They came in a flurry of orange, descending on this quake-ravaged neighborhood with brooms, shovels and dozens of hands. 
 
 Then they formed a human chain in Lori Lemieux' frontyard, passing the crumbled bricks of her home's fallen chimney into a waiting truck bed. 
 
 The retired clerical supervisor watched in awe Monday morning. She and her husband had lost every wineglass in Sunday's 6.0 magnitude shaker, the largest to strike the Bay Area in a quarter-century. Furniture splintered. Worse still, mementos of their daughter, who died a decade ago when she was 17, were destroyed. 
 
 And now, strangers were helping. 
 
 "When you have something so devastating happen, to see this teamwork is just awesome," she said of the dozens of Home Depot workers from a number of Northern California communities who offered their help. "Blessings do happen." 
 
 Caption Raw: Aerial Look at Napa Quake Damage Two days after a strong and damaging earthquake hit the Napa Valley area, California's wine capital is working to recover. Two days after a strong and damaging earthquake hit the Napa Valley area, California's wine capital is working to recover. Caption Some Priceless Napa Vintages Lost In Napa Quake Some Priceless Napa Vintages Lost In Napa Quake Some Priceless Napa Vintages Lost In Napa Quake Caption As Aftershocks Continue to Hit, Cleanup Efforts Underway Following Napa 6.0 Earthquake Cleanup efforts were underway in the Bay Area on Monday, one day after a magnitude-6.0 earthquake along the West Napa Fault prompted Gov. Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency., Cleanup efforts were underway in the Bay Area on Monday, one day after a magnitude-6.0 earthquake along the West Napa Fault prompted Gov. Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency., Caption Brown Declares State Of Emergency Following 6.0 Magnitude Quake In Napa Valley Brown Declares State Of Emergency Following 6.0 Magnitude Quake In Napa Valley Brown Declares State Of Emergency Following 6.0 Magnitude Quake In Napa Valley Caption Surveillance Cameras Captures Earthquake Damage Surveillance Cameras Captures Earthquake Damage Surveillance Cameras Captures Earthquake Damage 
 
 The volunteers had company. A day after the temblor, inspectors had deemed 70 buildings here uninhabitable. The number of people treated for injuries had risen to 208, and schools remained closed. But residents and outsiders alike had found a common calling. 
 
 "When you meet people who are helping each other, there's no difference between religions or between colors," said Premysl Balaz, a 33-year-old engineer from the Czech Republic who was a week into a San Francisco vacation when the earthquake hit. 
 
 He drove up, found the temporary volunteer center, and was dispatched Monday to help build a database of red-tagged homes. 
 
 "Everyone is connected through the idea that they want to help," Balaz said. "I love the energy about it." 
 
 It didn't take long for the helpers to amass. 
 
 At Grace Church of Napa Valley on Sunday morning, congregants prayed and then made a list. Up top was a couple whose home sits directly on the fault. 
 
 After the earth split, Tim and Ann Whitlock's two-story house ended up six inches in front of its foundation. Big cracks zigzagged up the interior walls, and the sidewalk buckled into the shape of a tepee. 
 
 Throughout the day, fellow congregants — about 100 of them — helped pack everything into boxes and big plastic containers. 
 
 "Who says you can't move in six hours?" said Ann Whitlock. 
 
 Across town, Patricia Trimble was wading through a mess of broken pottery and glass at the Roost, her downtown vintage store, when a stranger walked in. 
 
 "He said he was drawn to me. He quoted Yeats," Trimble said of Marc Liotta, a Walnut Creek contractor with a near-addiction to reaching out to strangers. Liotta picked up the bags of debris and tossed them in the bed of his silver Toyota Tundra for a courtesy run to the dump. 
 
 "And you know what he did then?" Trimble said Monday as she listened to the melancholy sounds of Rickie Lee Jones in her quickly shaping-up boutique. "He went to my house and offered his help there." 
 
 Liotta, whose card reads "The Closet Magician," is semi-retired. In addition to building closet organizing systems, he has volunteered for Habitat for Humanity (as has Trimble) and flown to Haiti to offer his assistance after the earthquake. 
 
