Family left homeless by fire pleas for help
Tina Knott doesn’t know where to turn next.
After losing nearly all of her belongings in a devastating June 11 fire at her Parkhill Road home , she and her husband Mark have been scraping money together for the past three weeks to stay in a hotel with their two dogs and a cat.
She said they will have to vacate the hotel on Tuesday, with nowhere to go until Friday, the earliest day they might be able to get an apartment. Both are also on fixed incomes and it will be several days before they have any more money.
Their first three days of temporary lodging were covered by the Peterborough City-County Disaster Trust Fund. But since then, Knott feels the buck just keeps on getting passed when they have asked for emergency assistance.
She said someone said they would start a crowdfunding webpage to help jumpstart community efforts to support them, but that never actually happened.
“Nobody is willing to help,” she said Monday in an emotional plea for help.
Knott doesn’t want to go to a local shelter – she says she wasn’t raised to rely on the help of others – and their options are very limited because of their pets.
Someone told them they may have to relinquish their pets, but their dogs – at age 15 and 9 – and their 14-year-old cat are just like family to them.
They lived downstairs in the two-storey home at 53 Parkhill, which sustained an estimated $80,000 in the afternoon blaze.
They lost everything in the fire and did not have insurance. The ceiling caved in and water soaked everything that was left.
“The smell is horrendous,” Knott said.
The fire is believed to have started upstairs, possibly with a barbecue on a second-storey deck at the rear of the building.
Knott called The Examiner because she felt she had run out of options.
While disheartened about her treatment since the fire, she knows that the city she was born in is known as a very giving community.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said, choking back tears. “We don’t have any place to go.”
NOTE: Tina Knott can be reached at the Quality Inn at 705-748-6801.