The Bishops didn’t waste any time.

As soon as they could line up a contractor and clear their home for repair after the Sept. 9 pipeline explosion, Bill and Nellie Bishop began working to get their Claremont Drive house back in shape.

Their home sustained holes in the ceiling from falling boulders after the blast as well as extensive damage to the interior. Thick, black soot covered furniture in most of the rooms. Despite the turmoil, they decided to live in the house while it was being repaired.

“We wanted to make sure that we were here for everything,” said Nellie Bishop, 61. “To me, it was part of the healing process.”

Her husband, Bill Bishop, also 61, added: “I was just thinking, ‘Let’s get on it right away before they forget about us.’”

Bill and Nellie Bishop hold up a sign given to the family by people who worked on the Bishops' house over the past year. (James Tensuan/San Bruno Patch)

Rebuilding so quickly after the disaster was certainly no race to be first for the Bishops, both of whom are retired and longtime San Bruno residents. To them, quickly making repairs and living in their own home was therapy that would help them return to normal.

But they are among the exceptions.

Others still struggle

On the Bishops’ block, many homes are among the 38 houses destroyed in the fire. Some of their neighbors died in the explosion and flames that followed. Several who are in the middle of rebuilding or repairing are taking a long time to make the next steps because they can’t shake off the emotional trauma. Still others haven’t decided, even a year later, whether to move back into the neighborhood, where the memories of their homes ablaze in the fiery inferno are just too painful to bear.

What is clear is that everyone, from those who lost their homes to those whose houses weren’t damaged at all, has been dealing with the aftermath of the explosion differently.

Given Bill’s stoic, sometimes playful demeanor and Nellie’s bubbly, gregarious personality, the Bishops represent a group of residents who have already moved on. They were shaken by the explosion, but are ready to get back to normal in the community they have grown to love.

“A lot of people my age, as they retire, they usually sell their house and move,” said Bill, who has been coaching softball for 30 years and is the president of the San Bruno Storm girls softball league. “But our daughters are here and all of our grandkids are here. Our roots are very deep. So it would be hard to just pack up and say, ‘Let’s get out of here.’”

That they survived the fire and found their home virtually intact, Nellie said, strengthened their desire to stay in the neighborhood.

First shaking, then fire

On the night of the explosion, Bill and Nellie had just sat down in their family room to have a cup of coffee and watch the 6 o’clock news. Suddenly, the house shook violently and debris began crashing through the ceiling.

Their first thought, like those of many, was that an earthquake had struck.

On instinct, they both headed for their antique oak and steel phone booth—which actually still takes calls—located in their garage, as it was likely the sturdiest place in the house.

After a while, Bill popped his head out of the phone booth and peaked through the doorway back into the house. Through a window he saw flames inching their way from the canyon to his home. The couple knew they had to leave.

Nellie sent Bill to get his wallet in one of the back rooms. But just as he went to retrieve it, a 3-foot boulder crashed through the ceiling, rolled through the room and hallway, and landed in the bathtub.

Holding on to each other as they rushed out of their still-violently-shaking home, they made it to their truck parked in the driveway. From there they saw complete chaos in the neighborhood: people running for their lives, red balls of fire flying through the air, emergency vehicles speeding to people’s rescue. After trying to help some neighbors, Bill and Nellie eventually got in their truck and made their way out of the neighborhood.

Meanwhile, one of Nellie’s daughters was driving up San Bruno Avenue with her three children, trying to get to her parents. But she was stopped by an undercover police officer, who had halted traffic. Their daughter was frantic, unsure if her parents had made it out alive.

“Thank God there was an undercover police officer there who stopped traffic,” Nellie recalled. If her daughter had made it to the neighborhood just moments later, they would have missed each other. Her daughter and grandchildren might have been trapped in the blaze themselves.

Some time later, Bill and Nellie made it down Sneath Lane to their daughter’s house, where the family finally reunited.

Nellie remembers her oldest granddaughter literally jumping head-first through the driver-side window and landing in Bill’s lap to embrace them. Their other grandchildren then ran into their arms.

