AUDIO TRANSCRIPT
“ It was an interesting day for multiple reasons,” Kristen King began. “It was my husband's birthday, and, um, we have made the joke a couple times that there were too many candles. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's not. We're still working on that bit. But I got a text from a friend of mine at about 4:00 in the afternoon just as I was getting home from the grocery store with a huge haul of groceries. She was hiking up above town on the east side of the valley that we live in, and my house is on the west side, and she saw smoke and thought, "Oh my goodness, that's right behind Kristen's house." So she alerted me right away.”
“It was just after 4:00. I dropped the groceries. I hopped into one of our utility vehicles and drove up the mountain, which is not accessible by regular cars, and I wanted to put eyes on it and not start, you know, calling the neighbors in a panic until I knew what was happening, and I very quickly was able to spot a column of smoke” King explained. “It was growing as I saw it, and I could tell, you know, living right there, I've seen the forest. I know what the fuel is like. I knew that it was gonna get bad, and I knew that it was gonna get bad fast.”
King continued to share her next moves.
“So I immediately called 911. I took a picture of the GPS so I could tell them exactly where it was if they didn't already know. I called all the neighbors I could think of. I called my husband. He was out on his motorcycle. And my two kids and I managed to get all the pets, all three days worth of clothes, all the medications, the important papers and stuff into the car. As my husband was pulling up on the motorcycle, he ran, got the truck, hooked up the camper; We threw everybody in, and we took off. We were out of there in under 90 minutes from when I got that text, and just as we were driving down the county road away from the house, the big alert went off saying, "Evacuation. Go now."
“So you already had yourself evacuated by the time the emergency managers were letting you know that you should be going?” Marilyn Gleason clarified. King said yes.
“What was it like? What was your responses besides the very practical actions that you took to get yourselves out of the house?” Gleason asked.
“It was a very surreal experience,” King started. “One of the things that has been my only real concern about living in this area has been the possibility of a wildfire in our valley, because it's highly unlikely that a fire from another place is gonna make it all the way over the tree line and then drop into my valley. Leadville is at over 10,000 feet. You know, we're pretty well protected from stuff happening other places. And so I was like, "You know, everything's gonna be fine." So then I got this text and I'm like, "This cannot be real." And it was just the most bizarre experience to see the smoke and be like, "Oh my God, this is really happening. I don't have a go bag. I need to think about what's important. I need..." I've learned a lot about what evacuation preparedness looks like, and we did a shockingly good job considering how unprepared I feel like we were.”
“But it was just a really surreal experience. It was very much like, “turn off the feelings.” We have to focus. We do not have time. Like I made the checklist and we just got into action. And when I had driven back down, kinda came to a screeching halt in front of the house and went running in, my daughter met me in the kitchen and she said, "Are you doing okay?" And I said, "Please don't ask me questions like that because I am not okay and I don't have time to not be okay right now. We need to get out of here and then we can fall apart, but we can't do it right now and if you ask me, I won't be able to hold it together and get this done." And she said, "On it." And we got to work,” King said.
“So you ended up over here in Carbondale. Your husband does some work over here?” Gleason asked.
“Yes. He has some work connections here, so we've actually been sheltering for a month and two days with a very gracious coworker and his wife and their dogs,” King explained. “And so they had two extra bedrooms and welcomed us into their home, and their dogs welcomed my dogs into their pack. And the cats are living out in the camper, and we found a place for the frogs in the basement…. We've all been just making it work. And it has been such a gift to be able to have a welcoming place to go and to not be taking up resources in town.”
“Now, Kristen, I know in your work, you have worked with the homeless population in Leadville. What do you know about how those people were affected by this whole situation, by the fire, by a time when a lot of people are out of their homes?” Gleason inquired.
“I'm really glad you asked that because I do not think that that has gotten nearly enough attention in the conversation about this fire. A lot of folks who are unhoused in Leadville and Lake County camp,” King emphasized. “We do a lot of street outreach to unhoused people, and one of the biggest things we provide are things like tents and sleeping bags. And we have a lot of folks who were camping out in evacuation areas.”
“People couldn't take their things with them. Those things then got cleared out as part of fire mitigation or other people trying to be helpful in the community and clearing things out that could have been combustible. And so, we haven't had anyone who we weren't able to get a placement for, but, it has been really, really scary because we don't always know where folks are,” King stated. “They often have to move, particularly because they can be the targets of violence or menacing by other people who think they don't deserve to be on public lands. And so it's hard to track people down. They don't necessarily have phones. So, it was pretty scary. But we've been able to make sure that everybody was safe, and we didn't have to relocate any of our clients who were already in a stable shelter situation because we were able to keep them there and didn't have to evacuate.”
