The Marshall Fire aftermath is illustrating how long it takes to recover from a disaster and how, for almost everyone affected, returning to life as it was is impossible. But some people get closer than others.
Two years after the Marshall Fire, more than 25% of those who lost their homes are back in a rebuild on the same lot that burned, according to official recovery dashboards for Louisville, Superior and Unincorporated Boulder County. Others have permits to rebuild. And still others took what their insurance gave them, sold their lot and left the state to start over elsewhere.
But for Jeri Curry, executive director of Marshall ROC — a coalition of local agencies, nonprofits and municipalities aiding in the long-term recovery — it’s the survivors who haven’t made a decision about what to do that she’s worried about.
“There’s been a tremendous amount of progress made,” Curry said of the two years since Marshall, citing the permits issued, the debris cleaned-up and the processes put in place for survivors to navigate financial and mental health aid. “But there’s a point in the disaster, in that recovery, where there starts to be a divide in the way residents and survivors start to move forward.”
On Dec. 30, 2021, the Marshall Fire burned across the Marshall Mesa south of Boulder and out towards Superior and Louisville. Bolstered by winds that gusted more than 100 mph, flames ate through dried prairie, jumped highways and burned 1,100 homes.
In the aftermath of the fire, underinsurance proved prevalent. Many people who bought their home years before didn’t realize how much it had appreciated in value and how much it would cost to rebuild.
Curry, who is from Boulder, was living in Virginia when Marshall burned. With a background in crisis response, she moved back after the disaster to help with recovery. Since then, she said she has heard about many residents, especially older residents of Superior, Louisville and unincorporated Boulder County, who bought their homes for a fraction of what they’re now worth.
“You can’t realistically rebuild a million-dollar home if you were only insured for $250,000,” she said.
The trauma of fire, meanwhile, is proving insidious. Curry said that compounding the financial complexities is a paralysis by some residents about what to do next.
“There are people who have the ability to handle this in their lives, and there are people who are deeply impacted on a trauma level,” she said. “A lot of people aren’t sure they want to rebuild knowing it could happen again.”
And that paralysis has left some survivors at a disadvantage. Those who chose to sell their burned lots right away, for instance, often had success and could go buy or build elsewhere. Many planned to rebuild until they began crunching numbers and realized the math didn’t add up, or didn’t have the mental energy to make a decision, until now. And now, “the sales have really dropped off,” Curry said, with roughly 80 lots currently for sale after more than 100 sold.
The two-year anniversary is likely to bring up difficult memories for survivors, and it is also likely to increase the financial strain on many in the purgatory of indecision. Additional Living Expenses insurance, or ALE, is set to run out for most this Dec. 30. ALE covers rent, rented furniture and other such expenses while people still pay the mortgage on their burned lots and try to rebuild. Curry said most insurers require evidence of progress towards rebuilding to continue ALE. And some people have just been surviving.
But, she added, the expiration of ALE insurance for many Boulder County residents will force them to make a decision.
“What makes me sad is we’re going to lose people,” Curry said. “We’re going to lose people who want to live here and can’t. People who have lived in Boulder County and made this their home are no longer going to be financially able to live here and to no fault of their own. If the wildfire hadn’t happened, they would still be residents of our community.”
The Community Foundation Boulder County recently allocated $5 million to help families whose ALE insurance is running out from the tens of millions the foundation received in donations following the fire. Capped at $15,000 per household over six months, the aid is only for those who earn 150% or less of the area median income and are also losing their ALE.
Tatiana Hernandez, CEO of the community foundation, said it is hoping to provide people with expiring ALE “a little cushion” with the funds “to make some hard decisions, because two years is a very short timeline for rebuilding or for making decisions on rebuilding.”
“The idea is not to supplant,” she said, acknowledging that $2,500 will not cover what people are now losing. ALE can provide as much as $10,000 or more, depending on people’s policies, she said.
Even though $10,000 might seem high for rent, Hernandez said many local landlords sought to profit from the disaster. This often resulted in people paying rents that were three times the amount of their mortgages.
