ST. HELENA, Calif. _ Just hours after the Glass fire churned through the hills above St. Helena and Napa Valley, Antonio Velazquez walked past the ruins of his neighbors' homes toward his house, a chain saw in hand and his German shepherd-mix, Sasha, by his side.
When they got to the homestead at Deer Park and Sunnyside roads, Velazquez turned to his dog.
"Sorry, Sasha, we don't have a house anymore," he said. "Oh well, we're alive. But our house is burned. I cannot believe this."
Velazquez, 56, who has lived in the area for 18 years with his four children, is among a so-far uncounted number of Napa County residents whose homes have survived numerous fires in the past, only to succumb Monday to the latest of a seemingly never-ending onslaught of summer and fall fires in Northern California's famous Wine Country. The community center directly across the road from his home also was destroyed, as were homes on all sides of his house except the rear, where one neighbor's house appeared untouched.
Velazquez stayed in his home two years ago when a fire swept through the area. This time, he evacuated with his 18-year-old son _ and hoped for the best.
"I knew something like this would happen," he said. "It was just a matter of time. It's like the COVID. A lot of people get it. It's just a matter of when."
The Glass fire ignited in the predawn hours of Sunday, just east of the Napa Valley. High winds fueled its "dangerous rate of spread," officials with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, said, despite being battled by more than 1,000 fire personnel. The Glass fire, along with the nearby Boysen and Shady fires, combined to threaten thousands of homes from Santa Rosa in Sonoma County to St. Helena and Calistoga in Napa County. It was unclear Monday how the fire started.
St. Helena, in particular, appeared to be in a hellish situation late Sunday as the Glass fire approached across Silverado Trail from the east and the Shady and Boysen erupted in the Mayacamas Mountains to the west.
Patrice Viera, innkeeper at the Inn St. Helena in the center of that Napa Valley tourist town, evacuated late Sunday night when the heat and smoke from three nearby fires became intolerable. "It was impossible to breathe," she said Monday morning from Berkeley.
The fire remained burning in the hills near both Calistoga and St. Helena on Monday, burning the Chateau Boswell winery and the Glass Mountain Inn, along with numerous homes, but had not breached the town limits in either place. Foothills Adventist Elementary school, which welcomed students back Sept. 14, lost its main building to the fire. Some buildings on the campus escaped damage and handmade signs on a fence thanked firefighters for doing what they could to save the school.
The fires on the west side of St. Helena merged and headed west toward Santa Rosa, where they hit several of that city's neighborhoods in the early morning.
Fire and county emergency officials say the Napa towns and hill enclaves are not out of the woods yet, as winds are expected to continue to gust into Monday night.
"We need to get through this period," Napa County spokeswoman Janet Upton said. "There is no containment and there are multiple fronts."
Peter Emerson, a 61-year-old broadcast engineer who has lived in Deer Park his entire life, tried to ride out the fire Sunday night because he did not believe it was coming toward his home. Then, with unbelievable speed, he said, the fire swarmed over the hills and forced him to flee at 2:45 a.m.
"This came so quick, I mean within like seven minutes," Emerson said. "It wasn't here and then it went behind those trees over there to just being the rest of the mountain on fire. I swear that had we waited a minute or two longer, it would have been a totally different story."
Emerson caravanned out with two other neighbors, making a harrowing escape. "When I left, this whole area was engulfed," Emerson said. "There were flames on both sides, it was crazy. The wind was raining embers down. It was really bad, I was just looking down at the road, that's the only way you could see."
Emerson returned to his neighborhood Monday to discover that his home, like all the others near Deer Park and Sunnyside roads, had been destroyed. The only thing he salvaged Monday was a badly burned cat he found in the middle of the road.
Emerson cradled the cat in his arms as he waited for Animal Control to arrive to rescue it, standing in front of the burned-out Foothills Adventist Elementary School that he attended as a child.
He said he thinks he'll rebuild but isn't sure what his neighbors will decide. "I know a lot of people will but they are always trying to buy property up here to put more vineyards in," he said. "Once your house is gone, people might just sell it off. And there will be more vineyards here."
Glenn Pendergrass and Marcy Sanders were still battling flames Monday morning near their home outside St. Helena off the Silverado Trail after spending Sunday night watching the Glass fire march over the hills on the east of side of Silverado.
Around 11 a.m., the grassy hillside near their home and the Rombauer Winery exploded into flames, and they began working with a 5-gallon bucket putting out spot fires. The couple tried to leave Sunday afternoon, packing two vehicles with their belongings, a cat and dog and motorcycle and headed out from their trailer behind the Casa Nuestra winery.
They had been smelling smoke and hearing sirens since early Sunday morning, and by afternoon a fire crew came by and told them to get out. By 6:30 p.m., they decided it was time to go. But the flames and smoke were too intense.
"It was eating that house," Pendergrass said, pointing across the road at the rooms of Chateau Boswell. "It took four hours, and it was insane because things kept blowing up, propane and whatever they had in there."
Then, Sanders said, hay bails being stored on a hillside for erosion control caught fire and helped torch trees along the highway.
"Once the hay bales caught fire there was fire down at that end of the road and fire at the other end, so both ends of the road were blocked," Sanders said. "Well, we backed up and hung out."
A firefighter who happened upon them advised that they were better off staying the night than risking a drive through the flames running along both sides of the road. So Pendergrass, a 62-year-old construction worker who said he has been evacuated because of fires eight times _ including during the 2017 Nuns fire when he lost his home _ decided to make the best of it.
"I'll tell you what I did," Pendergrass said. "I'm no stranger to danger. I went to bed."
Sanders had stayed up since 4:30 a.m. Sunday, and was spending noontime Monday monitoring radio traffic through an app on her phone.
Velazquez, a former St. Helena restaurant owner who was trying to make it during the COVID-19 pandemic as a caterer, says he has a sister-in-law in Napa he may be able to stay with.
Then, he said he will probably pitch a tent on his property and start to rebuild.
"The plan is, level this area, make a tent and rebuild," he said, pointing to an area of the front yard not far from where his eight chickens and a rooster had somehow survived the flames.
"We lived here too many years," he said. "I don't think my kids are going to want to leave. They grew up here."
