A year of recovery: Families rebuild after Gatlinburg wildfire

GATLINBURG — Allan Rivera didn’t think he would ever come back to Baskins Creek Road, where the only belongings he has left are a broken ceramic vase and an iron bench where he once read to his children.

But he also made a promise to himself and his family that they would recover after deadly wildfires destroyed their home and thousands of others.

“I’m the head of the household and I have to take care of them,” Rivera, 29, said last month while holding his nearly 2-year-old, Nathan, in his arms.

“I gave them the best things I could, and now everything is lost.”

Rivera, his girlfriend Lelin Romero, and their three young sons aren’t alone in their struggle. Entire neighborhoods in Gatlinburg were leveled, looking more like a war zone than a tourist retreat in the days after the fire. Homes were turned to piles of metal and crumbled concrete. Burned-out cars and blackened trees lined the winding mountain roads.

The devastating fire sparked in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park the day before Thanksgiving and five days later, fueled by an extreme drought and high winds, spread into Gatlinburg, killing 14 people.

The Nov. 28 fire burned 2,460 structures across the county — 73 were businesses and the rest were residences.

They belonged to renters who are now left with nowhere to go and to homeowners who had spent years building a safe place to raise their families and grow old.

Now, they all face the daunting task of putting their lives back together.

Owners must put a dollar amount on all of the clothes that hung in their closets, the toys in their children’s rooms, to the family heirlooms and the one-of-a-kind gifts.

Businesses must decide whether to recreate the dreams they had built or move on.

Immigrant families must wrestle with starting over once again or returning home.

As federal agencies and national media retreat from the tiny tourist town following the historic fire, moving on to other stories and tragedies, the people of Gatlinburg will be left to rebuild their lives and their community. Three of the families, including Rivera and Romero, agreed to allow reporters and photographers chronicle their journey back to normalcy.

Over the next year, we will tell their stories of triumph and struggle as they look ahead to their future — and the future of Gatlinburg.

Lisa and Kevin McCarter

Walking up the small hill to her property, Lisa McCarter stopped to stare at an ornamental cherry tree, its trunk black and charred. She is superstitious about the 22-year-old tree.

“I don’t know if it will make it to next year,” she said. “It’s really scorched. And if the tree is not doing well, I worry about my son.”

McCarter planted the tree when she was seven months pregnant with Kurtis, who is now a father himself.

The tree is still standing for now, but the house where she raised her son is gone.

All around the yard, McCarter begins pointing to other plants, all reminders of the three decades she and her husband Kevin have shared in the vinyl-and-wood home. There’s the magnolia tree that came from her late mother-in-law. Nearby is a rhododendron gifted by her sister-in-law one Mother’s Day and two crepe myrtles from Kevin on back-to-back anniversaries early in their marriage.

It’s comforting, she said, that the rest of their land looks the same, even with a leveled dirt plot where her two-story house once stood.

“The house will be different, but the view out our windows, the plants in the yard, the layout of the grounds will be familiar,” she said.

The night of the fire, a Monday, Lisa McCarter was alone at their home just off Beech Branch Road when she got word from a friend the fire was spreading. She called the sheriff’s office for confirmation, but was told there were no reports of fires off The Spur, the wooded stretch of road between Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg.

She waited 15 minutes and called again.

“The entire mountain is on fire,” the dispatcher told her. “Get out now.”

She escaped with her two dogs, and her husband — who was at his father’s house nearby — also managed to get out of the hollow. They spent the next few days in hotels in Pigeon Forge. It didn’t take long for them to learn their house was gone.

They also lost their businesses. Lisa, a part-time diver for Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies, ran a small interior design consulting business from her home. Kevin is a self-employed home inspector who lost his records and equipment.

Now, they’re staying in the home of a friend who is vacationing out of state for the winter. McCarter said she hopes to have a rental home by February. They’ve already filed their insurance claim and received a bid from a contractor to replace their house.

“I feel guilty about being sad,” she said. “There’s people who lost everything and can’t get it back. There’s people who lost people.”

It happened again recently, she said, when she ran into a friend at the store who had not only lost her home but also her pets in the fire. And while McCarter said she misses the photos that can never be replaced and the handmade gifts she’d received through the years, the shock of what was gone wore off quickly.

What McCarter has struggled with most recently is the loss of her routine — the mornings she would get up, have her coffee, make a to do list and plan her day and her route. Now, she has no home base.

