Colo. Springs residents rebuild after 2012 f ire

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — A year after his home in the Parkside neighborhood was destroyed by the Waldo Canyon fire, Jim Rottenborn is doing something he never really thought he’d do again: Relive the three days before his home burned to the ground.

The Black Forest fire has forced many Waldo Canyon fire survivors to think about how far they’ve come in a year, and what they can do to help. As a teacher, Rottenborn was asked to write a column of advice for the latest group of fire survivors, a larger group, who have months ahead of struggles that Rottenborn is just starting to put behind.

“That’s our only fire. We were the victims,” he said, of the Waldo Canyon fire, which burned 347 homes and killed two people in June 2012. “Now we’re suddenly the veterans.”

Not every Mountain Shadows resident feels like a veteran; many object to the term victim. What they are, a year later, is all over the map: Some have moved on, rebuilt their homes or moved into new ones, while others haven’t decided what they want to do. Still, Waldo Canyon fire survivors feel a bit prophetic.

“I think this has been a real hard time. We know what they are going to go through in the next year,” said Judy Anderson, who lost her home on Ashton Park Place and later moved to Peregrine. “There are a lot of brave people. Yeah, we used to sound brave like that, too. We used to sound brave like that until we knew what was coming.”

It was noon, on an unusually scorching lateJune day, when the Waldo Canyon fire erupted in a big, billowing plume that towered over the west side of Colorado Springs.

Three days later thunderstorm winds pushed a shower of embers into Mountain Shadows. From across the city, people watched as the fire roared down the mountainside. Some took pictures from Interstate 25, others took pictures from backyards that soon were met by flames. Hundreds of homes burned, and hundreds of others were filled with smoke and exposed to extreme heat for hours.

Bob Cutter, who soon became the president of the recovery nonprofit Colorado Springs Together, spent the next two days scouring the Internet, reading about fire recovery and coming up with a plan. Ultimately he did what he knew how to do: run a business, and create a supply chain and match it with a demand.

He figured Mountain Shadows’ recovery would be done by April. They’d rally some builders, “plant some grass, and we’ll be done,” he thought. Instead, residents came to Cutter needing help with their phone companies, needing grief counseling, needing advice on insurance and smoke damage.

“It’s rebuilding homes obviously, but it’s also rebuilding community, the human sides of things that have been torn apart,” he said. “It wasn’t just physical rebuilding of the houses. You’re rebuilding your life.”

For Joe Boyd and his wife, Trish Nelson-Boyd, rebuilding life happened quickly. In November, the couple became the first to finish a new home in Mountain Shadows, after their Yankton Place home was destroyed. By midJune, 68 homes had been rebuilt in Mountain Shadows, and many families had moved back.