll just send us a check and we can get started next week," says David. "No one ever dreamed that it would be such a time-consuming process."

And their insurance policy, they found out, looked like a heartbreaker. For years David and Nancy had been paying rent to Nancy's father, who still held the title to the home. "When it burned down we were like, 'Oh, what do we have for insurance?'" recalls Nancy. "We had no idea, so I called my dad and he dusted off the policy." It turned out that the policy had been adjusted over the years for inflation, rising from $17,000 to $67,000. But Oakland hills real estate had appreciated at a far greater clip, something their insurer had never taken into account. The funky old bunkhouse was probably worth more like $250,000. Even worse, the policy was what's known as "cash value," rather than a replacement policy. Any hopes for a larger settlement that would allow them to build a home comparable to the one they had lost were now destroyed. It looked as if they would get the policy's face value, and that was it. None of their possessions were covered--and none of their interim living expenses.

David remembers 1992 as a bleak year. He and Nancy feared that their settlement would merely be large enough for a deposit on a condo in some other part of the East Bay. Negotiations with their insurers--Farmers Insurance Group--had become strained. Yet there were bright spots too: Friends organized "fire showers" to help David and Nancy replace household items and clothes that had been burned. Moreover, the same Oakland hills community that had once been a disparate array of upper-middle-class homeowners began getting together to trade information about cleanup and insurance issues; in the process, some neighbors were getting to know one another for the first time.

Not all residents had policy coverage wrangles. Some insurers were lauded by the State of California for prompt settlements. But virtually everyone who wanted to return faced a hurdle common to an area wrecked by disaster: an extraordinary demand for construction services that delayed every step of the process and, in some cases, led to price gouging. There were also challenges unique to the East Bay hills, a place where sharp inclines and the risk of earthquakes require sophisticated builders and expensive supporting walls. Normally, a foundation is salvaged after a house fire; the Oct. 20 blaze burned so hot that it crumbled old foundations and forced residents to rebuild from scratch. This was yet another unforeseen expense, as well as a point of contention between some policyholders and their insurers.

With David and Nancy's consent, Nancy's father settled with Farmers a year after the fire for $190,000--a sum much closer to the actual value of the house but still not enough for the couple to build the home they wanted. Not long after the settlement, though, David got a call from a volunteer at United Policyholders, a consumer group that had sprung up after the fire to educate homeowners about insurance claims. "[The representative] said, 'You guys are the only people in the Farmers' group that didn't get a certain level of coverage,'" recalls David. The rep suggested that David and Nancy argue that the low value placed on their home was partly the fault of their insurance agent, and that they deserved a replacement upgrade like the rest of Farmers' claimants. David--his expectations low since his claim had already been settled with a substantial upgrade--wrote a letter stating the case to the insurer, then pretty much forgot about it. "A few months later they called to say that they were going to give us another $34,000," he recalls, still amazed by the windfall. "That was what made the difference in our ability to deal with the finances of this thing."

They arranged to take out a mortgage of $100,000 and asked David's friend, Russ Vincent, a contractor, to rebuild; Russ in turn suggested an architect that David and Nancy soon hired. They weren't intent on replicating the bunkhouse. If they were going to start over again, this was a chance to create something that fit their ideals, a modest dream house designed in the California Arts and Crafts tradition. And so they watched as a stylish, two-bedroom house rose on a hill now barren of trees and pocked with empty lots. Two years had passed since the Sunday morning when they first smelled smoke.

A GRAY BATHROOM CUP

Tough as they may have been, David and Nancy's negotiations with their insurer seem like a model of efficiency and bonhomie compared with Betty Ann Bruno and Craig Scheiner's. Of course, Betty Ann and Craig couldn't have known this at the beginning--they owned a guaranteed replacement policy, what their agent had called "the Cadillac of policies," which ensured that they would be able to build a home identical to the one they lost, regardless of cost. They assumed that their claims process would go quickly. In fact, they thought they'd be back in Oakland within a year.

