Big win for pair who lost home in Fort McMurray wildfire
A life overturned by wildfire and lottery winnings
It was a Tuesday morning in May, 2016. Bill Pendergast came off the night shift at the Suncor operation near Fort McMurray, Alta., headed home and went to bed — drawing the blackout blinds, turning off his cellphone, putting in earplugs and setting the alarm for 6 p.m. — so he could wake up and do it all over again.
There were reports of a wildfire, but the sky over Bill and Carrie Pendergast’s place at 135 Airmont Ct., in the south part of town, was blue.
Carrie was in Ontario, visiting the grandchildren. She switched on the news as her husband slept. The fire had turned. It was burning into town. Carrie called home, frantic. Leah Rogers, a family friend who was staying with the couple, answered, and burst into Bill’s room around 2 p.m. saying they had to get out.
“It was unbelievable,” Bill recalls. “The amount of smoke, and how fast it was moving — and it was moving toward our neighbourhood — and so then it became a mad scramble to get out.”
Bill wrangled the family pets — Sydney, a spaniel, Lefty the bird and Ozzy the black cat — charged down the basement stairs, grabbed three totes of photo albums and a box marked pictures, which contained music cassettes, and jumped into his red 2005 Mustang, driving away from the flames, hoping for the best.
Hours later, his phone started beeping with notifications from the home alarm. The backdoor was breached. Windows were breaking. Then, at 8:01 p.m.: “Fire is detected at 135 Airmont Court.”
“My heart sank,” Bill says. “When we finally got back into the house in June, it was like you would see on TV, when a bomb goes off. Everything was flattened.”
The home Bill and Carrie purchased in 2012, and were paying $2,400 a month in mortgage to carry, was gone, as were several heirlooms; Carrie’s jewelry, a coin collection Bill’s father started in the 1960s, home movies, marriage and birth certificates, winter clothes, Christmas decorations — everything.
The cascade of loss levelled the couple, as it would so many other Fort McMurray locals, and led not to a new beginning so much as to an avalanche of new headaches and stress. Bill and Carrie have struggled to rebuild their home, their lives, while juggling jobs (Carrie drives a truck at a mine).
All the stress had been wearing on Bill, he admits, a weight the 54-year-old flew home to Newfoundland and Labrador with in late January to visit his ailing father. Bill Sr. was in hospital in St. John’s. Bill Jr. stopped at a gas station to get the old man a “nice cold” 7UP as a treat, and to get himself $20 worth of lottery tickets.
Bill was always telling Carrie that, one of these days, his number would come up. Carrie, the practical half of the pair, was always telling Bill: “You can’t rely on lottery tickets, that is not a way to plan your life.”
But ... someone has to win. And, sometimes, even the most unlikely of plans pan out, which is how a stressed-out, 54-year millwright became a (mostly) relaxed instant millionaire. Bill went to bed at his aunt Linda’s place on a Saturday night. On Sunday, Feb. 4, aunt Linda awoke frantic, saying someone in Goulds — a neighbourhood on the outskirts of St. John’s — was holding a winning ticket. Bill checked his numbers against the winning numbers displayed on his phone.
“I kept looking at my phone and looking back at the ticket,” he says. “It looked like the right number, but I thought my eyes might be playing tricks on me, and so I asked my uncle to look at my phone and call out the numbers — and gave my aunt the ticket to check them.
“And my aunt looks at me and says, ‘You just won a million dollars.’ ”
The fire was one of those terrible things, Bill says, that happens — but it never happens to you. Same with the lottery: you read about somebody else winning, but that somebody is never you. Now Bill and Carrie have experienced both the extremes.
“It went from the end of the scale of losing everything, right to the other,” Bill says, in wonder. “Looking back on the stress, I don’t have to worry so much anymore.”
Carrie was coming off shift at the mine when Bill’s text appeared from Newfoundland with an image of the winning ticket. Bill is a practical joker. Carrie saw no reason to believe him, until he sent her further proof — an image with him holding the ticket in his left hand — which bears a childhood scar.
“We’re going to be able to help our kids and grandkids financially now,” Carrie says.
Says Bill: “I’m keeping my eye on the 2019 Mustangs. It is about time I got a new car.”
Bill popped back into the gas station where he bought the winning ticket, and bought another ticket — since you just never know.
I KEPT LOOKING AT MY PHONE AND LOOKING BACK AT THE TICKET.