The Current - Two moms, two wild fires, one shared grief

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

When wildfires rip through towns, the smoke may eventually clear, but the trauma lingers. This morning, we hear from two women whose lives were upended by wildfires. Brooke Kindel lost her home in Denare Beach, Saskatchewan just weeks before giving birth. Meghan Fandrich lived through the fire that destroyed most of Lytton, B.C. in 2021 including her small business. Together, they reflect on loss, survival, and what comes after disaster.

Welcome to the Dudes Club, a brotherhood supporting men's health and wellness. Established in the Vancouver downtown Eastside in 2010, the Dudes Club is a community-based organization that focuses on indigenous men's health, many of whom are struggling with intergenerational trauma, addiction, poverty, homelessness, and chronic diseases. The aim is to reduce isolation and loneliness and for the men to regain a sense of pride and purpose in their lives. As a global health care company, Novo Nordisk is dedicated to driving change for a healthy world. It's what we've been doing since 1923. It also takes the strength and determination of the communities around us, whether it's through disease

awareness, fighting stigmas and loneliness, education, or empowering people to become more active. Novo Nordisk is supporting local changemakers because it takes more than medicine to live a healthy life. Leave your armor at the door. Watch this paid content on CBC Gem. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is the current podcast. When a wildfire threatened her town in late May, Dawn Helady did something that's familiar to an increasing number of Canadians. She evacuated, fleeing a monster of a fire. Dawn owns a restaurant in Flynn Flawn, Manitoba and lives across the border in Creighton, Saskatchewan.

And you've got 4,000 people that are leaving one community all at once. And it's just complete chaos because you don't know where you're going. There's lack of self-service to even try and find out where you're going. You're trying to connect with family and phone calls are being dropped. You're phoning hotels that are completely booked and have no room for you to stay, you can't even pull over on the side of the road because you've got a convoy of 20 cars behind you and then you've got a whole city that is evacuating behind you. AMT – And then yesterday, once again, Manitoba Premier Wab Kanu declared a province-wide

state of emergency as wildfires again force thousands out of their homes in the north of the province, if you look at the current wildfire map of Canada, there are hundreds of fires dotting the country. And for communities near those fires, people are on edge, fearing an evacuation or worse. And for those who do have to flee their homes, life is often forever changed. Last month, we spoke with Brooke Kindle. She lives in Denerbeech, Saskatchewan, close to Creighton. The Wolf Fire, the same fire that

Dawn fled, destroyed more than 200 homes in Denerbeech and it's still burning west of the village. As the flames got closer and closer in late May, Brooke and her family evacuated. At the time, she was 35 weeks pregnant with her third child. The fire destroyed her home. Brooke is joining me now from Saskatoon, where her family has been living. Brooke, good morning. Brooke Good morning. Katherine First of all, I understand there's a new addition to your family. Congratulations. When was your daughter born?

Brooke She was born June 20th. Her name is Callie. She's doing great. She's actually a very easy baby, which is really nice. Which is just what you need right now. Can you tell me what does life look like for you right now? It's very, very chaotic. As we're speaking, my husband's trying to get one kid out the door to go play with friends. We're getting the other kid to go to daycare this morning so that we can focus on doing our insurance paperwork with just the baby. It's just been very challenging.

How are the older two kids managing? Not great. My four-year-old tells everybody everywhere we go, let his house burn down, every store, everything. Yeah. I mean, I can hear in your voice that you're under stress. How are you doing emotionally? Well, I'm about 10 days postpartum, so that's always fun just in terms of everything that you have to go through having a newborn. But I mean, just doing the best that I can on,