 "I was sort of languishing around here watching television and said, 'I'm gonna just go up there,'" said Liotta, 69, who was tipped off to Trimble's plight by the plywood on her window. 
 
 By Monday morning, more help arrived. At the volunteer center in the Grace church gym, Gregg DesElms welcomed a woman who said she'd taken the day off work. 
 
 He started to explain that he didn't have anywhere to send her or Balaz, the visiting engineer. Then DesElms' cellphone rang. 
 
 "Yes," he said. "I have two people here right now, and they're ready to go." 
 
 He hung up and turned to Balaz. 
 
 "How's your English and your typing?" he asked. 
 
 "So-so," Balaz said. 
 
 The police chief needed help entering numbers and addresses of red-tagged structures. 
 
 "Oh, I'm good with numbers," Balaz said, smiling. "I'm in, I'm in." 
 
 By afternoon, "Cartoon" Danny Roszell was offering his services to merchants. He tends to travel with a broom, though he insists he is no witch, but "a leprechaun incarnate." A window painter by trade, the Berkeley resident had come to Napa 10 days ago to help a friend with her house and look for gigs adorning glass with images of the grape harvest. 
 
 After the quake, he decided to put his broom to use. He showed up downtown in a white wool top hat adorned with a live flower bouquet. 
 
 "It's what I do," he said, of his sweeping habit. "It's a kind of meditation." 
 
 A few blocks away, Rod Wieldraayer was hauling free materials from the Napa Home Depot store to about 60 volunteers as they hopscotched through town. 
 
 Wieldraayer, the store manager, also happens to live here. The company often organizes its workers in small volunteer armies, so Monday's massive mobilization came naturally. 
 
 The bed of his truck was already loaded with a stack of plywood, crates of water and garbage bags when his cellphone rang. It was his district manager. 
 
 "Boxes? Medium boxes?" Wieldraayer said. "I'm on it." 
 
 A family with a red-tagged home needed them, so Wieldraayer returned to the store to fetch them and renew his supply of angle brackets, for residents now scrambling to secure their heavy furniture to the wall. 
 
 Meanwhile, in the Browns Valley neighborhood, where Lemieux lives, the crew was moving street to street. 
 
 Within no time, they had re-stacked a tumbled-down wood pile, hauled off debris from two other fallen chimneys, and disassembled a hulking planter once built onto Darcie Blair's front porch. 
 
 Blair, 45, a single mother with a 4-year-old daughter, lived in Northridge when the big quake struck there in 1994, but said she never felt anywhere close to the support she is getting in Napa. Within minutes of their departure, she had posted pictures of the Home Depot helpers on Facebook. 
 
 "The kindness of strangers just keeps on amazing me," she wrote. "As my daughter and I continue to clean up here in Napa, the folks from Home Depot just completely dismantled and hauled away for free a large part of our front porch. 
 
 "Thank you, good neighbors. You rock." 
 
 lee.romney@latimes.com 
 
 Twitter: @leeromney 
 
 marisa.gerber@latimes.com 
 
 Twitter: @marisagerber ||||| A strong, 6.0-magnitude earthquake jolted Northern California yesterday (Aug. 24) at 3:20 a.m. local time. The earthquake's epicenter was a few miles south of Napa Valley's renowned wineries, and the quake busted barrels and bottles of precious vintages. More than 170 people were injured, and 100 homes are now uninhabitable, the state Office of Emergency Services said Sunday. 
 
 In the first uncertain minutes, a seismologist at the U.S Geological Survey's Bay Area headquarters pinned the blame on the Franklin Fault, which has been inactive for thousands of years. 
 
 By morning, the sun lay bare what darkness hid: Buckled pavement and cracked curbs lined up along the West Napa Fault for up to 10 miles (16 kilometers). After inspecting the damage, California state geologist John Parrish declared that Sunday's earthquake occurred on the West Napa Fault, not the Franklin Fault. The USGS concurred, tweeting Sunday that the Browns Valley section of the West Napa Fault was the likely culprit. [See photos of damage from the Napa earthquake] 
 
 The results are still preliminary, and geologists will make a definitive call in the next few days. However, the early false start highlights how both high-tech instruments and old-fashioned groundwork remain important in the aftermath of an earthquake. 
 
