Sonoma resident uses telescope to inspect house in fire-ravaged area

Reporting from Sonoma —  Sarah Golightly stepped up to the telescope, its tripod legs planted in the gravel on the side of a two-lane road in Sonoma. The lenses were trained on a low-lying mountain ridge in the distance, blue in the dying light, where plumes of khaki smoke floated upward from multiple spot fires.

As cars whizzed by, Golightly peered at a magnified image of her home on Wood Valley Road, with no visible flames. Maps from Cal Fire showed that the fire zone had bookended their street but stopped short of their house. A lone firetruck was visible in the driveway.

“The grass isn’t burning!” she said, turning to her husband, Graham Edwards. “They must have hosed it down.”

The firefighters would have had to, she reasoned, because the sprinklers hadn’t worked since the electricity shut off Sunday. That was when roughly three dozen families evacuated, fleeing to friends’ homes or hotels, not wanting to stray too far from their homes.

“How come you got a firetruck, Sarah?” joked Bob Gardner, her neighbor down the street, as he took another turn at the telescope. Another neighbor piped up: “If he saves the house, he can have as many beers as he wants.”

Gardner built his house on Wood Valley nine years ago, when he sold his home in San Francisco. “It’s all we ever wanted,” he said, as he looked at the smoke billowing from behind the ridge.

Golightly fled the house Sunday with her husband and stepdaughter. They grabbed their three-legged cat and some chicks that were born the day before the fire started. On Saturday, they cheeped anxiously from inside their temporary home, a plastic storage bin in the back of the family car.

Police gave the family 10 minutes Monday to collect necessities from their house. Instead, Golightly and Edwards fed the 30 chickens they left behind and turned on their chain saws, trying to take down as many trees near the house as they could.

“Anything to save the house,” Golightly said.

laura.nelson@latimes.com