I think we got three hours of sleep last night. I'm okay for right now. Okay. Now you evacuated Dener beach. Can you take me back to when you learned you lost your home? Yeah, we watched it. Like we had friends and everyone was posting online videos of their cameras as they like slowly shut off as the fire crept up the street towards our house. And I had a Tesla at the time and we watched the temperature start rising but then the temperature went down so we thought maybe we were okay but that actually was my boat

burning next to it and then yeah after all the power went out in the town the only real connection we had was because the firefighters were all evacuated was my Tesla because it still had the connection through the data. And yeah, it got up to like 80 degrees, I think, before it turned off. And it just went blank? Yeah. Yeah, that was about 530. And then my friends at about 730, their houses like, you know, multiple streets down, their

security cameras were going off. Like it just slowly was alerting people as it traveled. What were you thinking when you saw the Tesla app go blank? We knew that it, everything burned. We, it was a weird feeling, like almost like a sense of not relief, but like just, okay, it's over now we can move on. Because there just been so many days of anxiety wondering like, are gonna lose everything is what's gonna happen you know and we're just like okay now it's done now we don't have to sit awake all night thinking about this and like watching cameras and watching fire maps it doesn't matter

anymore now we can just mourn the loss and start rebuilding and in your family it wasn't just your home I mean you live next door to your parents in Dener Beach how are they coping with losing their home as well? Yeah, like, it actually took me a couple weeks to even realize that it was, someone said, oh yeah, and you lost your childhood home too. And I was like, oh, I didn't even really think of it that way because I've been so focused and wrapped up in, you know, our own loss. But yeah, my parents are still staying with us.

They're helping with the new baby still and with my husband. They're up to their eyeballs dealing with insurance as well. We've had barely any answers. We don't know if we're going to be broke at the end of this or if we're going to come out okay. It's so confusing. It all depends on our house appraisal. Same with them. So we're all just kind of in a waiting game. I'm not sure if we should be replacing lots of things or if we're going to be trying to buy everything secondhand. We just don't know how it's all going to work out in the end financially.

So we're just trying to live as cheaply as we can and try to stay comfortable and keep the kids happy. But it's been really hard for them and for us, for sure. Now your husband has been back to Denier Beach since the fires. Can you describe what he saw, what your town and your property looks like now? Well, it's not like a normal fire where you can sift through the rubble and find really anything. It's just absolutely decimated.

Everything burned so hot that all the metal and everything is just melted. Like my car on the sides of the car is just melted piles of aluminum. It's unbelievable. And I was told, my husband last night, I was like, well maybe we could look through for my Christmas decorations. I know some people have found a couple ornaments. He's like, Brooke, there's a wash, there's the fridge and stove from upstairs on top of your Christmas, like on top of our storage area. And he said it's about two feet deep of just ash and rubble and poison. And it's just everything is just

like a fine silt with some pieces of metal melted. I mean, even inside of our gun safe, it's just like our gun safe was fireproof, but all of our guns were completely melted. Do you think you'll move back? Oh, yeah, 100%. Like, this wildfire risk isn't just here in northern Saskatchewan. It's all across Canada. I was actually more worried when I lived outside of Saskatoon at Pike Lake because of the big winds that we had there

and the grass fires that we had. It's happening all across the world. There's extreme weather events. So, I mean, yes, we're going to be changing a lot about the way that we rebuild our house. And I think a lot of people in our community will as well. But at the end of the day, it's still home. It's really, really hard to leave. And I don't think that there's really a lot of places that are safer.

Danielle Pletka Brooke, if I can ask you to stick around, I'd like to bring in another guest. In the summer of 2021, a devastating fire destroyed most of the village of Lytton in BC and killed two people. Megan Fandrich lost her small business in the fire. She joins me this morning from Lytton where she still lives with her nine-year-old daughter. Megan, good morning. Good morning, Megan. Now last week was the four-year anniversary of the Lytton fire. How have you been feeling this week?

This is the first year that coming into the anniversary, I thought I was going to be okay. Coming into the first anniversary, I think it was like a full month that I was really rattled. And this year I thought like, okay, you know, four years have passed, things are pretty stable here in a completely new way in this, what I still call a burned up town. But then on June 30th itself, a fire started just across the river from my house, just that evening. And just to see the flames, like I saw it race across a farm field and then into the trees and saw the trees go up. Just that on the day of the anniversary, it was, to put it mildly, really unsettling. The next day though, the next morning when

my daughter and I got up, the fire was already basically out because there was such a concerted effort between volunteers and firefighters. There were even helicopters on it late at night. And so the fire was out immediately. And so then to have made it through another anniversary and to have made it through another fire, like there's this sense of like, okay, we can keep going. Life does keep going. Welcome to the Dudes Club, a brotherhood supporting men's health and wellness. Established in the Vancouver downtown Eastside in 2010, the Dudes Club is a community-based organization that focuses on indigenous men's health, many of whom are struggling with intergenerational trauma, addiction, poverty, homelessness, and chronic diseases.

