After the San Bruno Fire: A Family's Anguish
SAN BRUNO (KCBS) - A month ago today, over 30 San Bruno homes were incinerated by the deadly PG&E pipeline explosion and fire. One family whose house was the last to burn down on Glenview Drive has struggled with the anguishing decision whether or not to rebuild.
When his Crestmoor Canyon neighborhood was going up in flames, Gene O'Neil could see the smoke as he drove home from Oakland. He would later discover his wife and two daughters who were in the house had escaped.
When the smoke had cleared, what was left of his three-bedroom, two-bath home was the brick hearth, a rusting water heater and 1,440 square feet of ash and debris.
After the Fire: A Family's Anguish, Part 1 of 3:
After the Fire: A Family's Anguish, Part 2 of 3:
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O'Neil thinks about how cool his kitchen was with its black and white checkered floor. Even on his fifth visit back to the scarred neighborhood, he searches for anything salvageable.
"It's my old college yearbook. I guess I can get that somewhere else. It's the photos you can't replace," said O'Neil.
Demolition crews have been working home by home, flattening people's lives into an empty lot and soon they will reach O'Neil's place.
"When the county said, can we bulldoze it, I said please go ahead. Let the grass grow." He was considering the people just like him that had lived there, hoping they wouldn't have to think about it every time they passed by.
His daughter Colleen couldn't forget how she suffered second and third degree burns on her arms as she bolted from the inferno. Nightmares allow her only three hours of sleep at a time.
"They tell us we'll make you whole again and I just think, you can't give me my art portfolio back, the last birthday card from my nanny back, my cats. Those are the things I want," Colleen lamented.
She also wants her old perspective back. "I feel like it's made me a little bitter. I'm kind of paranoid now about losing things, about not growing too attached to things."
That's the kind of mental anguish O'Neil refuses to subject his family to.
"My wife cries herself to sleep every night. I'm just wondering, coming back here if it would be too much for them," he said.
His wife Chris who ran barefoot from her burning home, lost antiques, heirlooms and her sense of security.
"My friends, my neighbors, they said if you rebuild, we'll rebuild and at the time I said, 'we're going to rebuild' and they were so thrilled. Now I'm going to have to tell them that, no, I'm not going to rebuild."
For Gene O'Neil and his family, the physical and mental scars may run too deep to reclaim what was their home. "It'll probably be replaced by a better house. I hope the people who move in it are as happy as we were in this one."
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