At the beginning, the couple's struggle to come to terms with what had happened was played out in public. The telecast Betty Ann did an hour after her house burned was picked up by cnn and relayed around the world. Friends in Europe and Asia watched the woman on the apartment building roof, the hills burning behind her, and realized it was Betty Ann. A few days later, a KTVU producer asked if the station could film the couple going through the ruins of their home for the evening telecast. Craig worked as a cameraman at the station. Because the newsroom was like family to him and Betty Ann--and because they felt it would help viewers experience what had happened to thousands of homeowners--they agreed. "They took us back on the Tuesday after the fire," recalls Betty Ann. "And they videotaped us going through our homesite, identifying stuff. I do pottery, and I had made a bathroom cup that I found in the ashes. And I saw it, and I said, 'My bathroom cup!' I picked it up out of the ashes and hugged it and said how much I loved that cup. I was crying. It was just--it was just this silly bathroom cup. But it was the only thing I found intact that day."

The night after the fire they had slept on their sailboat, anchored just south of the city, and watched from afar as the ruptured gas jets flared and the fire burned itself out. A few days later they signed a lease on a rental apartment in the nearby town of Alameda. They'd lost more than they ever imagined. "For the first year after the fire, we played the game of what we called 'plumbing the depths of total loss'--acknowledging what it's like to lose every little thing," says Betty Ann. "Every kitchen has a drawer that has rubber bands and paper clips, stuff like that," she says. "And when you have nothing--that's total loss. It's opening that drawer in your new rented home and it's empty."

In the ensuing months, homeowners whose houses had burned--or who had suffered partial losses and smoke damage--made lists of possessions to present to their insurers. Many were amazed to see how much they had carried through life. Betty Ann and Craig began their inventory on the night of the fire; it ultimately took them two years and ran 85 single-spaced pages. But the interior photographs of their home--the proof--had burned along with everything else. They hadn't thought to keep some elsewhere in a safe-deposit box. And there were no receipts. Some survivors became gumshoes, asking friends and relatives for old pictures taken in their houses. They would scrutinize the corners and fuzzy foregrounds of the photos, hoping they could show insurance adjusters the antique breakfront behind the smiling baby or the oak parquetry in front of the happy couple heading to the prom.

But five months after the fire, Betty Ann and Craig were no closer to proving their claims or reaching an agreement. They couldn't finalize an amount for the home or their possessions. And their insurer, State Farm, kept assigning new adjusters to their claim. In the meantime, they say their State Farm sales agent, who initially tried to advocate for a quick settlement for them, called to explain that he was forbidden from speaking with them anymore. At that point, says Betty Ann, "we realized we had a choice: One of us could quit [our job] for a while and work full time dealing with the insurance company; we could hire professional help--a lawyer or a public adjuster; or we could have nervous breakdowns." They hired a public adjuster--a professional advocate who deals directly with the insurer on a claimant's behalf and in return gets a percentage of the final settlement. And they began to think hard about how the next few years might play out. Betty Ann says, "When we realized it was going to be four years before we moved in, and that all we would get back was our address--not our house, not our old neighborhood--we decided to get on with our lives."

In the spring of 1992, they began shopping for a home. By that point, they had agreed with State Farm on a settlement value for their house, but not for their personal property. (A State Farm spokesman says the firm tried to settle claims as quickly as possible, but delays inevitably arose when policyholders struggled to document their possessions.) In any case, Betty Ann and Craig considered themselves lucky: Unlike many other fire victims, they could pay off their old mortgage and had savings they could pour into new furnishings while they waited to seal the rest of the deal with their insurer. At first they looked at dozens of places in the Oakland hills, but gradually they began visiting towns farther afield. Understandably, perhaps, the two fire victims ultimately decided that what they wanted most of all was to live near water.

In August of that year they moved into a house they bought alongside the bay in San Rafael, a small city about 40 minutes from Oakland. Their claims were far from settled, but because home insurance policies cover the physical structure and not the property, their land was not tied into any settlement. They were free to sell, and soon accepted a bid of $150,000 for the burned lot on Buena Vista Drive. They were ready to start over.

BACK IN KATE'S NEIGHBORHOOD

For Peter Scott and Teresa Ferguson, the first year after the East Bay hills disaster was a breakneck journey from the tragic to the redemptive. On the Monday after the fire, they still weren't any closer to finding out what had happened to Peter's mother. Another search of hospitals turned up nothing. That same afternoon, Teresa convinced a sympathetic policeman to let her through the barricades and give her a ride up the hill. Beside the smoking ashes of her former home, she watched as searchers combed the premises. They were looking to see if her mother-in-law had been trapped inside.

