Fire victim: ‘It’s not all on us’

PALMER — To say a house fire leaves a person with conflicting, unpredictable emotions is an understatement.

But what Austin Grimes is feeling this week would be hard for anyone to foretell.

“It’s a horrific event that’s kind of wonderful because of all the outpouring of support,” she said.

That outpouring started on July 23, the same day the house she shares with her husband and 10-month-old son caught fire. Her family was shooed away while a group of people did the dirty work of cleaning up.

“Neighbors and family members packed up anything that was savable,” Grimes said.

They got a storage unit and put it all there.

Since then, Grimes said, checks and cash have come in — some from people she doesn’t even know — and some in the form of donations to a donation account set up for the family at Matanuska Valley Federal Credit Union account No. 143348GE.

Grimes said people have given her bags of stuff for her little boy and offered the family shelter in their motor homes, and offered trailers to haul things back and forth. Grimes is a teacher at Tanaina Elementary and a student there made up a sign and is offering to mow lawns for $15 with the money going to the Grimes family.

If that doesn’t define what Grimes meant by “wonderful,” nothing will.

Another group of wonderful people are the firefighters, she said. Grimes said the fire started in her backyard in a food smoker. She said it was on a gravel area away from the house. She thought they were being safe about it.

“One of the firefighters told me, ‘don’t beat yourself up. I have a food smoker on my back deck right now. I called my wife to check on it,’” she said.

Another firefighter asked if there was anything inside that she wanted her to go look for. Grimes mentioned a box of glass that she’d inherited from her grandmother. The firefighter brought it out to her.

Grimes’ husband, Dustin, is an operator for BP on the North Slope. They bought the house — their first house together — four years ago. They also got a dog, a Rhodesian ridgeback named Dutch, who died in the fire.

“It’s kind of the American thing you do — you get a house and you get a dog and then a couple of years later you have a kid,” Grimes said.

Grimes said that surviving a house fire can be, in a word, overwhelming. She said a lot of her clothes looked like they could be saved with a good washing, but then she was told not to do that — chemicals in the smoke from a house fire can eat away at the seals in a washing machine.

“I told the insurance agent, ‘I wish you guys would create a manual,’” she said.

It’s hard to know what receipts to keep and what things to record. Even questions like should you let your father-in-law start hauling debris to the dump are hard to answer.

And one of the biggest questions she still has is will she need the cash donations received from the community? Their home is insured, after all, it’s just not clear what the insurance will cover and what it won’t.

“It’s the weirdest position to have lost everything and need everything but not know what you need,” she said.

For now she’s keeping track as best she can of who sent what. Will it be considered rude or ungrateful to return money people gave out of the kindness of their hearts? She’s not sure.

But one thing’s for sure — the fire has really shown her the kind of community she lives in, the kind of support she has. It’s something she said her husband pointed out to her when she was worried and frustrated in the first couple of days.

“Look, it’s not all on us,” he told her.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or

andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.