(Forbes) - On the day after she fled her Santa Rosa, California, home, cautiously steering through the wreckage of her neighborhood with her terrified 20-year-old daughter following closely behind, my dear friend Herlinda Heras whispered on the phone to me, “We usually help everybody else. Who’s going to help us?”

Honestly, I have chills typing those words, thinking back on the weeks that followed the October 8 inception of the Northern California wildfires that have so far destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of the richest wine and craft beer land in the nation but are finally, mercifully, almost entirely contained. In the days after these near-record-breaking wildfires in San Francisco’s North Bay, I read news and social media reports frantically, writing near-panicked emails to check on the site of the nation’s first ground-up modern craft brewery; sending Facebook messages to a friend forced to abandon his vineyard; trying to reassure a colleague choosing which laminated credentials to save from a decades-long career as a beer chef; and talking to Herlinda whenever she needed it, proverbially holding her hand across 3,000 miles of phone line, hoping against the odds that the Tubbs fire devouring the blocks around her just-constructed custom home in Coffey Park would somehow stop short of her newly delivered doors and windows.