"I left Monday night fairly convinced," says Teresa. "I went back down and told Peter: 'I don't think she got rescued, and I think we should start facing that possibility.'" The family decided to look for her remains once more. "We spent all day [Tuesday], until about four or five o'clock, searching through ash and rubble," says Teresa, "and we still didn't find anything. And at that point my oldest daughter, who was 13 at the time, was searching around the site where her bedroom was, and all of a sudden she turned around and said 'Mom, what is that?'" They went quiet. On the ground was what looked like an intact skeleton. Peter walked over and reached down to pick up what seemed to be a piece of bone. "But it wasn't bone, it was just ash," says Teresa, rubbing her index finger and thumb together. The skeleton had burned to dust.

Frances Gray Scott's body was one of the last to be found. Most of the others had died on traffic-clogged switchback roads, trying to get away on foot from a fire that blew in far faster than any man or woman could run. As it turned out, not a single family that suffered a death returned to the hills to rebuild--except for Peter, Teresa, Ginny and Kate. Early on, even amid the initial crush of grief, the foursome decided that they wanted to get back their old house, and their old life, as quickly as possible. They would try to be the first. As Peter puts it, "We were driven."

They knew they had an enormous advantage. "We have absolutely complementary skills," explains Teresa. "Peter is an architect, and I'm an accountant. I can deal with all the finance and insurance and the money, and he can deal with all the design and construction issues and the city [permits]." In rapid succession, Peter redrew his old plans for the house and hired a contractor. Teresa juggled the finances--borrowing from Peter's 401(k) in one instance to keep construction moving. She also came up with the idea of buying a tiny house in the nearby town of Piedmont. It was a brilliant move: Instead of spending their insurance money on monthly rent, they could use it to cover their monthly mortgage expenses--and they could deduct the mortgage interest from their taxes. They could also enjoy the tranquility of Piedmont--one of Oakland's most desirable suburbs--as they tried to recover. Peter says, "I think the thing that really made a difference is that both Teresa and I come from backgrounds where we tend to be financially insecure, and we like to pay for things as we go and not run up big bills. And so, when we looked around in the weeks after the fire, we didn't have car payments, we didn't have a huge mortgage, we didn't have a whole bunch on our credit cards. So we could go down to our banker and say 'Yeah, we can handle that.' It saved our tail, believe me."

The only problem was their insurance policy. Yes, it would cover their provisional home in Piedmont. But it would not cover the full costs of reconstruction. "We were classically underinsured," says Peter, noting that his policy had been marked up over the years for inflation to a value of around $180,000. That meant rebuilding would put them about $100,000 in the hole. So why, when they had purchased expensive earthquake coverage the year before, had their insurer neglected to give them any information on a full-replacement upgrade--an upgrade costing just a few dollars extra in yearly premiums? And what about their personal-property coverage? Teresa swore they had sent a list of their possessions (including photographs) to the agent a few years back to verify that they were covered. But the agent maintained that he had no record of the package. Within months these disagreements escalated into a bitter standoff, with Peter and Teresa filing a claim of professional negligence against their insurer. Before any litigation ensued, however, Teresa dug up something in her lawyer's files that made their case: a fax transmittal of the personal-property list she had sent to the insurer two years earlier. The two sides soon struck a deal.

In the meantime the family had continued to build. Psychologically, they tried to bounce back as best they could, infusing their return with a celebratory air rather than a mournful one. "One of the happier moments was [in April 1992] when we had just put in the windows and the drywall," says Peter. "We didn't have any plumbing or electrical, but we had the contractors' outhouse and we strung some wires from a [contractor's] power pole and had little white Christmas lights we put all over the house. We hired a five-piece band and invited 300 people for a party, saying, 'There's no parking problem, and there's no neighbors to complain.' And we had a party that you cannot believe. Supposedly, they could see us and hear us from downtown Berkeley."

