SANTA ROSA, Calif. _ The Sonoma County Search and Rescue Team arrived Sunday on Dover Court around 2:30 p.m. The neighborhood was gone. There was nothing recognizable as a home, except the chimney, and the rough outlines of a foundation.
They had very little to go on. They knew her name was Mary. She was elderly. And she lived alone.
She had been missing for a week, ever since fire had roared through here, melting or incinerating virtually everything in its path.
Not a thing in this neighborhood was alive anymore.
A buzz filled the air. For a few minutes, a drone hovered, moving back and forth, up and down, above the rubble that had been Mary's home. Its 3-D photos would document the scene before the team went in.
After the drone landed, searchers in bright orange shirts, gloves and masks walked the perimeter, looking for hazards that might hurt the two cadaver dogs who waited with their handlers, ready to work.
Sgt. Dave Thompson, a 25-year veteran of the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department, stood to the side, a mask over his face, and watched with a couple of detectives.
Thompson has been in charge of search and rescue for eight years. He trained and took care of the folks who would be poking and sifting through the ash for human remains. There are a total of 50; Sunday, 20 descended on Dover Court.
Thompson, who said some have been doing this work for a decade, did not allow me to interview them. The work can be emotional and he did not want me to distract them. All are community volunteers: bankers, teachers, professors, insurance agents, basketball coaches.
"They are amazing people," he said.
And yet, given that temperatures had soared as high as 1,500 degrees, what could even the most tenacious searcher hope to find?
Brace yourselves, because this where it gets really grim.
"The best clue for us is bone marrow," Thompson said. "The bones tend to explode a little bit. They look kind of like a PVC pipe. And you see this porous, darker yellow substance in them. That's the marrow."
But bones are easy to confuse with other household items, he said. "Drywall pieces that are cupped and curled can look like ribs," he said.
At Mary's house, they would be lucky to find even a 3-inch bone fragment, or part of a vertebra or a tooth. If they were really lucky, they might discover an artificial hip, with a serial number that can be traced.
"Our job is to find the big parts," Thompson said. After that, he added, the search team withdraws, and detectives move in to gather what they can.