“It was a homecoming like I couldn’t describe,” Nellie said, choking up as she remembered the moment.

Taking next steps to recover

They ended up staying at their daughter’s home for six days.

That was long enough to be away from their house, they thought. So they began planning repairs to their home as soon as they could.

Bill admits he pushed hard on the repair workers because the Bishops’ insurance company said everything could be fixed and he didn’t want any delays.

“They told me they were going to fix everything,” he said. “So I was like, ‘What are you waiting for?’”

In all, it took four months to repair everything and cost about $140,000, which their insurance company did indeed cover.

The only frustration they have now is not knowing whether their neighbors will ever return to the neighborhood.

Bill and Nellie’s home is now the new corner lot on their side of Claremont, since the fire destroyed six houses as it raged downhill toward them. Nights can be eerie because there isn’t much foot or car traffic, the couple said. Loud, random noises often startle them.

But they believe patience is a virtue.

Despite their push to repair their home, restore their community and return to the lives they knew, they’ve realized they can only do so much.

“As our therapist said, ‘Things will get better,’” Nellie said. “It will take time.”

Crawled up in a ball and trapped in a thicket of bushes in her neighbors’ yard, Maria Barr thought her life was over.

With burning embers and other objects flying through the air, and with the intense smoke from the fire caused by the Sept. 9 pipeline explosion filling her lungs, she had accepted her fate—not wanting to die that way but knowing that she had done all she could to escape.

Then, in a surreal moment, she heard a still, small voice that sounded like her only daughter. “Mom,” she heard.

Maria Barr rests in her garage on Tuesday, Aug. 23. (James Tensuan/San Bruno Patch)

Although she was scared for her life, at that moment she held out a glimmer of hope, gaining new courage from the thought that she might live and spare her family pain and suffering.

“Lord, don’t let me die,” she called out. “I don’t want to die. Not right now.”

In a miraculous moment, she looked up and someone came to her rescue and helped whisk her to safety. She had survived.

Barr, 70, who has lived alone on Concord Way since her husband died a few years ago, is now one of the many residents of the Crestmoor neighborhood who, a year after the fire, is still rebuilding her home and steadily rebuilding her life. In large part due to her age, she’s taking a long time to recover. Yet she is hopeful, just as she was on the night of the explosion.

Long road back

After the fire was extinguished and residents gradually were allowed to re-enter the neighborhood, officials told Barr that her home had been yellow-tagged. It was a label given to about a dozen homes because they weren’t completely destroyed, but were damaged badly enough that they were deemed uninhabitable.

She spent months staying in her daughter’s condominium, dealing with bouts of depression because she had lost so much up to that point. Her husband died in 2006 from complications related to carotid arteries. Just a few months before the explosion, a neighbor—who had also lost a spouse and whom she had befriended—died. Her daughter, Desiree, was to be married, but the wedding was postponed after the fire.

It took time for her to summon the strength to cope with everything. Eventually, she mustered up the energy to start repairing her home, working with contractors to replace her kitchen, walls, paint, carpet—basically the majority of the house. Then, as she would start moving things back in, the depression would kick back in because, to her, her home had been her castle. Now it just was not the same.

“Every day, I think I was getting better,” she said. “But the fact that I hadn’t accomplished much—I don’t know, it was like a sadness that would come back.”

Even today, boxes fill just about every room of her house—some stacked up taller than her petite frame—because just when she is ready to start unpacking, she gets emotional thinking about all the memories and she has to leave.

Recovering with words

Her breakthrough came a few months ago when, to get over the shock of rebuilding after a disaster, she remembered how much she enjoyed writing.

Passing the time away, she would recall how remarkable it was that she escaped death, and her thoughts would flow into words on paper.

She remembered how on the morning of the explosion, she visited her next-door neighbor, a paraplegic whose wife has been in a nursing home, as she did just about every morning. She would bring pastries while he would yell outside the window, “Coffee’s ready!”

