Let's Go See for Ourselves

31 December 2021

My brother Colin drove up from Parker to watch our three kids at 7AM the morning after the fire. Emily and I were keen to get up to Louisville and see for ourselves. We’d heard anecdotes about our neighborhood being destroyed. But there was nothing official.

So we hopped into the van and drove the 25 miles between my parent’s house and ours. The news reported that, in some cases, the fire had mercy on one or two structures as it reaped destruction on all the others. Yes, I’d already filed an insurance claim declaring the house a total loss. But 40% of me believed I’d have to reverse that claim after finding our house was spared.

Then, on the way up, Emily received the drone photo above from a co-worker. She cried in a way I’ve rarely seen her do in the 10 years we’ve been together.

Our house, 939 Eldorado, was gone.

And our approach from the ground confirmed the drone footage. Here’s a video of what we saw:

Police guarded the entrance. We parked the van at the skate park across the street, then went full Special Ops — we walked up a hill and followed a circuitous path into the neighborhood so the cops wouldn’t see us.

This is what was left of our house.

(Emily captured a shot of me entering our backyard through a fence that was no longer there. We spent a lot of money laying that stone. We also spent a lot of money laying that patio, which you can’t see here because it was converted to ash a few hours prior.)

(Looking at the back of the house from where the patio was. You’ll make out our dryer poking its head up from the basement in the background. And my grill is buried somewhere there in the foreground.)

(Our kids spent 70% of their time outside on that trampoline.)

(Looking at the front of our house from the col de sac. Not 15 hours earlier I had the van backed up on that driveway and loaded our kids into it so we could just get out of the smoke for the night.)

On the way back to my parent’s house we pulled over. We shared these pictures with people. We cried.

Then a survivalist instinct started to take over; all these houses are gone, and all these families are going to look for a nearby rental so they can keep their kids in school. We have to get ahead of the surge. We need to find a place to live. Now.