Rebuilding after wildfire: Help is scarcest for those who need it most
More than a year and a half after Boulder County’s Dec. 30, 2021, Marshall Fire destroyed 1,084 homes and damaged hundreds more, Jody Bill still has no clue if she will get the help she needs to replace her mobile home. The 115 mph gusts that spread the fire peeled the roof off the 1960s-era mobile home Ms. Bill had purchased just four months earlier as her retirement home.
She was attracted to the unobstructed views of a gorgeous stretch of the Rocky Mountains known as the Flatirons. And she’d like to stay in her community, where neighbors shoveled the snow out of her home when storms hit right after the disaster. But now Ms. Bill lives in fear of the heavy winds that periodically rush down the mountains and rattle her patched-together house.
“It makes me nervous,” she says. “It doesn’t feel safe.”
Even though Ms. Bill’s home didn’t burn, she’s eligible to seek disaster relief. Still, she has been turned down three times for federal Small Business Administration disaster relief loans, which are available to homeowners as well as businesses. And she has already spent nearly half of her insurance payout for temporary housing