“Unfortunately, what we saw in Marshall and many other disasters, is a lot of landlords know that people are getting all that additional living expense funding,” Hernandez said. “So rents tend to go up in communities after a disaster.”
Curry made this same point.
“You’re not supposed to gouge after a federal disaster was declared,” she said. “And yet it was happening right and left. People were charging $8,000 to $10,000 a month for a two bedroom.”
Among those who managed to weather these exorbitant rents and rebuild, many are not returning to the neighborhoods they left. In Old Town Superior, for example, many burned lots were sold, Curry said. The homes now being built on those lots are pseudo-mansions where single family homes used to be.
“The fabric of the neighborhoods is changing,” Curry said. “Boulder County has very little affordable housing. We know there’s a crisis here to begin with and [Marshall] has just exacerbated it.”
Moving into a rebuilt home
Larry Donner, the City of Boulder’s fire chief from 1991 until 2014, and his wife Susan Loo, a former Louisville city councilmember, recently moved into a rebuilt Louisville home on the same lot where their other burned near Harper Lake.
“It just feels a little bit strange,” Donner said. Even though he and his wife rebuilt their home with essentially the same floor plan, “when the fire hits you lose your sense of security, your sense of safety and your sense of place,” he said.
Included in his sense of place were things Donner took for granted, like his tools. Over a lifetime of fixing things, Donner said he had accumulated a tool collection that could handle almost any job. Now, every project means a trip to the hardware store to buy a tool he used to have.
“All things considered, I’d just as soon have my old house with my old stuff.”
A battle with his insurer, State Farm, necessitated hiring a private adjuster to “duke it out” over what they owed him. State Farm told Donner he could rebuild his home for $150 a square foot. “You can’t build anything you can legally live in in Boulder County for $150 a square foot,” he said.
The initial $500,000 rebuilding estimate from State Farm was less than half the actual cost, and it took State Farm more than a year to pay out, Donner said. Because of this cost and the trauma of the fire, Donner said some of his neighbors “will never be back.”
“The real tragedy for me is, when I first moved to Louisville [in 1991], it was Boulder’s answer to affordable housing,” Donner said. Now, only wealthier people can afford to move into Louisville, he said.
Donner called it “gentrification through disaster.”
Lessons learned: The insurance gap
The insurance gap — the difference between the insurance coverage for homes that were burned and the actual cost to rebuild — has caused much of the heartache of the Marshall Fire. According to Colorado’s Division of Insurance, the average shortfall was more than $100,000 per household. Closing that gap in future catastrophes is a lesson Curry hopes all Boulder County residents absorb. Some homeowners have sued their insurers for using software that low-balled replacement costs.
“I give this as almost a PSA to everyone in my life who asks, ‘What did you learn?’” she said. “The first thing I learned is everybody should call their insurance company and make sure they know what the value of their house is if it were to burn or be destroyed in a disaster.”
And it’s not just homeowners. Curry said there were many renters who didn’t have renters’ insurance and lost everything.
Curry added that one of the most arduous things for victims of the Marshall Fire in subsequent days and weeks was creating an inventory of things lost. Insurers often require detailed lists before they reimburse. Knowing what you own is a good idea.
And knowing your plan for disaster is, too. Make sure you’re getting alerts through the Everbridge system. But as Curry said, you should also know how you’ll stand financially in the aftermath of a disaster. How you respond to a disaster will change throughout your life. One of Curry’s friend’s parents, for instance, lost their home in the fire. They were in their eighties.
“It takes a long time to rebuild, and is that really how you want to spend your eighties?” Curry said. As a result of such reasoning, her friend’s parents made the decision to sell their lot quickly. They got a high price and moved on with their lives.
As Curry assists in the long-term recovery process, she said her continued goal is helping people navigate the convoluted landscape of financial aid, building permits and insurance so they can finally decide their future.
“I would hope that within the next six months everyone has enough information or enough assistance that they can know what their next step is,” she said. “That they’re able to move forward.”
The post ‘We’re going to lose people who want to live here’: High housing costs, trauma hinder some Boulder County residents in their recovery from the Marshall Fire appeared first on The Boulder Reporting Lab.