Residents tour San Bruno devastation

Packed with survivors, the first buses crossed police barricades about 4 p.m. Monday and entered the burned blocks, escorted by San Bruno’s police chief and mayor.

They passed an American flag that neighbors and firefighters had raised earlier that afternoon on a telephone pole near the crater that ripped a hole 167 feet long and 26 feet deep into the center of their subdivision.

At least four neighbors were dead, dozens injured, 37 homes destroyed, hundreds of people displaced.

Residents pressed against the windows, taking photographs, dabbing their eyes and pointing out the charred debris where their houses once stood as they begged the drivers to slow down.

Bob Hensel, 72, caught a glimpse of his house, reduced to charred stucco, the car in the driveway a burned hulk.

The retired firefighter had fled his home of nearly 40 years just minutes after a gas explosion sent flames as high as 1,000 feet. He’d left after a hurried search for his two cats, still missing.

Now, he was returning for the first time since Thursday night’s disaster.

“There was just rubble,” he said afterward in a parking lot overlooking the neighborhood, as he prepared to return to the mobile home where he is now staying.

Hensel was composed. Then he started talking about those who had gone to his aid.

He put a hand over his mouth and turned away.

“When I get emotional is when I get to the point where I realize all the people that are helping me,” he said. “I think I’ll be OK.”

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Geraldine Milam, 90, a retired PG&E payroll worker, made it through her electric garage door just before the power went out Thursday.

Milam did not wait for an escort before heading back to Claremont Drive. Just hours after the explosion, she borrowed a friend’s Coleman lantern and walked past firefighters and PG&E repair crews onto her darkened street. She found her house untouched. She went inside and fell asleep.

The next morning, she awoke and walked down the street to survey the damage. More than a dozen houses had been gutted, reduced to smoldering chimneys.

“I was all tears,” she said.

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Jerry Guernsey, 66, a retired elevator repairman, had felt the heat surge uphill, carried by a southwest wind that swirled between the houses. Downhill, in the direction he thought he’d heard the roar of a jet engine, he saw a glowing, twirling orange fireball.

He next saw his home on Concord Way on the television news, instantly recognizing his Impala out front. It was scorched.

Now he longs not just for his home of 25 years, among the ones demolished, but also for the neighborhood with its comforting routines.

Outside the town hall meeting over the weekend, he wore the same blue jeans and plaid Western shirt he fled in. He and his wife were staying at an airport hotel. His address was a post office box.

“I’m getting to the point,” he said, “where there are no normal days.”

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The night of the explosion, Maura Guerrero called 911 from her home on Fairmont Drive, trying to report the flames she could see from her front window. The operator thanked her for calling.

“Now,” the woman told her, “You need to get out of the house.”

Sunday night, at the town hall meeting, Guerrero was embraced by several of her son’s teachers.

They looked at an aerial photograph of the neighborhood.

“Could anything have survived?” 12-year-old Jonathan Guerrero asked. “Because our cat was under the bed.”

His mother shook her head in frustration. Her house was gone, but so much remained — including the neighbor’s pine tree that appeared to have survived just to spite her, spewing needles in her yard.

“This one is standing and this one is down,” she said, pointing to houses along her street. “Wow.”

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Priscilla Tovar, 19, bolted from her childhood home on Claremont Drive, just ahead of the inferno. The criminal justice student at nearby Skyline College saw the charred remains of her house for the first time Monday, from the edge of a police barricade.

Tovar was staying at a nearby Embassy Suites. She said she was grateful for the up to $100 million assistance fund PG&E announced Monday for residents. But that would not buy her peace of mind. Sometimes, she felt the room shake the way it did before the blast.

She would leave the hotel for an errand and find herself driving back to see her street.

“I know I’m going to need counseling,” she said.

At the site where her home once stood, she could see a ceramic dog ornament in the yard, her scorched kitchen stove and little else.

“Everything’s gone,” she said.

She walked away feeling a sense of finality.

“It’s what I needed,” she said.

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

Times staff writer Maria La Ganga contributed to this report.