Their Colorado community burned to the ground three years ago. Now they’re helping victims of LA wildfires

(CNN) — A day before New Year’s Eve 2021, the wind-driven Marshall Fire quickly tore through neighborhoods and cul-de-sacs in a quiet suburban community northwest of Denver, Colorado.

Melanie Glover was stuck in traffic at the time the fire was raging, her husband and children trapped in their burning home. Glover sat helpless in the car on the phone with her family as they made desperate attempts to put out the flames before narrowly escaping.

It took weeks for the initial shock to wear off, but then the trauma just settled in even deeper, roosting within her.

Glover tried her best to endure on her own by drawing from her past experiences — notably living in Hurricane Alley and seeing communities rebuild after Category 3 and 4 storms — but it was not enough. What ultimately ended up helping her move forward in those early weeks were hearing the lived experiences of survivors of another “wildland-urban interface” fire that happened a decade earlier in the state: The Waldo Canyon Fire on the northwest side of Colorado Springs.

Three years later, that role has reversed.

Glover and hundreds of other Marshall Fire survivors have gathered in Facebook groups, on Instagram, Slack and other online spaces to serve as resources and share lessons learned and best practices with Los Angeles-area residents who are in the early stages of recovering from the highly destructive and deadly urban wildfires a month ago.

“It’s very important that people get the support and love that they need in the first few months after a fire,” Glover told CNN. “And, of course, everyone feels like they get forgotten about. It’s the nature of a natural disaster: We just move on to the next one and then the next one.”

“But it’s the community that doesn’t forget, and that’s who comes together and supports you in the long term,” she added.

‘She’d been through exactly what I was going through’
About a week after the Palisades and Eaton fires, Julie DiBiase, a Boulder resident who lived in LA for 20 years, started the “From the Mountains to the Beach” Facebook group to serve as a bridge between Marshall Fire victims and those affected by the fires in California.

“From the Mountains to the Beach” has grown to more than 1,400 members.

“The group I created is really intended to be a survivor-to-survivor advice group,” DiBiase said. “There are a zillion lists out there where you can go get information about different resources for people who have experienced loss; but there’s something different and unique to having gone through it and really understanding others.”

Pasadena resident Anna Ballou happened across DiBiase’s Facebook group when furiously searching online, consuming any bit of information she could about next steps in recovering from a wildfire.

The Eaton Fire came just hundreds of feet from the single-family rental that Ballou and her family had called home for the past eight years. The property was seemingly spared by the fire; however, it was caked in a cocktail of soot, ash and other unknown chemicals from firefighting efforts and burned homes.

“We’re all afraid of the toxicity and how it could affect our health,” she said. “I do think that people who are renting with intact homes is an awkward category. You’re at somebody else’s mercy. You have to live at that home, and they don’t.”

Via the Facebook group, Ballou was able to to communicate directly with others who navigated this type of situation three years earlier — including some who are still in back-and-forths with their insurance company and remediation firms.

“It’s so bittersweet,” Ballou said, “but because of [the Marshall Fire survivors], we’re much more educated about what steps to take.”

Altadena resident Kate Adams Barnett, who also has health concerns as to the safety of her family’s rental home, was able to bond with another single mom who navigated similar issues in the Marshall Fire.

“It’s really hard when you have kids and you’re the decisionmaker and their health is at risk,” Adams Barnett said. “She actually gave me a lot of hope and courage and told me to reach out to her anytime. She’d been through exactly what I was going through.”

Driving pain into purpose
When DiBiase started the survivor-to-survivor group, she took inspiration from another group formed in the immediate wake of the Marshall Fire.

The Marshall Fire Community Facebook group, which was started by Colorado resident Meryl Suissa as a direct donor-to-survivor exchange group, not only remains active to this day, but Suissa also duplicated the concept for California survivors in need.

“The most important takeaways I have from falling into disaster recovery, and the main thing we have all learned over the past three years and what I am hoping to impart on to those affected by the California fires is that the majority of recovery comes from the people, the community,” she said.

“It’s the community that steps up and gives individual physical donations and monetary donations, it is the small businesses and religious and nonprofit organizations that show up in a big way,” she added.

Suissa’s main role with the California fire recovery efforts is to serve in more of an advisory and resource compilation capacity while using hindsight from what worked and what didn’t three years ago and also adapting to unique needs of the LA community (including co-founding a Judaica replacement program).

She said it’s her hope that these and others’ grassroots efforts, including the formation of the Extreme Weather Survivors network, could help people in the future.

“We need one central location where survivors know to go for information post disaster, they know it is a trusted group who’s done this before and we aren’t reinventing the wheel time and time again,” Suissa wrote via email. “After every disaster there needs to be one place that is a central hub for donors and distribution sites to contact, that creates a website and sends a weekly email regarding logistical updates such as debris removal, town hall meetings, et cetera, that creates a Slack group, and that creates a Facebook group that is a ‘buy nothing’ post-fire group.”

In the near term, Marshall Fire survivors like Glover hope to continue to share their experiences and actions to help LA residents move forward and rebuild.

Glover, for example, is sharing how she rebuilt her Louisville, Colorado, home using Colorado Earth’s EcoBlox, which are made from earth and clay and other fire-resistant and sustainable materials.

She’s also conducting research as to how Earth homes can be adapted to meet California-specific building regulations.

“When people think ‘Earth home,’ people think of these crazy, weird, very eccentric things,” Glover said. “And what I tried to prove is I wanted to build a cookie-cutter home in a cookie-cutter neighborhood that actually isn’t a cookie-cutter home.”

“And I did it.”

In sharing her rebuilding efforts, Glover said she’s found a way to drive her “pain into purpose,” a concept she heard several years ago from yoga teacher and activist Seane Corn.

“Her words were, ‘find your pain, and you find your purpose in life,’” Glover said. “My pain was being completely out of control of what was happening to my family. That was my pain, and so then it gave me a purpose: Now I see that I want to talk to people about rebuilding this way, because I feel it’s really important that people know there are other options.”

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