“We just looked at each other in disbelief,” she said.
Robert Guokas (83), was well-prepared for a power failure at his Sans Souci mobile park home. It did not burn in the fires.
He is a former Boy Scout and has been keeping his mobile home warm using a propane heater, a camping stove to heat the water, and sleeping bags and layers from Army surplus stores. He was running out of propane by Saturday and worried that his preparations would not suffice if the outage lasted for too long.
“That’s going to stretch my limit,” he said. He stated that going to an emergency shelter would be worse than staying at home. He could stay put and try to minimize the damage by replacing the pots that he had set up to catch water that had dripped through his roof on Thursday after the strong winds tore it apart.
“You leave it for three or four days or a week, and it becomes a derelict, it becomes unfixable,” Mr. Guokas said.
He expressed concern about the possibility of his pipes burst if the outage continues. A burst pipe could cause so much damage that it would be more cost-effective to buy a new mobile home rather than to repair his decades-old one. With his $1,400 per month income from Social Security, he doesn’t know how he would be able to afford either.
As the extent of the damage became more apparent, thousands of families in Boulder began to ask questions about their ability to rebuild. They also had to consider how they would find temporary housing in a region with a severe shortage of homes and an affordability crisis. Many young families have already moved out of Louisville and Superior.
Even as Ms. Bowdey’s husband, a property manager, fights off Covid-19 at a hotel, he has been inundated with 200 requests for housing from families who now have no place to go, she said. “It kind of hits you every so often that this is not just weeks and months — this is years.”
Source: NY Times
