Fire Victims Rebuilding Their Lives

The Hemsing family isn’t spending the holidays at home this year: Home is still a big hole in the ground surrounded by a chain-link fence.

More than 18 months after a wildfire roared out of Los Alamos Canyon and left 400 families homeless, many survivors find themselves in a waiting game.

Rita and Billy Hemsing and their children will spend their second Christmas in a house they rent on the other side of town.

“Maybe by this time next year we’ll be home,” said Rita, mother of five. “The neighbors keep asking me, ‘When are you coming?’ ”

The family lost its home of 23 years and nearly everything in it when the Cerro Grande Fire tore through their neighborhood at the edge of the forest in May 2000, destroying some houses while leaving others untouched.

The Hemsings never wavered in their determination to rebuild on the lot where years of work--much of it the do-it-yourself variety--had transformed a 900-square-foot fixer-upper into a house big enough for seven.

But clearing the burned rubble, getting a house designed, tinkering with the plans, obtaining permits and contracting with a builder has taken time. An occasional tangle of red tape hasn’t helped.

It took several trips to county offices to get the exact square footage--required by federal disaster officials--of the original portion of the destroyed house. Rita pitched in and helped county workers go through old files to find the house plans.

The Hemsings hope construction can begin soon, although the weather may cause delays.

“Right now, on our street, nobody’s rebuilding yet,” Rita said.

But Billy has put up a new mailbox on the lot. And Rita putters there, watering the surviving trees and shrubs. When 10-year-old Thomas gets out of school early, he and his mother eat lunch at the partly charred picnic table. Rita has plans to wash the blackened plastic clothesline.

“It’s like I’m getting things ready,” she explained.

Karen, 25, who lives in Denver, chose the old house site for a special event this fall. On a sunny afternoon in early October--a day before her wedding at nearby historic Fuller Lodge--the wedding party and the minister gathered on the burned-out lot for the rehearsal.

“Karen was in that house a long time, from the time she was 6 months old until she was 18,” her mother said. “It’s definitely still home to her.”

As of early November, 76 building permits had been issued to fire survivors, with five more in the works, said Julie Habiger, spokeswoman for Los Alamos County. Thirty of the 76 new houses already were occupied. Since some were multiple-family dwellings--duplexes or quads--the actual number of housed families is probably higher.

Some of the 400 fire families--Habiger estimates 10% to 20%--bought preexisting homes, some outside of Los Alamos. Some survivors moved away, but “for the most part, they are staying here,” the spokeswoman said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s mobile home park for fire victims housed 85 families initially; now it’s down to 35.

Tom and Charmaine Weber spent about 10 months in the trailer park before returning this summer to the street where they’d lived for more than 30 years.

Their 1946 government-built house was the only one on the street to burn. They’ve replaced it with a 2,200-square-foot Southwest-style house with skylights--”a luxury we never had”--and a stucco exterior that Tom jokingly says looks like a Santa Fe restaurant.

The Webers were able to move in barely a year after the wildfire because they bought a conventional house that was built off site, in Albuquerque, and then hauled to Los Alamos on a truck and placed on a permanent foundation.

“People were lining the streets, just like a parade” to watch the 80-foot-long house go by, Tom recalled.

The Webers are musicians--she a pianist, he a violinist and the concertmaster for the Roswell Symphony Orchestra--and they were eager to be back in their own home, where they give music lessons.

By the time they looked at the Albuquerque firm’s houses, “all I could think of was, the faster the better,” Charmaine said.

The few family heirlooms they were able to save are on display in the new house, along with the 25-year-old bird of paradise plant that survived the blaze and has begun to grow again.

The Webers are at home, but at the same time it’s a bit foreign--strange, they say, to be in a completely different house in exactly the same spot.

“I guess the new house is a reminder all the time of why you’re in it,” Charmaine said.

Even the view has changed, with the loss of big trees in the front yard.

“We’ve had people say, ‘Oh, you’ve gotten a nice new house out of this,’ ” Tom said. “Of course, that’s from someone who didn’t lose a house.”