SANTA ROSA, Calif._When she'd gone to bed Sunday night, the fires ravaging Northern California had seemed miles away from Santa Rosa, but something woke Julie Pilacelli around 1 a.m. and told her to slip on her robe and go outside.
As she stood in the middle of Hemlock Street, where she had lived for 21 years, she smelled smoke and felt a breeze and a sinking feeling.
"Something told me," she said. "Death. Go. Leave now."
Within an hour, the L-shaped street lined with more than 40 ranch-style homes was overwhelmed by wildfire. In the sky, fireballs exploded like popcorn. Embers crashed onto bushes, rooftops and windshields. Sweltering winds howling up to 70 mph sent full trash bins flying across the street.
By Monday morning, the block so many had chosen to live on _ because Schaefer Elementary School was down the road and Coffey Park was around the corner and everything seemed so safe and tranquil _ had been reduced to a heap of rubble and ash. Santa Rosa, where many of them had grown up, had been walloped.
Officials believe a burst of late-night wind pushed the Tubbs fire, 10 miles away, into the city.
"Never in a million years would I have imagined something like this," said Pilacelli, 48.
She had moved to the house with the big eucalyptus tree as a 21-year-old mother with two little girls.
She moved out of 8693 Hemlock St. with two big bins packed with photo albums and the clothes on her back.
As she and her husband, James, with their dogs, Marley and Jazzy, backed out of their driveway around 1:15 a.m., her neighbors the Reisners, who used to come caroling at Christmas time, appeared to still be at home.
The Reisners had moved to Hemlock Street just after the Pilacellis. They had come from Utah and bought a house with a leaky roof, green walls, a green fridge and no toilet.
"It was awful," said Janet Reisner, 58. "But we thought it was such a sweet neighborhood. We knew this is the one we wanted."
For the next 20 years, her contractor husband, Jack, chipped away at every inch of the home, with help from their three kids. They added a family room, a bay window as backdrop for their baby grand piano, a marbled fireplace, a hot tub and a cedar-lined master closet. Many neighbors also put in the work to make the matching 1970s tract homes their own.
"This was our piazza," Jack Reisner said. "The unveiling of a life's work."
The night of the fire, the Reisners were sleeping on a mattress in their office. New hardwood floors were supposed to be installed in two bedrooms the next morning.
Before bed, Janet Reisner checked the status of the wildfires online. There were some in Calistoga and Napa and on the Sonoma coast. Nothing in Santa Rosa.
At 1 a.m., the couple woke to their dog door flapping from the wind.
Janet Reisner went into the kitchen and found the entire home filled with smoke. Then she grabbed a suitcase, but left with it mostly empty because she couldn't think of what to put in it.
Not her wedding ring. Not her Christmas ornament collection. Not even the ugly green tie with the glued-on gorilla that her daughter gave her husband on a long-ago Father's Day, the one he loved so much he said he wanted to be buried in it.
"There was no time," Janet Reisner said.
By 1:30 a.m. the people of Hemlock Street were out on their driveways, their front doors and car doors flung open to chaos. There were no firetrucks, no evacuation notices. No notices of any kind.
A lone police officer drove fast up the street, using a megaphone to tell people to get out. But his siren was silent.
"We were left high and dry," said Jimmy Warren, who has lived at 3696 Hemlock for 16 years. "Nobody was there to help, and everyone was trying to save their own lives."
The Reisners hollered at their friends Veronica and Allan Darrimon, who were watering their lawn. A few doors up, Nicholas Carrera, 23, alerted Ryan Crowne, who worked the late-night shift with him at Home Depot. And Luis Hernandez called his neighbor Ed Kuhn and roused him from bed.
Warren tried to use his hose to extinguish embers on his lawn, but it was no use.
As he got ready to leave, he saw his neighbor Gary Bower across the street. The man was so kind and giving that years before, he had helped Warren buy his house. Now, he stood with his own hose, determined to fight back the fire.
Bower's home was among the few that survived.
So did Stacey and Dan Hageman's house at 3699.
The couple returned to their home the day after the fire to find Hemlock eerily silent, except for the buzz of helicopters overhead. The street that had so often been home to festive Fourth of July barbecues and crowds of trick-or-treaters was now a wasteland. Strangers drove through, snapping photos, until police put up blockades.
When a wave of television crews descended on the neighborhood, Stacey Hageman asked them not to film their house, embarrassed by her family's good fortune.
"We see husbands and wives crying, picking through their houses just to see if they can find anything," she said. "They ask us, 'Is your place gone, too?' It's very hard to answer."
The Hagemans are doing what they can to help. She has offered their bathroom to anyone who needs it. He went around the neighborhood shutting off gas valves.
They feel hope about moving forward. Many do. They also have questions. Will insurance companies come through? Will the city move swiftly to let them rebuild? Will all of their neighbors return?
Stacey Hageman likes to think so.
"It was a great family neighborhood," she said. "And it will be again."