When Barr first ran out of the house to escape the fire, her first thought was to save her neighbor. She yelled to him over their shared fence, but he didn’t answer. So she thought he was dead. It turns out, however, that paramedics were able to take him to safety. Barr said she now has to chuckle, knowing that she almost risked her life trying to save someone else when she was the one who would end up needing to be rescued.

While she waited to be rescued, Barr remembered many things, from getting off the phone with her sister just before the explosion to happy times with her late husband. Like a phoenix rising up from the ashes, Barr felt she should pen a short book chronicling her experience, with the help of her creative writing group.

What makes her thankful, she said, is knowing that God saved her life on that chaotic day so that she could tell her story now.

Rescued by sheer chance

When Barr was trapped in her neighbors’ bushes during the fire, she didn’t think anyone would really hear her cry for help, she said.

But then a young man emerged from her rear neighbor’s house—initially looking for his girlfriend’s pets—and spotted her.

That young man was Sean Applegate, who stopped by his girlfriend Katie Ocampo’s house on Claremont Drive minutes before. Applegate, Ocampo and her family had rushed to the top of Claremont after the pipeline ruptured, but Applegate and Ocampo decided to run back to the house to get her pets.

Applegate, 32, was able to grab the dogs while Ocampo, 28, looked for her cat and boa constrictor. When Applegate ran into the backyard, he saw Barr.

“That was probably the weirdest thing to me, because she looked like she was just hanging out,” he said. “It took me a second to realize it was a real person.”

They had a car waiting in front of the house, so Applegate snatched up Barr, and they eventually ended up near Sneath Lane. Another family then picked up Barr and took her to a house in San Bruno where a good Samaritan took in families for the night.

Barr was reunited with her daughter Desiree, who had been looking for her, the next day.

Joy replacing despair

Today, Barr still has trouble dealing with frequent flashbacks to the fire and the burdensome aftermath. But she has a reason to smile.

Her daughter, Desiree, finally had her wedding in Santa Cruz in July, where Barr was able to walk her down the aisle.

Barr is now thinking about going back to school to get her degree, which she was never able to do because, being the oldest child in a poor family of migrant workers in Texas, she had to put some of her earlier dreams on hold.

Best of all, Barr has her castle back.

“I’m still trying to cope,” she said. “People are saying this area is blighted and that property values will go down because of the explosion. But I believe in God. And I figure I’m old, I don’t have much longer to live, and I want (my life) to be happy.”

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Check out Martin Ricard’s travel diary for this project.

Winner of “Best Student Multimedia Feature Presentation” in the 2010 Online Journalism Awards.

From the ONA judges:

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The Black Family: Revisited from Martin Ricard on Vimeo.

Demo Reel 2009 from Martin Ricard on Vimeo.

Donald Zimmerman was mad at the world, stewing again in a 6-by-9-foot mayonnaise-colored jail cell. Then, he remembered the advice a counselor had given years earlier.

“She told me, whenever you get angry, to close your eyes and take a deep breath,” the 28-year-old Southeast Washington man said, recalling when he was locked up after a police officer pulled him over in October 2008 for a routine traffic stop. They found an outstanding warrant for an old robbery charge, for which he had already served time.

Using his counselor’s suggestion, Zimmerman changed: As quickly as he became upset, something on the inside told him to get rid of that anger, get off the guilt trip and let it go.

For some ex-offenders, the most important part of reentry is not freedom from a jail cell but making an internal change. For some, that means forgiving themselves for their crimes. For others, it’s deciding to stop and listen to the world around them.

But, with a criminal past hanging over their heads, how do they get there?

Donald Zimmerman embraces his seven-month-old son Dontrell as his son Donald Jr., 5, plays flag football in District Heights. (Marcus Yam/The Washington Post)

“If, in fact, we are sincere about helping someone transform themselves from a situation of stigma to one of acceptance, there needs to be a change in language used to describe them,” said Badi Foster, president of Phelps Stokes, the nearly century-old District-based foundation that recently launched an initiative called the Homecomers’ Academy, aimed at addressing reentry issues and changing stereotypes about former offenders. “Instead of defining themselves by their deficits, many are redefining their statuses as lifelong learners.”

