Tales from the Trenches: Facing fire and insurance claims

Every August, many homeowners around the Inland Northwest can’t help but worry about the threat of wildfires. The hotter and drier the summer, the greater risk to homes, especially for people living outside traditional city limits.

The reality is fires happen all the time and not just because of lightning strikes and wayward fireworks. Earlier this year, I had a kitchen fire in my own home — an incident I thought unlikely given my knowledge and preparation.

The fire, which originated in the oven, started small but got scary fast. After I emptied a small extinguisher, the fire continued, and I opted to take my kids out of the house. In a rush, I left the home without my keys, my cellphone, even my shoes.

Good news first: Everybody got out safe. Our neighbors invited us into their home, and within minutes, first responders arrived and extinguished the fire. We were lucky. Despite significant smoke damage, the fire itself was contained to the kitchen, and the home sustained little long-term structural damage.

In the days, weeks and months following the incident, I spoke to a seemingly endless line of people with their own fire stories. While the causes and damage varied, we all shared similar experiences dealing with insurance claims and the reconstruction process.

Here are the major takeaways I think people in any fire situation should know.

Get the details right

We didn’t have an immediate explanation for the cause of our fire, so the investigation that followed lasted several weeks. Being the primary witness, I told my story to several different people throughout the process.

The first person was an investigator with the fire department, and I credit him for providing me with the best advice throughout the entire ordeal. He had a house fire in his own home, so he knew the process I was about to take with our insurance company.

When we first spoke, I was still pretty rattled. I kept thinking about my 1-year-old girl screaming at the first sight of the smoke, and even though we were safe, I couldn’t help but think about the worst-case scenarios.

But the investigator sat with me for a while and never once rushed me through his questioning. He asked me to take my time and really think about the chain of events. He told me to write down the details for myself, and to add to the written account any time something new came to mind.

The details mattered, because the specific sequence of events — what I saw and didn’t see, what I did and didn’t do — factored into the information gathering.

Beyond the actual incident, the investigator urged me to continue detailing every aspect of the process — from summaries of phone conversations with the insurance agency to communications and requests with the subcontractors tasked with repairing the home.

On your own side

Details and written accounts of interactions are especially important through an insurance claim. Here is the harsh reality: Nobody is 100 percent on your side. You and your family are the only ones with your best interests at heart. While many will share certain goals, everybody is acting on those goals from a different set of interests.

I don’t mean to sound negative, and I certainly don’t mean to criticize the people tasked with helping us fix our home. Many of those people were compassionate and easy to work with, and many went above and beyond my expectations.

While the people can be wonderful, you can’t forget they technically work for someone else. While good home insurance is a blessing in this sort of situation, insurance providers are understandably working to minimize their costs. If there’s a chance, for example, that a third-party can be held responsible for some aspect of the recovery, then they have every right to pursue it.

In our case, a lack of clarity in the cause of the fire required third and fourth and fifth-parties to be involved. As just one example, an insurance representative from the oven manufacturer needed access to the scene in order to determine if there were any mechanical deficiencies. As a result, our insurance company couldn’t immediately authorize cleanup and recovery, and repairs had to wait until after the manufacturer got a fair look at the scene.

Now, my best interest was to get back in the home as quickly as possible. We had five people, three of them under the age of 5, living away from home with just a handful of personal items. At the time, I didn’t particularly care about potential manufacturer deficiencies. I just wanted the house to be fixed.

Contractors work for profit. Insurance adjusters answer to bosses. The people paid to move your gigantic, smoky couch don’t want to break their backs going down our stairs. Bottom line, people have their own interests, and you can’t expect others to see everything your way.

There are cases when you need to be your own advocate. You need to voice a concern or ask a question. You may not always be right, and you’re not always going to be the priority for people who are tasked to work on multiple fires and insurance claims.

Summarizing phone conversations, emailing certain communications and keeping a record of your experiences all play into playing your own advocate. Without the details, you may not have the information needed to advocate effectively.

Despite the initial unknowns, our home recovery progressed relatively smoothly. Most people are inherently good, and the insurance adjustors, contractors and workers all had their own incentives to reach my same goal. And even if you’re cynical about the monetary aspects of the insurance industry, I believe many individuals work in the field because they do care about helping families when they need help the most.

Despite this positive outlook, I know I’m always going to be the No. 1 advocate for my family. You can be trusting, thankful and careful all at the same time.

Time in a bottle

We were out of our home for about three months. We spent the first week in a hotel room, and that alone felt like seven years. While normal life rumbled on around us, we often felt trapped in our own, significantly slower timeline.

As my insurance adjustor correctly pointed out, three months is pretty fast for the level of claim we had. Yet, every day, it felt like we were so far away from moving back home. When you’re locked into the details, the big picture can be lost.

We’ve been back home for a couple months now, and it’s only starting to feel normal again. Were it not for all the details I wrote down, I’d swear it was just a fuzzy dream.

At least now, finally, the bigger picture is more in focus. We got out safe. It could have been much worse. And a lot of good people helped us get home.

Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.