What Do You Do When Disaster Knocks? Lessons from the Marshall Fire
| Publication year | 2022 |
| Pages | 16 |
THE INQUIRING LAWYER
BY RONALD M. SANDGRUND
“Soon after the deputy sheriff banged furiously on my door and my wife and I fled with only the clothes on our backs, I found myself sitting in a friend’s house staring at the beeping home alarm app on my smart phone. Smoke detectors were going off room by room by room. Then, unexpectedly, a door alarm went off, and I realized the fire department had broken in and was saving my house. Then another door alarm went off—reinforcements! Then every alarm went off and I knew that every door and window frame was deforming from the heat and my home was being incinerated. Later, my demolition contractor said temperatures had to have reached 6,000 degrees to have twisted our steel I-beams like spaghetti.”
—Unincorporated Boulder County Resident, Bari-Donn Knolls Subdivision
This is the ninth article series by The InQuiring Lawyer addressing a topic that Colorado lawyers may discuss privately but rarely talk about publicly. The topics in this column are explored through dialogues with lawyers, judges, law professors, law students, and law school deans, as well as entrepreneurs, journalists, business leaders, politicians, economists, sociologists, mental health professionals, academics, children, gadflies, and know-it-alls (myself included). If you have an idea for a future column, I hope you will share it with me via email at rms.sandgrund@gmail.com.
Introduction
This installment of The InQuiring Lawyer asks: In an era of rapidly increasing wildfire risk, how can we prepare ourselves for a natural disaster that destroys neighborhoods, displaces families, and tests long-held assumptions about our resilience and rebuilding? To answer this question, I spoke with several attorneys who lost their homes to the wildfire that swept through Boulder County on December 30, 2021. The Marshall Fire destroyed nearly 1,000 homes and killed two people. It was not the biggest Colorado wildfire, but it destroyed the greatest number of homes to date—including mine.
Following the fire, I helped several neighbors navigate their fire insurance claims, drawing on my 40 years’ experience assisting both policyholders and insurers with insurance law matters. All the neighbors I spoke to had some difficulties with their claims. One neighbor whose home survived the fire but was smoke-damaged said, “I wish it had burned down.” (Their stories motivated me to write a Colorado Lawyer article on how to establish a personal property fire claim.1) I also spoke to many, many friends about the adequacy of their insurance coverage going forward. Every friend I spoke to was underinsured. Each remained underinsured after we spoke until—a few weeks later—a second wildfire broke out in Boulder. Then they scrambled to increase their coverage.
I came to learn that there are insidious and counterintuitive economic forces at work incentivizing insurers to underinsure homes and to under-educate their insureds about this problem. In short, most people buy insurance based on cost, not coverage. While lawyers should arguably be better suited than most to navigate the complexities of homeowners insurance, the attorneys I spoke with made many of the same assumptions and faced many of the same hurdles as everyone else in managing their insurance claims.
Participants
Josh Marks is an attorney with Berg Hill Greenleaf Ruscitti, LLP focusing on public entity, employment, land use, and zoning law.
Chris Robbins is an attorney with Cozen O'Connor focusing on insurance subrogation, construction defect, and product liability.
Tawnya Somauroo is an attorney with Brake Hughes Bellerman focusing on patent law.
Carolyn Steffi is a shareholder with Dietze and Davis, P.C. focusing on special district, local government, water, and real property law.
The Gathering Storm
The InQuiring Lawyer: I never gave much serious thought to our house burning down. A small house fire perhaps, quickly contained, and then dealing with a burned room and some smoke damage, was as far as my imagination took me. My next-door neighbors, on the other hand, expressed concern whenever the county conducted controlled burns, given that both our homes abutted open space. They also asked us to keep our tall grasses cut back due to the fire danger they presented. I did so to be neighborly, and continued to do so for 20 years, but I thought their concerns were overstated. The only real fire preparations I made—prompted by my representing several homeowners who had lost their homes in fires—was to seek out annually broader fire insurance coverage and to take digital photos of our personal property every few years. Still, the risk of a serious fire seemed remote, and I had to talk myself into not feeling like a sucker for spending 50% more on our insurance premiums than our friends were at the time.
InQ: Josh, had you envisioned a scenario like December 30?
Josh Marks: I had given some thought ahead of time to a fire like this, but I had greatly discounted the possibility. All the nearby fires had occurred in forested open space, seven or eight miles away. Frankly, I didn't really seriously consider a large-scale fire threat until December 30.
InQ: Had you considered the possibility of ever having to evacuate your home?
Josh: We knew people who had evacuated from nearby fires. We got a glimpse of that in 2020. We were in the process of building a mountain vacation home when the Troublesome Fire in Grand County occurred, and we kept track of the evacuation orders to gauge how close it was to the structure. In those moments I had thought to myself, What would I do ? But then I was on to 20 different things. As to the Louisville house, we kept no inventory of our possessions. At one point some years back, I went through our home with a video camera, but I didn't save the recording. I have no idea where it is. Now I wish I had kept that recording in a safe place and made a more recent one. One of the least favorite things I'm doing now is trying to reconstruct all the things that were in the house.
InQ: One former client I met with before the Marshall Fire told me about sifting through his home’s ashes, trying to remember what he had based on the few fragments that he found. That image, his sadness, prompted me to create a digital photo inventory of nearly everything in our house in 2016, which documented most everything we had, and an electronic inventory of much of our jewelry and artwork. Despite my efforts, it took my wife and me dozens and dozens of hours to create a post-fire personal property inventory with current pricing. Not one of the many neighbors I spoke to kept any sort of similar pre-fire inventory.
Straight-Line Winds and a Fiery Vortex InQ: Tawnya, how did this disaster play out for you on the day of?
Tawnya Somauroo: The morning of the fire I was working on an appeal from home while also keeping an eye on the worst windstorm I had seen in 20 years of living on the Front Range. When our nanny came for our twin toddlers at 12:30 p.m., I saw an ominous black plume of smoke miles away to the southwest. The sky was still blue overhead. I looked for news but found no information that our neighborhood was in any danger. Still, concerned that the fire might change direction and hop US 36,1 spent the next 50 minutes making a packing list, texting my neighbors to warn of the danger, and carefully staging some belongings in our garage in case we needed to evacuate.
InQ: When it became clear the fire was an imminent threat, what did you do?
Tawnya: At first I moved calmly, but by 1:00 that afternoon, smoke and debris were pelting us horizontally in 100-plus mile-per-hour gusts from a neighborhood upwind of us that was already on fire. I was in a panic. By 1:20 I had loaded our car. Around this time, a neighbor—also a lawyer—drove home from her office honking her horn to warn that flam es were on our block and everyone needed to leave. Together we ran to help some elderly neighbors evacuate. Meanwhile, a garbage truck was emptying bins in our street as we drove...
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