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Colorado’s Marshall Fire survivors find healing and meaning through oral history��project

The killed two people and on Dec. 30, 2021.

The news cycle has long since moved on, but people impacted by the fire are still recovering. Part of that process is through storytelling.

The , which is located 10 miles east of Boulder, later joined by collaborators from the �������� Anthropology Department, initiated the to preserve the stories of people affected.

CU Boulder researcher Kathryn Goldfarb is an associate professor of anthropology.

“This is the first time we’ve actually sat down and taken this long to talk about it,” said Lisa Clark, one contributor to the project. “’Cause we’re always like, ‘(people) have better things to do. You don’t wanna hear our pain. You don’t wanna hear our stories,’ you know. But yeah, it’s been nice to do it.”

All project contributors are quoted using their real names.

We are a cultural anthropologist and who are collaborating with the Louisville Historical Museum on the Marshall Fire Story Project. Broadly, we are each involved with research that explores the importance of personal and community narratives for well-being.

However, the Marshall Fire Story Project is not a research project. We have no research questions. Contributors are simply invited to share what they would like about the fire.

While this project embraces the specificity of individual experiences, recent destructive fires in , and show that the work we are doing is needed in many other locations.

Why oral history?

Recounting personal experiences is .

Oral history has also become recognized as a powerful method for healing after trauma, both for . Talking about traumatic events . However, narrative also facilitates meaning-making, strengthens ties within communities, and contributes to .

By telling their own stories in their own words, participants in the Marshall Fire Story Project shape .

Contributors to the project had diverse objectives in sharing their stories. Many welcomed the opportunity to contribute to the historical record, which Jessica Rossi-Katz described as “a record of experience.” Another contributor wanted to share their perspective as a lower-income person. Others mentioned the relevance of local stories as they apply to a global context of climate change.

As , the themes that came up in the oral histories are increasingly relevant to community members, policymakers and scholars alike.

Stories of loss

Two people lost their lives in the fire, along with over 1,000 pets.

“I’d take losing my stuff over losing them,” said Anna Kramer, when describing the loss of her neighbor’s dogs. Kramer, an artist, did lose her stuff, including the majority of her artistic works.

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Remediation workers clean the garage of Gigi Yang, a collaborator for the Marshall Fire Story Project. Due to concerns about toxins from smoke and ash residue in their homes, many residents opted for smoke remediation and deep cleaning of their homes. (Photo: Gigi Yang)

Abby McClelland’s family was away from their house when it burned.

“For a while I was really upset that we weren’t there and didn’t get a chance to take anything,” McClelland said. “And the more I think about what we would’ve taken, the more I’m like, that stuff is dumb.”

The family was able to replace their vital records and passports within weeks.

“But things like, you know, my grandmother’s rings or the Champagne cork from our wedding reception. Like things that I would’ve thought, oh, that’s so silly to evacuate that, those are the truly irreplaceable things.”

Mary Barry said the “fire was the ultimate downsizer.” She reflected on the objects she had lost – her daughter’s baby pictures, her sewing machines, a collection of books bound in blue and gold.

The fire also took Barry’s pet turtles, one of whom her husband had kept for over twenty years.

“Losing (a) house is like losing a person, where you mourn the loss of your comfort,” Barry said. This was particularly true in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, where people’s homes were their entire environment during quarantine.

Many of those whose homes did not burn suffered a different kind of . Their , which carried with it heavy metals, hazardous chemicals and volatile organic compounds.

Shana Sutton’s family stayed in a hotel for six months while their home was being remediated. Like many others, much of the family’s belongings were deemed nonsalvageable.

“In my head,” Sutton recounted, “I was like, okay, I’m just going to pretend that they all burned.”

Concern with health impacts

As she watched the smoke from a distance, Brittany Petrelli told her brother on the phone, “I can smell how devastating this fire is.” Petrelli, a project contributor involved with the recovery effort, recounted that the fire smelled “like things that shouldn’t be burning. Rubber, plastic building materials.”

Residents with concerns about outdoor and indoor air quality as well as soil and water contamination contacted scientists at the ��������, who, along with scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory, . Ultimately, the publicized data for outdoor air quality showed little difference from other urban areas.

Residents whose homes survived but were affected by smoke such as sore throats, coughs and stinging eyes for six months and then one year after the fire.

, Beth Eldridge had difficulty obtaining insurance coverage for mitigation. After she attempted to clean char and ash on her own, she experienced persistent health impacts.

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After the Marshall Fire, area residents created notes of support for friends and neighbors at the Louisville Public Library; the notes were displayed in the library windows. (Photo: Louisville Historical Museum)

“Being part of an HOA (Home Owner’s Association) should give you two buckets of insurance,” Eldridge explained, “but in reality, everyone is divided and the system makes individuals fend for themselves. My insurance wouldn’t take any responsibility. The HOA insurance wouldn’t take any responsibility. … I was sick and I couldn’t get better and I needed help.”

Accounts from the project highlight uncertainty that remediated personal items were “really clean” – as Shana Sutton shared, it “makes you crazy.” Many people spoke of dissatisfaction with . , do not engage the epidemiological and toxicological effects of fire byproducts, although .

Precarity and community solidarity

Being underinsured was a persistent theme in project stories, and some people recounted how negotiating with their insurance companies literally became a full-time job. After the fire, lower-income community members found themselves in an even more acute state of financial uncertainty.

A number of mutual aid groups sprung up in the aftermath of the fire, and several of those groups shared their stories with the project. Meryl Suissa started the , which worked to help families replace items lost in the fire.

“I think what we’ve learned is like, yes, people are okay and they’re strong and they’re resilient and they’re gonna continue fighting,” Suissa said. “But we still have a long way to go to help them heal.”

Kate Coslett, who ran , also highlighted how the community came together to contribute to organizations like hers, which delivered home-cooked meals to displaced residents.

“So many volunteers, hundreds of volunteers,” she said. “It’s September (2022), and there are still people making meals. It’s incredible … their empathy and their love, this community is just, I have goose bumps.”

Yet recovery means different things to different people. As Abby McClelland noted, there is a difference between “trauma on the individual level and trauma on the collective level.”

“I can rebuild the house,” McClelland said, “but I can’t rebuild all the houses in the neighborhood, and I can’t plant all the trees, and I can’t, you know, reopen all the businesses. I can’t reverse the trauma in the area. I can only control what’s inside my house. It’s hard to know what’s going to happen on that larger level, and how long that’s going to resonate.”

Like others who shared their accounts with the project, McClelland highlighted a necessity for policy change and governmental actions to prevent further climate-related disasters.

“Individuals can’t solve systemic problems,” she said.

Future of the project

For a community historical museum whose motto is “Be a part of the story,” first-person records constitute valuable resources for both the present and the future.

Our team is currently preparing written and oral project contributor submissions for archiving in a publicly accessible platform. In partnership with and the , we are as residents return to their homes.

The first storytellers in our project spoke of trauma and despair, but also gratitude for community. What will future stories tell us as neighbors continue to reunite and adjust to how the community has changed after the Marshall Fire?

This article was written in collaboration with Sophia Imperioli, museum associate – Public History & Oral History, and Gigi Yang, museum services supervisor of the .

Kathryn E. Goldfarb is an associate professor of anthropology at the��. Lucas Rozell (MAnth'24) is a research assistant on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus.

This article is republished from����under a Creative Commons license. Read the��.

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