Homeowners Return To Find Not Much Left

Most of the gutted, destroyed, neighborhoods are still not open, but a few of the homeowners have gotten back inside for a look, reports CBS News Early Show national correspondent Hattie Kauffman. What they found wasn't good.

Kiat Tohsakul had lived in his house just west of Interstate 15 for 18 years. When he saw the walls still standing, he thought everything was fine, until he got a closer look.

He and his wife gathered what they could. Among the prized possessions were a family portrait and his grandfather's American flag; his grandfather had been a Marine.

Others came back to find nothing standing at all.

"It's amazing, because this is just gone," Al Cihocki said.

"My mom's car is underneath all that stuff and mine's in the driveway," said his girlfriend, Brittany Harmon.

Her parents had put the home up for sale, so they could retire out of state. Now, Harmon has to tell them their retirement nest egg is gone.

"It's hard," she said. "We're never going to come back here again. There's nothing to come back to."

Still, she's alive, reports Kauffman, thanks to her U.S. Marine boyfriend, Cihocki. He awoke to the smell of smoke.

"I went from sleep to the truck and up the road and out," Cihocki said.

"I called my parents and asked what we should grab and grabbed important documents and all the photo albums and animals and food," Harmon said.

Zach DeVito came back to find a miracle: His house was still standing, though the fire crept up right up the edge.

"We were staying here just spraying the fence and the trees and the ground," he told Kauffman, and spent the night not knowing the fate of the house.

Convinced it had burned, DeVito went to extremes to check on it, running along the freeway.

"I hid from police, I climbed fences, I fell down, I crossed burned places," he said.

"Why was it so important to you?" Kauffman asked.

"This is where I grew up. This is home," he replied.