Thursday, February 17, 2011

Family Disaster

Got a call this afternoon from a family friend, telling me that there had been a fire at one of the family homes in Kent.

No kidding.

http://www.kirotv.com/news/26906135/detail.html

http://kent.komonews.com/news/911/fire-rips-through-kent-home/622080

http://www.pnwlocalnews.com/south_king/cmv/news/116452883.html

My mom will heal. The fire burned her face pretty badly, and she is at Harborview. Nobody else was hurt. They got the dogs down to the other house owned by my family on the same block, and we'll be looking for the cats tomorrow. We're guessing the kittens didn't get out. The bigger problems are on the horizon. My mom had retired from King County on December 31st, and had not continued her health insurance. She also had not had the time to send in the check for Homeowners Insurance. Meaning they have lost everything. All clothes for 2 adults and 1 child, all the toys, all the books collected over 50+ years, ... everything. The only thing we can do is put the lot up for sale.

What we need more than anything right now is clothes. My mom told me to run up her Nordstrom card. I think I'll stop by Value Village and call the Red Cross first.

Don't EVER go without insurance. That's why I got involved in politics in the first place, to push national health care insurance. I'm not giving up until I see my son get a US National Health Insurance card.

I'm checking to see how people can help. Right now the biggest need is clothes for three people. My mom wears a 1x-2x, Alberta wears 3x-4x and Karen a girls 14-15.

Update: My mom's clothes somehow survived. We're just going to have a large drycleaning bill.

If anyone would like to donate money online, please send money to my paypal account. search for my email address, chadlupkes@gmail.com

3 comments:

Chad Lupkes said...

Nice. Cobra has a 60 day grace period, which means we can get Mom health insurance that will cover the accident. She won't like the expense, but I don't much care. She needs the insurance coverage more than she needs the money.

Chad Lupkes said...

Another thing we need is a work party of people willing to help put up a fence so the dogs have somewhere they can run outside.

Chad Lupkes said...

I visited the house yesterday. I couldn't believe it. While the upstairs room no longer existed, my mom's bedroom was damaged but not destroyed, and most of her stuff is salvageable. Most of her clothes survived. Incredible.

We did a lot of work to get things out of the house, much of it salvageable and even usable.

I'm going back tomorrow to continue going through the house and salvaging as much as possible.