But she’s learning to cope with that, too.

“It was hard to lose everything, but you come to grips with that pretty quickly,” she said. “You realize when you got your family, and you hear about people who lost family. All that stuff didn’t matter really."

Susan and Glenn Stocks

Daily, Susan Stocks’ phone rings: another traveler wanting to book a stay at the Tudor Inn bed-and-breakfast, just above Gatlinburg’s main business area.

In the past month, TripAdvisor posted no fewer than 10 five-star reviews, with headings like “Friendly and Beautiful,” “Ideal Stay,” “Great Location” and “Best Thing About Gatlinburg.”

Photos on the travel site show a medieval-style wood-and-stone mansion with a majestic view, rooms packed with antiques and personal touches. Reviewers rave about Stocks’ home-cooked breakfasts.

She tries to keep her voice steady as she explains to callers that it’s all gone. The inn, its cherry walls and crown moulding. The antiques — some family heirlooms, some she and husband Glenn bought at the beginning of living out their dream of running a B&B. The unscathed mountain view. The business that’s been the couple’s main source of income since they bought it in 2012 and moved to Gatlinburg from Florida, sleeping on bare floors while they readied it for guests.

Mere days after TripAdvisor’s latest review posted, Tudor Inn burned to the ground.

Now, instead of making shopping lists for breakfast menus, Stocks is trying to list everything that was in the Tudor Inn — when and where it was bought, what it cost — for insurance purposes. Furniture, linens, carpets, dishes, electronics — and even if she can remember every item, she knows, there are many that can’t ever be replaced.

For example, “the 12-seat dining room table, with 12 unique hand-carved chairs,” she said. “How do you begin?”

Stocks, an accountant by trade, had been working two days a week for a Sevier County entertainment company. In the wake of the fire, she asked for and received additional hours, she said, so they have another source of income.

And though the Tudor Inn was their heart, it wasn’t the Stocks’ primary home. They co-own, with a business partner, a six-apartment building on Hemlock Street. Three apartments’ older occupants already lived there when the Stockses bought the building. The Stockses live in one, their partner in another, and they rent the sixth out nightly.

The Tudor Inn website notes that apartment can still be rented, but Stocks said there have been few takers so far.

Her days are full anyway. She had to buy a new computer and software, since hers burned, and get all her bank and credit card statements, records from their reservation service and payroll information, and “start reinventing the wheel.”

“You can’t get loss-of-income insurance (benefits) until you can prove you had income,” she said.

Erie Insurance “has been wonderful,” she said. “We’ve had no problems at all with them.”

The insurer’s request for three estimates for debris removal, three for contractors seems reasonable, but Stocks is finding it difficult to fulfill. Contractors stand her up, or don’t return her calls. She and others with single dwellings are competing against condo and timeshare companies with larger jobs to offer, she said.

Gatlinburg isn’t brimming with contractors anyway, she said, “and the few we have are overwhelmed.” She surmises contractors will come from other areas, charging extra for travel, and wonders where all those workers will stay when citywide rebuilding starts in earnest.

Four days before Christmas, Susan Stocks finally got the requisite three estimates for debris removal, at roughly twice what it would have cost before the fire, she said. At the time, the city hadn’t yet started issuing demolition permits. Once homeowners have those, they can bring debris to the landfill (at $5.50 per cubic yard, plus tax), Sevier Solid Waste said. But Stocks wonders if the local landfill can accommodate all the refuse.

Then, for more than a year, the city will be full of construction, roofers, pavers, polluting Gatlinburg with dust and noise, Stocks said. She remembers the racket from rivet guns when a hotel near the Tudor Inn got a new roof last spring.

“And that was only one building,” Stocks said. “Can you imagine all this happening? A lot of people like open windows. They want to hear birds chirping.”

As much as they love the Smoky Mountains, the Stockses are still deciding whether they’ll rebuild Tudor Inn. A new building would need to meet updated regulations, and they aren’t yet sure what those will be — or whether the rebuilt inn, absent its inherent charm and character, could again draw guests to a tourist town trying hard to retain its own character.

“It’s going to be difficult to bring back that 65 percent (citywide) occupancy rate that we had on Nov. 28,” Stocks said.

Allan Rivera and Lelin Romero 

It was seven years ago that Allan Rivera and his young family — his girlfriend, Lelin Romero, and their son Simon, just a year old at the time, arrived in Gatlinburg.

