Nicola Cook was returning from a trip to the Oregon Coast with her mother, Lisa Berck, May 1 when Berck got a phone call.
“Her face just dropped,” Cook said. A fire had destroyed Berck’s house, killing her two Chihuahuas and a cat she’d been watching, and burning everything she owned.
Firefighters had arrived that afternoon, at Northwest Mobile Estates on in the Rose Village neighborhood, to find the manufactured home engulfed in flames whipped by gusty winds. It took 18 of them to protect buildings nearby.
Cook and her family had room to take in her mother. But along with everything else, her mother faced a hefty fine if she didn’t clean up the mess.
The home wasn’t insured. Berck has health issues to deal with, and Cook said it came down to feeding herself and her dogs or paying an insurance bill.
Cook and a friend took to the Internet.
“I just posted it on every Facebook site that I could find that was a public site that didn’t boot me off,” she said, laughing, while volunteers worked to clean up the rubble.
Cook connected with Flash Love, a local nonprofit, which rallied volunteers Friday to help clean up the mess.
Volunteers with face masks picked through the rubble and tossed it into a large trash bin while Andrey Ivanov, in a donated tractor, worked to break down what was left standing.
The organization started in 2013 doing neighborhood cleanups, he said, and has since moved its focus to helping seniors, single mothers and kids in need.
The goal, he said, is to create low-friction opportunities for people to come out for community projects.
On Friday, Ivanov and about a dozen others were out doing some heavier demolition work to get ready for the 30 to 40 volunteers expected this morning.
“We create environments where people can not just feel involved, they are involved and they carry that” on to the rest of the community, he said.
Erik Ivanov, a brother, said they’ve spoken with a home loan broker about helping bring in a new house, and hope to set up a fundraising campaign to help refurnish Berck’s home.
Nothing’s yet concrete, he said, “but we’re going to gather whoever we can and pretty much see what we can do, and try to help out as much as possible.”
Between Berck and her mother (Cook’s grandmother), the house has been in the family for 24 years. All of Berck’s mother’s and grandmother’s things are gone.
Since the fire, neighbors and strangers have come forward to help out, and her mother’s been floored by the response, Cook said.
Cook said her mother is doing OK, considering, and she’s still Mom.
“She always thinks of everybody else before herself. Even now people will donate stuff and she’ll say, ‘Oh Nikki’ — she calls me Nikki — ‘Oh, look how cute this is, would you want this?’
“I’m like, ‘Seriously Mom, you have nothing, you have to stop.’ ”
It’s a blessing, as much as it can be, that the fire happened here, Cook said, and not somewhere else.
“Where we didn’t have resources available and a community that would help,” she said.