The aim is to reduce isolation and loneliness, and for the men to regain a sense of pride and purpose in their lives. As a global healthcare company, Novo Nordisk is dedicated to driving change for a healthy world. It's what we've been doing since 1923. It also takes the strength and determination of the communities around us, whether it's through disease awareness, fighting stigmas and loneliness, education, or empowering people to become more active. Novo Nordisk is supporting local changemakers because it takes more than medicine to live a healthy life.

Leave your armor at the door. Watch this paid content on CBC Gem. This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on a Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment on board and on shore. With a variety of voyages and sailing dates to choose from, now is the time to explore Europe's waterways. Learn more at Viking.com. Can you tell us a bit about what happened to you in the fire four years ago? Where were you when that fire first started? Yeah, I was at my coffee shop. It was a beautiful little art cafe and we

were just closing. And a community member just ran in and said there was a fire that was really close and we had to go. And then like most of my community, I ran from the flames. I drove out of town kind of through the fire and saw that my house was right on the edge of the fire, but still, but not on fire yet. So I stopped in and grabbed my cat and my computer and my daughter had just turned five, I grabbed her favorite stuffed animals and a basket of laundry. That was all I could think to pack and drove away. We were evacuated for a month and in that month I found out that my house had been saved by firefighters. But my art cafe and also the town that I grew up in and the town I was raising my daughter in, they were completely gone.

I'm so sorry. What was your life like in those first few months when you were able to move back home? I remember, I mean, just listening to Brooke now, I was remembering that there's this feeling, I mean, of course, this awful of like shock and disbelief, but also this like propulsion to keep moving forward, right? You need to find a new sense of normal and a new balance and a new way to trust the world around you. But you're doing that while navigating trauma.

For us in Lytton, you know, Lytton's a pretty isolated community. And for those of us, like especially the Inquilqatmah community, indigenous communities around Lytton and the few of us with homes within the village of Lytton boundaries, we had lost our town center. Lytton's pretty isolated. We had two grocery stores now. We're driving an hour or two hours each way to get groceries. We had things like the atmospheric river that flooded out most of the lower mainland near Vancouver that washed out Highway 1 on both

sides of Lytton. And so for a little while we were trapped. The highways were closed for three months. It was ongoing that it seemed like we were just barely surviving in this kind of hostile world in this burned up town. And I hope it's different for Brooke and for her community. But here in Lytton, I mean, everyone's heard that we've been like the poster child for how not to do a recovery. So for the first two years after the fire, my coffee shop was still the bricks and the rubble and the basement full of ashes that it was the day after the fire.

But we couldn't go in and clean it up. It had to be negotiated between the province and the insurance companies and the village. But yeah, just with my business, I found out I didn't have enough to rebuild and I still hung on to the piece of land, hoping that I might be able to do something with it. And just this past winter, I was able to let go of the idea and to sell the land to one of the local indigenous governments so that they'll have a piece of property in town that they hope to develop. Yeah, and I feel good about that, about them having it. Megan, what about your own personal recovery?

I mean, how have you been working through the emotional fallout of the fire? I mean, for that first year, even though I had a really good therapist and was trying to work through it, I think as you're going through the trauma, it's really just a matter of survival. As I started to come out, so a year and a bit after the fire, I started writing. I thought I would just write out a note for a friend,

but it came out as a memory of the fire and then another and another and another until I had a big stack of poems that turned into a book that was accepted by a publisher. And that's been so key in my healing. It's, it's really just my like emotional journey of the first year after the fire. But then to get them out with healing, but then also to be able to just, to share it, right, to take that book on, on book tour and to share it with audiences and

then to have different like speaking engagements with it and all the opportunities I've been given to share my story, my daughter's story have been healing because the trauma is like so isolating while you're experiencing it. Like I know right now with Brooke, like so many people in the community have lost their homes and yet you're on your own navigating the insurance paperwork and trying to keep things normal for your kids. And it's just, it's so personal and isolating. But then when we're able to share it, we understand each other.

