NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — With the anniversary of the Cottonwood Complex Fire over the weekend, Reno County Volunteer Organizations Active in Disaster is still assisting those whose property burned last March.
"This is obviously a very traumatic experience," said Amy Bretz with the United Way. "People almost lost their lives. It's been over 40 properties that we've been on site helping with numerous different pieces of the work that needed to be done out there. Most of it was the cleanup, the initial piece of it."
It took a lot of sweat and time just to get things cleaned up last spring.
"That was a lot of volunteer work," Bretz said. "Over 1800 hours of volunteer work went towards that disaster. Of course, the families were doing a lot of that work, too. I don't want to say that they weren't out there doing it. It was quite a team effort."
The stage that landowners are in one year out is as different as the needs of those families were following the fire.
"They are in different stages," said Lisa Gleason with the United Way. "We have some that we have worked with that have completely rebuilt their house now and they are living back out there. We have some that are still in the early stages of trying to determine whether they will move back or not. What our goal was to do was to make sure they had the best opportunity to move forward that we could possibly provide for them."
Just being there to listen to their stories was a big part of the recovery.
"I hope that through this work I have been at least a sounding board and just someone to listen and ask some of the right questions for people who have gone through such a traumatic event," Bretz said. "I think it's important for all of us to, in any kind of traumatic event, never say, I know exactly how you feel, because I certainly have no idea how they feel. I wasn't the one trying to get out of that fire and black smoke being all around me and not knowing if my loved one was alive or not. As I mentioned before, they almost died. I know that some of them still have reoccurring nightmares about this. They lost pets and one person did die in that fire and it could have been so many more."
The survivors are being brought together for a private meal in the coming days with the VOAD so that they can share stories with each other about how the recovery is going.
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