They moved back almost nine months to the day after the fire--on July 19, 1992. "We were the only house as far as you could see," says Teresa, recalling the solitude of the neighborhood as somewhat unsettling at first. "There were no streetlights, no neighbors. It was all just ash. Some people hadn't even cleared their lots yet." Their daughter Kate, six years old at the time, took to wandering the empty neighborhood, this slight blond child a bright dot amid the acres of burned gray rubble. She would sit on the steps of homes as they were being built, befriending contractors and neighbors, charming and welcoming them as they moved back in, one by one, over the course of the next few years. "It's her neighborhood," says Teresa. "Even now, people call this Kate's neighborhood."

THE LOST YEARS

It's not often you get invited to a dinner party where all the guests' houses have burned down. But on a recent evening at David and Nancy's home, a slew of neighbors have come to reminisce about how the fire has altered their lives. Over several bottles of wine, they joke about how, in the weeks after the fire, they could recognize a fellow fire victim by the baggy donated sweatsuit, or how for years afterward their clothes, purchased in one big batch, would all wear out simultaneously.

There's a sense of fellowship here that never existed before the fire. Glen Hammonds, a neighbor of Dave and Nancy's, remarks: "If your house is going to burn, it's good to have it burn down along with 3,500 of your closest friends." He's not kidding. In the fire's aftermath, hundreds of dispossessed families banded together to fight for fairer insurance settlements and to help one another rebuild their lives. Still, too much has been lost, including vast sums of money and time, to think of the fire as any kind of blessing. That the victims learned from the experience--learned that they were capable of wresting a good insurance settlement or supervising construction of a new home or simply not giving up--doesn't negate the damage. "This took a chunk of our lives," Nancy says softly during dinner. "Five years that we didn't spend on our careers, or adopting kids, or getting college degrees."

By the mid-1990s the residents who had the money and desire to rebuild--about 1,500 households--had settled with their insurers and returned. Missing from those ranks were many older residents, as well as those whose underinsurance made rebuilding financially impossible. Today, about 30% of the 1991 residents remain--a group that tries to help educate newer neighbors about their community of breathtaking views and breathtaking wildfires. Due to its climate and dense vegetation, there will be another conflagration in the Oakland hills sometime in the near future, much as another hurricane will inevitably crash into the Florida coast and another tornado will rip across the Kansas prairie. When I drove around the fire area in July with Oakland deputy fire chief Ronald Carter, he said, "Will it burn again? No doubt about it. Will it be as bad? It could be worse."

David Kessler has devoted countless hours in the years since the fire trying to get this point across--mostly through his work with several neighborhood organizations. Unlike those living in a hurricane or tornado area, it is generally agreed that the residents of the East Bay hills--a region known as an "urban/wildland interface zone"--can help prevent, or at least contain, the next fire by clearing brush, cutting back trees and replacing old wooden roofs with asphalt or ceramic tiles. In many ways, David's efforts to educate his neighbors have made a difference in how they take care of their property. But the urgency of his message is fading; the neighborhood's newcomers have little knowledge--and in some cases, little interest--in what happened in 1991. "I'm sure that in a few years people will move into this neighborhood who won't know that there was once a great fire here that killed 25 people and burned up the entire area," David says. "It hasn't happened yet. But it will."

The morning after David and Nancy's dinner party, I drove west across the bay to see Betty Ann and Craig's house in San Rafael. If one of the fire's legacies was to transform David into a tireless activist on fire safety issues, another was to turn Betty Ann into an outspoken supporter of insurance reform. In large part, she was motivated by her own struggles to get a fair settlement and extract some personal meaning from the debacle. "Our insurer alienated us so thoroughly [that] we decided we were going to get every dollar we were entitled to," she says. "And they ended up paying a lot of money to us. It took four years." During that battle, Betty Ann worked on a 1994 bill to change the California insurance industry--a bill that offered homeowners various protections against abuses and delays during the investigation of claims. That legislation never made it into law, but Betty Ann is helping support a similar bill now moving through the state legislature. As she sees it, this is a chance to use what she learned about claims and settlements to improve public policy.

But here on their sundeck that overlooks the water, the Oakland hills seem far away. Hummingbirds flutter around the porch rail, sprays of lavender cover the garden below, sailboats bob in the marina. Somehow, you get the impression that 10 years later, things have turned out quite all right. Betty Ann has retired, and Craig has left his job as a cameraman to start his own video-production company. Craig says the experience of the fire--finding out that he could deal with the loss and uncertainty--was what inspired him to leave his job. "So you see," he says, "there is this silver lining."

