Team Rubicon helps Sonoma County residents search for possessions in Kincade fire’s ashes

Nadine Lavell cried at the sight of the home reduced to ashes three weeks ago by the wind-driven Kincade fire that roared through the foothills of the Mayacamas Mountains.

It was a modest, wood frame house with a metal roof, unoccupied for years but packed with family keepsakes and rich in memories from Lavell’s childhood visits, with a massive oak tree out front.

“This was the house my grandmother grew up in,” Lavell told volunteers who came Friday to carefully sift through the gray, gritty remains of the house before they are hauled away.

To hear the old family home north of Windsor described as a “debris field” is ?“really heartbreaking,” she said, as the task at hand was to recover anything valuable amid the rubble. Lavell and her husband, Gary Del Carlo, live in a house farther uphill that survived the fire.

“I’m so grateful these people are here to do this,” Lavell said, tearfully. “This is really important because I couldn’t do it myself.”

Standing nearby, Caroline Upton, a strike team leader with Team Rubicon, said that’s what the 9-year-old nonprofit’s Sonoma County mission, dubbed “Operation Autumn Winds,” is all about.

“It gives people closure,” said Upton, a St. Helena resident. “That’s what we can give people, the ability to move forward because everything else has been done.”

Team Rubicon, a Dallas-based military-minded global disaster response organization with a roster of about 105,000 volunteers, rolled into Cloverdale Thursday and set up in the Veterans Memorial Building, filling the auditorium with rows of cots borrowed from the American Red Cross.

On Friday, two dozen Team Rubicon members - ranging in age from 19 to 73 - headed to the Kincade fire zone on the start of a property recovery mission at about 17 of the 174 homes incinerated by the blaze that scorched 120 square miles from The Geysers geothermal field to the outskirts of Windsor.

They were joined for the first time by seven volunteers from Bethel Global Response, a faith-based disaster relief organization started by the Bethel Church in Redding in 2013.

“Don’t be a Richard, get stuff done,” John Saguto, Team Rubicon’s operation section chief, advised the volunteers, gathered in a circle outside the vets hall.

The mission is urgent, he said, with rain expected next week that would transform the ash into slurry, increasing the hazard of handling it.

Even dry ash is so threatening - owing to the numerous toxic substances in homes - that Team Rubicon volunteers are protected from head to toe in white Tyvek suits, helmets, gloves, N95 masks and safety glasses or goggles.

Their work consists of shoveling ash into homemade sifts, made of a metal screen in a wood frame, to capture any solid object.

At day’s end, the suits are carefully rolled up and left in a bag to be hauled away with the debris.

Notable finds of the day were: a small diamond, minus the gold ring it graced; a roll of gold coins melted together along with hundreds of silver coins; and, at the same house, a porcelain pig that a woman had been given by her grandmother.

At another home, dogs trained to detect cremated human remains found the grave of a 10-year-old girl who was buried on the property in the 1970s.

Team Rubicon, founded by two Marines who took an eight-person team to Haiti in the wake of the crippling 2010 earthquake, has since responded to more than 400 natural disasters - wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and quakes - and humanitarian crises around the nation and the world.

More than 2,000 volunteers responded in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, which killed 106 people and did $125 billion in damage in Texas and Louisiana in 2017. This year alone, Team Rubicon has assisted nearly 12,000 people recovering from disasters as far apart as South Dakota and Mozambique.

About 80 percent of the volunteers are veterans, with the rest typically referred to as “kick-ass civilians.”

It operates in a military manner, typified by the posting in the Cloverdale vets building, captioned as a “billeting battle rhythm” and listing a schedule from 6 a.m. lights up to 10 ?p.m. lights out.

Morgan Rains of Sacramento, the incident commander for the Sonoma County operation, her 14th with Team Rubicon, said she first volunteered for Hurricane Harvey and found “the culture and the morale was infectious. It’s like a family.”

Her father is an Army veteran of the Vietnam war.

Jerry Cederholm, 73, of San Jose, reacted with mock alarm on discovering he had set his cot beneath the poster of a Cloverdale sailor. “I’m Army all the way,” he said, displaying the Vietnam infantry combat badge attached to the visor of his cap.

“Mentally, I think I really need to do this,” said Cederholm, whose retirement came unexpectedly when his employer moved to Costa Rica. “I really enjoy going places and helping people.”

Katie Price, a 19-year-old college student from Lodi - “Wine Country,” she called it earnestly - is on her first operation after seeing an item about Team Rubicon on Facebook.

“I want to be part of something,” she said. “I want to help others, to give back.”

Asked what she hoped to do here, Price said: “Anything they tell me to do.”

Team Rubicon doubles as a veterans’ self-help organization, affording their ranks a “sense of purpose” and a return to the camaraderie they had in the military, said Jake McCormick, the mission’s spokesman.

Nothing significant turned up in the ashes on Lavell’s property, but she still appreciated the help.

“It gave me peace of mind to know that I did all I could to make sure nothing was left behind,” she said.

Team Rubicon plans to work at least through Sunday, and any property owner interested in the organization’s services may call ?310-981-8919.