By ALLISON HOFFMAN and SCOTT LINDLAW, Associated Press Writers
SAN DIEGO - As some wildfire evacuees returned to their neighborhoods to find only ashes where their homes once stood, others sought government help for dealing with the uncertainty of their upended lives.
Justin Miner was among hundreds of people who gathered Thursday at a disaster center in Rancho San Diego in San Diego County, where an array of federal, state and county agencies had clustered to offer assistance.
Miner was evacuated from his home in Deerhorn Valley and had just arrived with his family at Qualcomm Stadium when his wife — seven months pregnant — went into labor prematurely.
"Things could be a lot better," he said. "It's really bad timing. I'm out of my house, I'm out of my job, my wife's in the hospital. ... I got a 3-year-old with a broken arm and an 11-year old stepson. Would you be OK?"
Five hours later, Miner walked out of the disaster assistance center with food stamps, financial help from the Red Cross and a little bit of hope, though he still didn't know if his house was still standing.
"I walked out with a tremendous amount of help. It's more than I expected," he said.
Such facilities create a one-stop shop where disaster victims can more easily navigate the bewildering array of government and non-governmental assistance.
"What happens in a big disaster like this is that people are very confused, they don't know where to go for help," said Steven C. Preston, head of the Small Business Administration, which joined the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, the state Office of Emergency Services and dozens more agencies at the center.
"Especially in a large disaster like this, our first job is to give people a clear understanding of what we do," Preston said.
The Small Business Administration provides low-interest loans to businesses and — despite the agency's name — homeowners and renters to help with property damage and other costs.
FEMA, among other assistance, gives grants for temporary housing.
In San Diego's fire-ravaged Rancho Bernardo neighborhood, some residents who stayed behind grabbed garden hoses, ensuring their neighbors would be less likely to need FEMA's help.
Gail Jones, 46, came home Thursday to find a little paper American flag planted in her front yard. Residents who watered burning roofs placed flags in front of each of the homes where they put out fires.
"We got back and saw this flag, and that's how we knew they saved our house," she said, weeping. "Our roof is a little scorched, but that's it. If they hadn't been here, our houses could all have been gone."
Across the street, another neighbor wasn't as fortunate.
Robert Sanders, 56, a photographer, rented a house that was incinerated after flying embers hit its wooden shake-shingle roof.
A fire-resistant box containing all his transparencies survived, but its contents melted from the heat, he said. Also destroyed was the only photograph he had of his father and a photo of his wife with her father.
A charred copy of "The Little Engine That Could" belonging to Sanders' daughter lay open in what had been the master bedroom. The book had been his wife's when she was a child.
"I've lost my history," he said. "All the work I've done for the past 30 years, it's all destroyed."
When the evacuation orders were lifted in Rancho Bernardo on Thursday, mile-long lines of cars formed at the freeway exit off Interstate 15 as tens of thousands of residents waited to return to their neighborhoods.
Some, like Frank Monticello, 40, saw no reason to rush back to a house that was burned to the ground.
"Truthfully, we don't feel any urgency to get in there," he said. "We know it's gone."
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