In the meantime, the two feel a pang when they remember the home movies or long-ago birthday cards from their children that have been lost. "I didn't really understand what the important things were until I didn't have them," says Craig. In this regard, the fire's legacy may never leave them. There are too many reminders. A few months ago, a bus driver saw Betty Ann and said, "I remember you!" For a former television newscaster, this was not altogether surprising. But then the bus driver said, "I remember your bathroom cup."

A PHANTOM LIGHT SWITCH

Does coming back to the hills first mean recovering from the fire first? Looking back on things now, Peter and Teresa think that maybe moving a little slower would have been better. "We were so intent on putting our lives back together physically," says Teresa, "that I didn't spend enough time dealing with the emotional stuff."

In any event, sitting at the dining room table at Peter and Teresa's house, I get the feeling that regardless of what they did that first year, like all the other fire victims, they may always be on the mend. The fire changed not only their own views on life but their children's. "Kate has a happy-go-lucky facade," says Teresa. "She seems to be driven to kind of smell the roses, to make sure that she gets into every experience that she can. Yet underneath it's driven by the sense that yes, this too can be taken away, the whole thing, without explanation, without any reference to what is fair or right. It's like she lost her childhood at that point." In addition, Peter and Teresa still hurt from the financial blow they've suffered. Driving back that Sunday from Monterey after hearing about the fire, Peter said to Teresa, "You know, this means we're going to have to suddenly get 10 years younger." His prophecy proved true enough. There's no question, says Teresa, that Peter is working 10 years longer just to catch up. "And in fact, three months ago, we realized that we are now back to where we were in terms of replacing everything," she adds. "That means we treaded water for 10 years. So there's some sadness to that."

By far the largest source of regret, though, is the death of Peter's mother. It seems incongruous to get a blast of anger from this soft-spoken architect, yet Peter says he has never stopped feeling rage at the city for its inability to stop--or prevent--the firestorm. In the years since, he has agitated with some success for better emergency services. And in 1998, he waived his fee and designed a new firehouse that now stands just a few hundred yards from his home. Peter nonetheless wonders what will happen in the next fire--or, just as likely, after the next earthquake. He now has a replacement home insurance policy that he keeps up to date; nearly every year, he and Teresa take inventory and photos of their possessions. But will the city be able to help those who can't help themselves?

To be sure, the couple believes that the burden also rests on them. Peter calls the fire "a failure of community," and both he and Teresa know that their lapsed relations with neighbors are partly the reason that no one thought to check on Peter's mother. Yet the two see the community breakdown as something larger than Oakland, something endemic to America. It sounds almost precious--and certainly a bit antiquated--to say that in this age of cool remove, as we connect more and more to one another by e-mail and telecommuting, a thing like neighborliness will save your life. But the two clearly believe this is the case. "There is this myth out there that a disaster isn't going to happen to me," says Teresa, "and that if it does I'm going to call 911 [and] think I'm going to be okay." Moreover, she says, "when that kind of thing happens, it's the most horrifying realization to find out that you don't know where your kid is or where your mother is, and you don't even know how to reach somebody who might be right next door to them."

In this sense, life is different for her and Peter: They now know their neighbors and feel guilty when they fail to reach out to new arrivals on their street. Just as important, they can spell their neighbors' names and know their phone numbers. Not long ago, I sent Peter a note asking whether he would ever move away. He wrote back: "It is impossible for us to discuss the idea of relocating...because our children become tearful if we even mention it. They have searched in dirt with their hands for remains of their childhood and have a primal connection to the terrain of this neighborhood. They have seen each of our neighbors' houses from the inside out as it was constructed and helped to plant each tree. We can see the remains of the old charred foundation under our house, and we know the history of it in a way that it is hard to imagine anyone else ever understanding. I suspect this house will remain in our family for generations."

Meanwhile, as the pain of the fire recedes a little with each passing year, Peter and Teresa still encounter what they call phantom-limb syndrome. There are days when they'll spend 20 minutes rooting around in a storage area for their old slide projector before recalling that it too was lost in the flames. And there is a light switch in the kitchen that Peter always reaches for, only to come up empty-handed. When they rebuilt the house in 1992, he redesigned things slightly, moving the switch from the right side of the door to the left. But for some reason, his memory tells him otherwise.