‘We’ve lost everything.’ Eastern KY home burns down while family rebuilds from flooding
In late July, Regina Quillen’s home was flooded with over 10 feet of water.
On Sunday, the house burned to the ground.
“I was rebuilding, hoping to get back into the home,” Quillen said of her house near Colson in Letcher County. “Was thinking maybe in a week or two that we might actually be able to get back into it.”
Quillen, who was renting a nearby home from a friend while hers underwent repairs, said she got a call shortly after 1:15 p.m. Sunday from a neighbor saying that her house was on fire. When Quillen got there, trucks from the volunteer fire departments filled her driveway.
“Wasn’t much I could do other than watch it burn,” she said.
Quillen’s son set up a GoFundMe campaign where donations could be sent to the family as they “figure out what our next steps will be.” They had no insurance on the house.
“We spent months clearing flood debris and salvaging what little remained of our belongings after the flood just to have the majority of it burn in the fire, and we have spent even more time waiting for the day when my mom and sister could move back into our family’s homeplace,” Brandon Sun Eagle Jent, Quillen’s son, wrote on the fundraising website.
“We no longer have any hope of that now,” the post continued. “My sister put it best when said she will always be homesick for our little brown house with the purple roof. I feel the same.”
Fire crews from Colson, Sandlick and Neon responded to the fire. Firefighters inside the building were able to contain the blaze until an incident commander outside the building blew an air horn instructing them to exit after the roof appeared like “it was getting ready to cave in,” said Caleb Johnson, who is the chief of the Colson Volunteer Fire Department and a captain in Sandlick’s department.
After a few minutes of watching the roof, Johnson said they were preparing to go back into the building when they were instructed by the homeowners to let it continue to burn because the house was too far gone. They did go back into the structure to retrieve a few valuable items and then made sure the fire didn’t spread to nearby utility poles, Johnson said.
Johnson said he wasn’t an arson investigator and couldn’t offer a cause for the fire.
Faulty wiring might have been to blame, Quillen said. The house had been “rewired” during the building process. A contractor laying floors in the home told her that those who installed the wiring left it “in a pretty bad state” and offered to help clean up some of it, Quillen said.
A few important items were able to be saved from the fire, including Quillen’s great-grandmother’s sewing machine, the top of a China cabinet that firefighters pulled from the burning house and Quillen’s father’s gun cabinet.
“I have no pictures of my children,” Quillen said. “I have those three items.”
Quillen’s father built the home in the early 90s, she said. He was murdered in 2006. A tub full of old newspaper articles and other items from the court proceedings were washed away in the flood, she said, and now the house he built is gone.
“I only had a few things left of my dad,” Quillen said, “and of course you know, we’ve lost everything.”
Recovering from the flood has been hard but it’s been “a time for God to shine and he has certainly done that,” Quillen said.
The day before deadly flooding hit multiple southeastern counties, including Letcher, Quillen said she tested positive for COVID-19. The entire first story of their two-story house was underwater and water was coming up over their second-story porch. After the flooding, she was still too sick to do much cleaning up but a group of Mormons came and helped clean out the first floor.
“They worked hours on my house,” Quillen said. “They prayed with me. Expected nothing in return.”
By early November, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, had designated the homes of over 6,100 people as uninhabitable without repairs. Those displaced by the floods say there is limited options for finding new affordable housing. State and local officials are looking to build new housing on reclaimed mine land. In December, Gov. Andy Beshear announced plans to build such a community on former mineland in Knott County.
Despite hearing some discouraging stories from others about getting relief funds from FEMA, Quillen said she was thankful for the agency’s assistance. She received funding to help rebuild her home and they also paid for two months rent on the house where she’s staying.
At this point, Quillen said she’s not sure what the next step is.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Quillen said. “Just trusting in God, I know that he has a plan for me.”