DRAKE, Colo. — Neighborhoods tucked away on Storm Mountain are usually quiet, but were full of activity in the past few weeks as firefighters worked to control the 9,668-acre Alexander Mountain Fire, which scorched dozens of homes before it reached near-containment this week. Now, volunteers buzz around to clean up debris and help the residents who lost their homes.
Garrett Hansen, who moved to the area in 2015, knows the feeling well. In a house fire in March, he lost two dogs and a cat.
"So when I heard about the Alexander (Mountain) Fire I said, 'I will not go through that again and I'm going to do everything I can to help,'" Hansen said.
That led him to put out a call to action for neighbors, who also wanted to assist by pulling together resources and coordinating to remove rubble and rebuild. A Facebook group brought those people together for an initial meeting, where more than 50 people showed up.
"It's been unbelievable — to see everybody come out of the woodwork to help out. It's just been great," Hansen said. "Everybody is here to help and everybody has the same goal here — to rebuild."
Now, the group — with permission from homeowners and their insurance companies — are working to take care of cleaning up the debris from burned homes. The goal is to give homeowners who are hoping to re-build one less thing to worry about.
Once they get the green light to start on a project, the group can begin removing the debris left from the fire. They take out metal first to be recycled and then wrap the debris "like a burrito" and mist it down to go to a landfill, he explained.
It takes about three hours to bring items to a dump on the outskirts of Loveland, unload all the debris, and then drive back up to Storm Mountain, Hansen said.
Gerry Delp with the Cedar Park/Storm Mountain Fire Recovery Group was working alongside the volunteers on Friday. He recalled fighting the fire on the backside of the neighborhood and cutting down foliage. As a mechanic, he helped get generators back on in the neighborhood.
As he spoke to Denver7, he was surrounded by piles of remains from nearby homes.
"This is your whole home, in a few piles going out to the scrap metal," he said. "Everything else burned. All that's left is the metal... It's emotional. It's emotional when you have to start over."
The group is also working to remove foundations that are no longer strong enough to support a new home, he said.
"To rebuild, it would take two to three months for a company to come up and clean this out," Delp said, adding that insurance companies may take months to come up and assess the damage. "Our logistics are an hour to every place — an hour to get rid of scrap metal, an hour to get rid of the garbage from the dump truck."
But with the number of volunteers currently helping, they can finish cleaning up the debris around a home in about three hours.
As of Friday afternoon, the group had cleaned up two houses. They will do about 30 more, once they get the go-ahead from owners and insurance companies, he said.
"It could have been us that lost our house too," he said. "So we all feel if we can pitch in with our hands and the shovels and the trailers... We feel it's a faster way to get us back to normal... This is a huge undertaking to knock this all out in the next five weeks, get all these homes cleaned up."
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Most of the volunteers live up around Storm Mountain. Hansen said a rafting company from Estes Park came up to help out too.
"We're overwhelmed with the generosity and the graciousness of the community coming together to help out those who suffered losses," Hansen said.
If people have trailers or pickup trucks, or other vehicles that can pull a trailer, they are welcome to help, he said. Financial donations are also welcome, as each truckload of debris is about $300 to dump at the landfill, and an average house will have about three truckloads. To donate to the cause or volunteer, visit StormMountain.info.
"We'll take all the help we can get," Hansen said. "Don't be afraid to join in."
The next community meeting is set for Aug. 18. Click here for details.
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