 Which fault? 
 
 Yesterday's earthquake struck near the Napa Airport, in the San Pablo Bay marshes. The USGS precisely located the epicenter in just a few minutes, thanks to the region's dense seismic monitoring network, said Tom Brocher, director of the USGS Earthquake Science Center in Menlo Park, California. But which fault was at fault? 
 
 Many suspects appear on state earthquake maps. One is the West Napa Fault, which stretches 35 miles (57 km) from the city of St. Helena south to San Pablo Bay, according to a USGS report published in 2008. Among a handful of other possibilities, the Franklin Fault also stands out. This fault begins near the epicenter of the recent quake, and then cuts south across San Pablo Bay. 
 
 West Napa or Franklin? That 4 a.m. guess blaming the Franklin Fault soon seemed wrong. As damage reports poured in, scientists zeroed in on the West Napa Fault's Browns Valley branch. 
 
 This fault traces the western margin of the Napa Valley and cuts through the Browns Valley neighborhood of Napa. Along with the damaged streets, many of the city's water main breaks were in the Browns Valley area, according to Napa Valley officials. The Browns Valley branch pierces the Napa River at Cuttings Wharf. Another strand of the West Napa Fault lies east of the river and runs through the Napa Airport. 
 
 Map of Napa Valley region faults. Credit: USGS 
 
 Why it happened 
 
 The West Napa Fault is part of the huge fault zone extending outward from the San Andreas Fault, which lies about 31 miles (50 km) west of Napa Valley. The San Andreas marks the boundary where the Pacific and North American tectonic plates grind past one another. The West Napa Fault is sandwiched between two larger faults: the Hayward-Rodgers Creek Fault and the Concord-Green Valley Fault. [Photo Journal: The Gorgeous San Andreas Fault] 
 
 "The plate boundary is really quite wide and quite complicated, and the plate motion is accommodated by a wide network of faults," Brocher told Live Science. 
 
 The tectonic tension between the plates trickles inland to the West Napa Fault. An earthquake occurs when this built-up strain is unleashed. The fault parallels the San Andreas, and like the San Andreas, it is a series of slashes in the earth, not a single crack. (Each fault has more than one segment running in parallel.) Each fault is also of a type called right-lateral strike-slip, which means one side of the fault leaps horizontally to the right during an earthquake. 
 
 Within the last 11,000 years, the West Napa Fault has created cliffs and ridges called scarps, a sign of past seismic activity. But this fault has never jolted valley residents in historic times. 
 
 The last earthquake to rattle the Napa Valley struck on Sept. 3, 2000. This magnitude-5.1 earthquake occurred 10 miles (16 km) northwest of Napa, near Yountville, on a previously unknown fault. 
 
 No one knows how often earthquakes rumble through Napa Valley. The West Napa Fault and others nearby have never received the detailed detective work that geologists lavish on faults in the densely settled Bay Area. A 2008 estimate of Bay Area earthquake probabilities conducted by scientists and engineers for the state of California did not include the West Napa Fault. 
 
 "It is known to be an active fault, but it certainly has not been viewed as one of the major players in the Bay Area," Brocher said. 
 
 Napa's 6.0-magnitude earthquake is the biggest quake in California since the magnitude-6.7 Northridge earthquake in 1994, and the biggest in Northern California since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, a magnitude 6.9. 
 
 Collecting clues 
 
 But the South Napa earthquake could have been worse. Only part of the West Napa Fault broke open. If the entire fault had ripped, the earthquake would have been more powerful. 
 
 "I have to say, as much as the earthquake was large and had a widespread impact, it's not as bad as it could have been," Mark Ghilarducci, director of California's Office of Emergency Services, said during a press conference Sunday. 
 