As many as 60,000 D.C. residents — one in 10 — are felons, 15,000 of them under court supervision. Two-thirds are rearrested within three years. Forty percent are sent back to prison.

Legislators at the national and local levels regularly introduce so-called second chance legislation to expunge nonviolent crimes and ensure that ex-offenders are not permanently discriminated against. But Carnegie Mellon University is scouring empirical evidence regarding ex-offenders to discover how long it takes — if it can be determined — for them to be redeemed, or deemed harmless to society. The preliminary results of the study, highlighted in the May issue of Criminology, show that a person’s criminal record, depending on the crimes, could indeed become irrelevant after a certain number of years. Led by Alfred Blumstein and doctoral student Kiminori Nakamura, the study could help employers conduct background checks on ex-offenders with a better understanding of the risk involved.

The results also support what many advocates have long believed: that every ex-offender, no matter the offense, is forgivable.

For the past year, Cortez McDaniel, 56, a mentor for the Phelps Stokes’ Homecomers’ initiative, has promoted his recidivism prevention workbook, a how-to guide he created in prison to help people once they are released. McDaniel said he has watched many overcome their criminal past and the stigma society attaches to being a felon.

“So even though society’s got this vision that it’s not possible,” he said, “I truly know in my heart that it is.”

In Montgomery County, the Rev. Tim Warner is the community liaison for the African American and faith communities in the county’s executive office of community partnerships. He also runs his own nonprofit organization, Onesimus Human Resource Development.

Onesimus was a slave who in biblical times robbed his master and was converted by the Apostle Paul. In the book of Philemon, Paul urges Philemon to mediate on behalf of those like Onesimus — people “once not profitable” to the church and community — so that they can reenter the fullness of life in society.

Warner, a Methodist minister, said the participants in his program sometimes return to crime, but others clean up their lives.

“If you go to any correctional facility, I would argue that 20 percent of the people there need to be there. You and I would want them to be there,” Warner said. “I do not discount the power of God to redeem them, but I don’t know if it is in my power to do so.”

“Another 20 to 30 percent of the people who are there shouldn’t be able to be in jail in the first place because they have drug and alcohol problems,” he said. “But 50 percent of the rest of the them, they need a shot. Work needs to be done on them, and some of them can come around.”

Zimmerman counts himself among those who deserve a break. He caught his first charge in 1998 after he robbed a man for some money he was owed. The judge gave him probation because it was his first offense, but Zimmerman returned to selling drugs and using PCP and marijuana. He eventually was arrested for distribution of crack cocaine.

He spent six months in the D.C. jail before being shipped off to a penitentiary in rural Pennsylvania about 50 miles east of Philadelphia, where he spent four years yearning to go back to a normal life.

Although he could walk around now with a chip on his shoulder for his last incarceration, in which he was released after 42 days because the robbery warrant had been cleared years ago, Zimmerman now counts the stigma of having a record as a blessing.

“My record defines me. I’m not ashamed of it one bit,” Zimmerman, a portly man with an equally large smile, said one recent afternoon while at his aunt’s home, taking a break from cooking his family a meal for his son’s birthday. “It makes me who I’ve become now. It makes me stand tall.”

He said his record reminds him every day that being there for his family and raising his 5-year-old and 7-month-old sons are too important for him to go back to jail.

Zimmerman is now a dispatcher for a trucking company and plans to attend community college in the fall to study culinary arts.

Most of all, he said, for the first time in a while, things are normal again.

As the 20-year-old graffiti artist stood in broad daylight Saturday morning and aimed his spray paint at a concrete retaining wall behind the Rhode Island Avenue Shopping Center, the pleasant greeting of a passerby startled him.

He nervously put down the paint can and looked over his shoulder. For the past couple of weeks, he had been tagging his alias, AERA, throughout the area at night, with no one around to catch him in the act or disrupt his creative flow.

“Okay,” the artist said he thought to himself as he resumed his work, “this is a little weird.”