They chose it because the Great Smoky Mountains reminded them of the terrain in their native Honduras.

The family was happy and succeeding in their new life, making ends meet, most recently between a job Rivera held at Blaine’s Restaurant and Grill, while his wife mostly took care of their now three children and occasionally worked in housekeeping.

That changed on Nov. 28 when their rental cabin, like so many others, was reduced to rubble by the fast-moving wildfire.

“I want to go back to work. I want to recover,” Rivera, 29, said one afternoon after lunch at Taco Bell in Pigeon Forge, where the American Red Cross was putting his family up in a hotel more than two weeks after the fires. “It’s hard sometimes. Yesterday I was crying.”

So far, the immigrant family has held together with persistence and love for each other, but their determination to forge a better life in the United States is being put to the test.

Nearly two weeks after the fires, the family pushed a shopping cart through Boyd’s Bears in Pigeon Forge, a former teddy bear store turned supply warehouse filled with donations for fire victims, filling their cart with canned goods, clothing, toiletries and toys.

It was Nathan’s second birthday, and as his parents concentrated on taking care of immediate needs, their minds also focused on the future and not just how they would be affected by the wildfires. Like many immigrants across the country, they were wondering what the world will look like for immigrants after President-elect Donald Trump, with his promises to restrict immigration and build a wall on the country’s southern border with Mexico, takes office in January.

“I’ve lost everything and I’m still thinking, ‘What is the new government going to do?’ ” Rivera said later, a few days before Christmas. “We are scared to get a new home. We don’t know if we should save money to go back (to Honduras) or for a house.” 

In Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, immigrants play a key role in the service sector and tourism industry, where more than 10 million visitors flock each year to nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park. They're also among the hundreds of people that lost their homes and represent some of the area's most vulnerable fire victims.

The mountains are a familiar reminder of home for many from Honduras, according to Rivera, who said his family left the capital city of Tegucigalpa nine years ago because it was growing too violent and they didn’t want to raise their children there. His oldest son, Simon, now 10, was born there, while the two youngest, Nathan, 2, and Ethan, four months, were born here.

“A lot of American people are friendly, but there are a few people who think (immigrants) come and we bring bad things from our country,” Rivera said. “My family, that’s not us. We are trying to get a better life for our children and thinking about where we can get them the best education — that’s in the United States. Now we lost everything.”

For more than two weeks after they were homeless, Rivera did not return to his job at Blaine’s Grill & Bar, where he works as an assistant to the wait staff, but he said he was lucky that his employer, like many in Galtinburg whose workers were hit by the fires, paid him for the time he was out of work.

It was that kind of support that eventually helped the family make a $3,000 payment on a new rental home in Pigeon Forge at the end of the month — using $1,000 from the Dollywood Foundation’s My People Fund, along with funds from the American Red Cross and a local Methodist church.

The restaurant closed for more than a week as authorities shut down downtown Gatlinburg, but when it reopened Rivera said he couldn’t return to work without taking care of his family first. His wife, Lelin Romero, doesn’t drive or speak English and he said the fires have weighed heavily on her. His two youngest children were sick because of the smoke and were having breathing problems, bringing the family to a nearby hospital in the days immediately following the fire.

And without a driver’s license or passport, both of which burned in the fire, Rivera said he was, like many immigrants, afraid to drive into Gatlinburg. Recovering those documents will also be a challenge for him and others, as he said the only options for getting a new passport involve travel to Atlanta or Washington, D.C.

“It’s not easy,” he said. “I’m feeling like a ghost right now.”

During their afternoon at Boyd’s, the family sat down to their first meal of the day around 2 p.m. – a lunch of free hamburgers and pulled pork sandwiches set up outside the warehouse. With no coats, they huddled around a small fire on a chilly day before heading back to the Pigeon Forge Community Center, an American Red Cross shelter that served as their home base in the days immediately following the fires.

The children laid down to take naps while Rivera pulled out his cellphone, scrolling through Craigslist ads looking for apartments in a search tempered by moments of hope and then despair. At the community center, surrounded by family and Red Cross workers, Rivera said he felt hopeful, and that despite the challenges, his family and other immigrants would recover.

A few days later, he was scrambling to find the money for the first rental home payment.

"I'm afraid to spend that money," Rivera said. "Do I save the money to be ready to go back? I'm scared to rent a nice house, to buy a new car and new stuff. It's not just me, many people are thinking like we're thinking."