 Though the actual earthquake rupture only lasted four seconds, there was strong shaking in Napa because the valley floor is lined with soft river soils that amplify earthquake waves. Also, the fault zipped open from south to north, directing the earthquake energy toward the city. "It looks like it went northwest and up from the dot on the map that shows where the earthquake nucleated," Brocher said. [13 Crazy Earthquake Facts] 
 
 Early Sunday morning, geologists from the USGS, the California Geological Survey and local universities were recording the surface damage before road crews started their repairs. This information will help researchers understand the earthquake's progress during the brief seconds the fault opened and closed. 
 
 On the high-tech side, it will take a few more days to measure how much the valley moved during and after the earthquake, using GPS and satellite measurements. An initial GPS report indicated 4 inches (10 centimeters) of shift near the earthquake's epicenter, Brocher said. 
 
 Small earthquakes called aftershocks continue to strike along the West Napa Fault. These small quakes cluster along the fault zone and illuminate the hidden underground parts of the fault, and will help scientists nail down which fault caused the quake. 
 
 "The locations of the aftershocks indicate that it ruptured the West Napa Fault, but it is not clear yet which strand of that fault broke," said Felix Waldhauser, a seismologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York. "Over the next couple of days we should have a better picture." 
 
 The earthquake is likely to bring new focus to Napa Valley's earthquake hazard. The California Geological Survey had already begun new studies on the Browns Valley branch earlier this year, and more researchers will likely begin studies analyzing the earthquake and its causes. 
 
 The quake also highlighted the most forward-reaching technology in California's quake arsenal. 
 
 The first jolt triggered the prototype earthquake early warning system at the University of California, Berkeley's Seismological Laboratory. The lab received a 10-second warning before the shaking started, said Lab Director Richard Allen. The warning could have been improved with an upgrade to the ShakeAlert system, which would have boosted the response time of the slowest seismometer by 2.5 seconds, Allen said. The state legislature approved a bill to expand the system statewide in 2013, but the Office of Emergency Services must find $80 million to pay for it. 
 
 "While the system clearly worked, the warning could have been twice as fast," Allen said. 
 
 Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. ||||| Day after Napa earthquake, region takes stock, cleans up Recovery will require time and money, but residents are grateful damage wasn't worse 
 
 Sweeping up glass and brick, cleaning up school classrooms and tending to wounds, thousands of people grasped for a sense of normalcy Monday after a violent earthquake shook the heart of Wine Country. But they faced challenges that will stretch into the days and weeks ahead. 
 
 Dozens of houses and businesses in Napa and Vallejo were red-tagged as uninhabitable, their walls or roofs deemed too fragile. 
 
 Hundreds of homes had no water, with some people dipping into pools to flush toilets. 
 
 Public schools were shut down and were to remain closed Tuesday - a summer break extended for the wrong reasons. 
 
 And more than 250 people were recovering from injuries that included broken bones and concussions. 
 
 But there was also reason to rejoice, or at least feel some relief, for many who call the area home. The two people who officials said were most seriously injured in the earthquake - including a 13-year-old Napa boy struck by a crumbling chimney - were said to be improving and were expected to survive. 
 
 In some ways, it seemed like business as usual Monday for one of the nation's top tourist destinations - including in hard-hit downtown Napa. Even as trucks hauled off trash and rubble, nearby wineries served up tastes of their world-famous Cabernet Sauvignons, tourists streamed into the city center to eat and see the sights, and many locals went to work. 
 
 "Compared to what it could have been, it doesn't feel like a pain at all," said Joanne Strickland, 47, owner of Legends and Lore Gift Shop, whose worst damage came when emergency sprinklers drenched her carpets. "I feel blessed. I am so fortunate." 
 
 Still, it wasn't the same - and it may be a while until it is - for many people reeling from the worst earthquake to hit the Bay Area since Loma Prieta in 1989. 
 
 That much was clear from the damage totals, which prompted Gov. Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency for Napa, Solano and Sonoma counties, paving the way for engineers and architects to arrive to help in the recovery. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated the damage from the 3:20 a.m. magnitude 6.0 quake could cost $1 billion or more. 
 
 As of Monday evening, inspectors had red-tagged 70 buildings in Napa, including the historic county courthouse downtown and a senior center, as too dangerous to enter. A few streets remained closed to keep people away from precarious structures, while a damaged pedestrian bridge was roped off for repairs. 
 