But on this day, spray-painting graffiti on public property, an act that would have been against the law any other time, was all good. It was part of a “mural jam,” a city-sponsored project that drew dozens of graffiti artists to contribute their flair to a nearly 1,000-foot-long wall turned canvas in Northeast’s Edgewood community.

Artists work on the nearly 1,000-foot-long wall in Northeast's Edgewood community that is serving as a concrete canvas for the "mural jam," sponsored by the Commission on the Arts and Humanities. (Megan Rossman/The Washington Post)

The goal of the project is to beautify the city and dissuade youths from engaging in illegal graffiti. But it represents a broader shift in thinking among the city’s political and art establishments, which are beginning to learn how to coexist with a graffiti culture that has thrived for years.

“We decided that just painting over [graffiti] with one color was not the answer,” said Gloria Nauden, executive director of the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, which authorized the murals. “You have to embrace them as artists, give them freedom. It’s about the respect and allowance of not being defined.”

From when tags began to show up scrawled across buildings and other public property in the District in the 1970s, the city has been struggling to find ways to eradicate what has long been viewed as vandalism.

The city has been forceful in its attempt to crack down on graffiti, including beefing up its graffiti abatement program in the Public Works Department and tracking down and arresting taggers. But like weeds sprouting through pavement, graffiti artists, many of them young people striving to claim a unique identity, have managed to survive.

Instead of viewing the graffiti artists as enemies, city officials have caught on to the idea of embracing them.

It started last year with MuralsDC, a $100,000 city-funded project spearheaded by D.C. Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) that connected teenagers with well-known graffiti artists to paint murals throughout the city to cover areas hardest hit by taggers. The underlying belief in the program was that by incorporating the graffiti artists in the creation of the murals, young people would be reluctant to participate in illegal tagging.

The efforts seem to have made a dent, Nauden said. Last fiscal year, the Public Works Department reported 1,948 incidents of graffiti on the buildings it monitors, spokeswoman Nancee Lyons said. This fiscal year, as of June, the department had received 695 incident reports, a significant decline.

“I don’t know whether we can attribute it all to the mural project,” Lyons said. “But it seems to be making a bit of a difference.”

With the expansion of the city-funded, graffiti-inspired mural projects, the District joins cities including Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles that have incorporated graffiti into their public art landscapes.

Graffiti experts say such programs are an important first step because, although many have viewed tagging as a social ill, taggers themselves, part of the ever-evolving hip-hop culture, have often viewed themselves as artists. Or, as they like to refer to themselves, “writers.”

“Essentially, it will desensitize people to the idea that it is an art form, not something you just see scribbled on the side of a building,” said Dominic Painter, executive director of Midnight Forum, a hip-hop-influenced youth group that specializes on the arts in the District. Painter also heads up MuralsDC, which has been expanded.

Projects such as the Edgewood mural not only bring life back to communities riddled with blight, some say, but they also show youths what they can aspire to become.

While Pose 2, one of the artists involved in the Edgewood mural, was taking a break Saturday, he spoke candidly about his passion for graffiti. Just past the tracks of the Metro Red Line station, he could see in plain view the numerous abandoned buildings coated with elaborate graffiti. Although it is illegal, Pose said, the graffiti reminds him of his roots in Yonkers, N.Y., where he got his start as a graffiti artist.

He now sells his art in galleries for hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars. Pose 2 pointed to the city-sponsored mural, part graffiti, part intergalactic mosaic.

“The young people here,” he said, “they can see the evolution.”

But not all of the graffiti artists have bought into the goals of the program.

“I just like the illegal kind a lot more,” AERA said. “Just the adrenaline and being out on a rooftop.”

There will never be enough murals to cover all the nooks and crannies taggers eventually find to spray-paint their pieces, some youths said.

But Painter said the main goal of the mural projects is to spread understanding of the art. Such understanding can encourage city officials to fund more programs that allow youths to express their identities creatively, he said, and it also can persuade youths to respect the artwork and realize that when they take ownership in a mural created by fellow graffiti artists, they also take ownership in their city.

“One kid might hit 10 to 20 walls,” Painter said. “But if you get to that one student, that problem’s abated right there.”