 Some displaced residents had nowhere to go, taking shelter at a Red Cross evacuation center at the Crosswalk Community Church. 
 
 In Vallejo, 10 buildings had been red-tagged, including a post office on Santa Clara Street. Vallejo officials said they had recorded 49 injuries, with two people admitted to the hospital. 
 
 Among those cleaning up was Napa resident Richard Webb, 67. Webb, who was awaiting a visit from city inspectors Monday, hoped he would be given the green light to rebuild. 
 
 "This one felt like someone picked up my house 15 feet and dropped it," said Webb as he surveyed damage to his chimney, which toppled and spilled bricks across his front yard. 
 
 Water remained a big issue Monday. Some 600 properties remained without it in Napa, as workers scrambled to repair about 90 pipeline breaks. Officials said it could take three or four days to fully restore service. 
 
 Some residents resorted to using water from swimming pools to flush toilets. Among those were the 280 residents of the Napa Valley Mobile Home Park, where a water main break had made it hard for firefighters to control a blaze that destroyed six units. 
 
 Residents used a jury-rigged pump to suck water out of the pool, filling buckets that they hauled home and poured into the toilet. 
 
 Napa officials said those who maintained pressure after the earthquake could safely drink their tap water. But they recommended that anyone who lost service for any period of time buy bottled water for cooking or drinking, boil tap water for a full minute before consumption, or stop by one of two water stations with containers. 
 
 Resident Carol Caie, 66, was one of those who filled up at a community center. 
 
 "I got some dishes on the counter," Caie said. "Nothing is washed." 
 
 Schools were another area of recovery. In Napa, all public schools were closed Monday and were scheduled to remain closed Tuesday to give administrators more time to survey damage. About two-thirds of school facilities had cleared inspections, officials said. 
 
 Desiree Buckley, 32, said she will take her daughter to the park or the library Tuesday. The city also set up a youth drop-in program, which will open Tuesday at a community center. "It's pretty hard," Buckley said as her 9-year-old, Haylee Mock, fidgeted on a bench. "The kids have nothing to do and nowhere to go." 
 
 Haylee, though, said she was happy to be out of school - her class is studying division. 
 
 There was hopeful news Monday from the family of Nicholas Dillon, the 13-year-old Napa boy injured by a falling chimney at his home. His family said he was stabilized at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento after a nine-hour surgery to treat pelvic fractures. 
 
 Dillon had invited a friend to spend the night Saturday and was sleeping on a mattress on his living room floor - his friend was on the couch - when the temblor struck. 
 
 Family members said Nicholas felt the jolt of the quake, heard the fireplace crumbling above him and lunged to get away - just enough to avoid being fatally crushed. His friend was not injured. 
 
 "It's a blessing that he was able to spring out of the way," said his aunt, Carmen Rosales. 
 
 On Monday, Nicholas was following his own story in the media and was, like any teenager, getting a kick out of it. He agreed to a bedside interview but then ran a fever and didn't feel well enough. 
 
 He won't fully recover for several months, said Rosales, and he'll be in a wheelchair for a while. 
 
 Another badly injured patient remained in critical condition Monday at Queen of the Valley Medical Center in Napa, but hospital officials said the person was expected to survive. 
 
 The waiting area for the emergency room, though, was empty after the hospital treated 208 patients on Sunday. Seventeen people had been admitted with serious injuries, including broken bones. 
 
 A Napa woman died at the hospital Sunday, but hospital officials said they do not believe the death was related to the earthquake. 
 
 All over Napa on Monday, people took stock of the damage. Brad Alexander, a spokesman for the state Office of Emergency Services, said he expected that help would remain in the community for some time. 
 
 "With a major earthquake, you're talking about a process that is months long," Alexander said, noting the long recoveries that followed the Loma Prieta earthquake and Southern California's Northridge shaker five years later. "Those earthquakes impacted us for decades." 
 
 For most homes and businesses, though, there was little to no damage - other than fallen knickknacks and furniture moved out of place. 
 
 If it weren't for the sheet of plywood across the window of the Alexis Baking Co. downtown, evidence of the earthquake would be tough to find. 
 
 Tourists and locals lined up for coffee and potato buns. This being Napa, customers asked the typical questions, such as: Is the food local? 
 
 "That's California," said cashier Terry Washburn after describing the lemon ricotta to a group from New York. "Food and earthquakes. I could do without the earthquakes, though." 
 
 Chronicle staff writers Kurtis Alexander and Melody Gutierrez contributed to this report. ||||| Video 
 
 NAPA, Calif. — The gardens at the Hess Collection, one of this region’s better-known wineries, reeked of spilled cabernet on Monday. The wine barrel storage warehouses by the airport were a jumble of tumbled oak barrels. The wine library at Saintsbury — a room filled with old vintages — had the smell of a day-old party, a result of 500 bottles shattering on the floor. 
 
 The magnitude-6 earthquake that jolted this picturesque valley of wineries and vineyards early Sunday morning wreaked at least some havoc with the industry that has come to define this part of Northern California. “About 15,000 cases of lovely cabernet came pouring out those doors and down the steps, into the garden,” said Jim Caudill, director of hospitality at the Hess Collection winery in Napa. 
 
 But as winemakers and tourism officials began cleaning up and assessing the damage, there was evidence that the impact may not have been as widespread as suggested by the images that flooded Twitter and television screens. 
 
 As is often the case with earthquakes, the amount of shaking — and thus damage — can vary significantly within a few square miles. This was certainly true here in wine country, where there were drastically different, and sometimes conflicting, reports of damage from vineyard to vineyard on Monday. In many cases, wine had just been moved from oak or metal barrels, where the earthquake could cause the most spillage, to bottles stacked in cases protected by shrink-wrap. 
 
 Bruce Cohn, an owner of B. R. Cohn Winery, said he was at first disheartened when employees reported that his warehouse — which holds 5,000 barrels, some stacked six high — was in chaos, with wine spilled all over the floors. “I’ve been in this for 40 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mr. Cohn said, describing the tumbled bottles and spilled wine. 
 
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 But as he reviewed the actual damage, he said, his worries began to diminish. 
 
 “My feeling is that it’s not that bad,” he said. “A lot of the barrels fell over, but I’m not sure they broke. I’m hoping — and I think — it looks a lot worse than it is, but we don’t know until we sift through it.” 
 
 At Saintsbury, a winery that makes about 30,000 cases a year, most of the damage was in and around a tin-roofed barn. Barrels stacked 16 feet high were knocked from a tight lattice into uneven piles that workers spent Sunday and Monday examining. Stainless steel tanks shifted a foot or more during the earthquake, but fortunately for the company, the tanks and barrels were empty: About a week ago, the company bottled and moved most of its inventory to Napa-area warehouses that were unaffected by the earthquake.
– People in Napa Valley, Calif., are picking up the pieces after Sunday's 6.0 earthquake wrecked scores of homes and businesses, and they're getting plenty of help from outside. Volunteers have flocked from across Northern California to assist in any way they can, reports the Los Angeles Times. The helpers include scores of Home Depot workers and an engineer from the Czech Republic who was on vacation in San Francisco when the quake struck and drove out to offer his services. "When you meet people who are helping each other, there's no difference between religions or between colors," he says. More: The damage is estimated at up to $1 billion, but wineries say they will pull through and they hope tourists won't stay away, the New York Times reports. "In the end, people who are growing grapes are farmers," says an official of an organization that represents 500 local vintners. "This is a particularly strong expression of Mother Nature, but they deal with Mother Nature every day, and they are very resilient." Dozens of homes have been declared uninhabitable and more than 250 people are recovering from injuries, but there have been no fatalities from the area's worst earthquake since 1989, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The two most seriously injured victims, one of them a 13-year-old boy hurt by a falling chimney, are both expected to survive. Seismologists are still working to determine the exact cause of the quake, LiveScience reports. It was initially believed to be connected to the Franklin Fault—which has been dormant for thousands of years—but researchers now believe it was the West Napa Fault, part of a wide network of faults around the San Andreas Fault, which lies 31 miles away.