There's this universal experience and trauma. Yeah. Now, you mentioned your daughter. How is she doing? She was what, five at the time of the fire? She had just turned five, yeah. And so now she's just had her ninth birthday. She's mostly doing well.

Almost half of her life now has been in a burned up town. She wasn't home when the fire hit. She was staying with her other grandmother because of the heat dome that was affecting Lytton when it was almost 50 degrees. Because of that, she still has a lot of separation anxiety. There's still a lot of nights where she needs me to help her fall asleep. If I leave the bed in the night, she'll wake up. She'll know I'm not there. During the day, she needs to be near me. She misses a lot of school still. So it does still affect her, even though I've had play therapy for her

and we talk really openly about things and I'm supporting her in every way that I can. But of course, the trauma doesn't end when the fire goes out. No, of course not. Brooke, I'd like you to bring you back into this conversation. I mean, what's going through your mind listening to Megan talk about life since the fire?

Oh, well, I'm really, really hoping that it's not going to take that long for us to rebuild. Yeah, I mean, people in the community keep saying, we need to, I wish we could reach out to people that have gone through the fires in Fort Mac, gone through the fires in Jasper and just kind of get a sense of what tips and tricks that they have for us. I know that my municipal government has, but even just on a more personal basis, trying to understand what this process looks like and how we can make it easier for our children or easier to navigate the insurance stuff is good to hear, but it is very disheartening.

You're both part of this kind of terrible club that no one wants to be a part of. Megan, what advice do you have for Brooke as she navigates all of these different things after the fire? I think one thing, Brooke, I hope that it won't take so long for you either, like Lytton, I really hope is a special case. But I think in a way to trust the process and so even to trust the different emotions as they come up, right? Like anger is really important to hold on to, to help you process and grief when you're

ready to process the grief and all of those different things, just to trust that as it happens. And then also things like insurance paperwork. I put a lot of pressure on myself to get through it quickly and then it seemed like it was always being stalled by the insurance company. But just to maybe not put too much pressure on yourself to have everything go back to normal right away. Brooke, is there anything that you've learned from your experiences with these wildfires and afterwards? I think the most important thing that I've learned is that everything that's important to you, make sure that you know where it is in your house and ideally

keep it all together. We've got some things out because my husband stayed to fight the fire but he only had like 25 minutes before he had to leave to finish packing because I never packed anything like that. I barely even packed clothes for myself because I thought I was just going to the city for a weekend with the kids and I am a pretty you know logical person. I don't get stressed out. I'm pretty calm but even for me it was very challenging. Like I left without my wedding rings. My husband grabbed them but he was like what the heck. I'm like well I'm pregnant. I can't even fit them. I haven't worn them for four months. Why would I pack my wedding rings? You know I don't want to lose them but just you know my wedding dress burned. like so many things that are important and it just it's like every day you're remembering

Oh, I lost that. Oh, I lost that and I mean even like we cut down all the trees in our yard pretty much We called our property fern gully because even though I'm an environmentalist we cut down everything We did as much home hardening as we could like we we were right next to the firebase the firebase burned Sometimes you can't really be prepared, but you can be prepared in the ways that you can be by having a list and knowing what is irreplaceable for you because a lot of things are just stuff, but some things are so much more than that and it's really hard to cope with those losses. Well, I'm so sorry for both of you for your losses and thank you so much, Megan and Brooke, for sharing your advice and everything that you've been through.

Thanks, Megan. Thank you. Brooke Kendall lost her family home in Dener Beach, Saskatchewan to wildfire. We reached her in Saskatoon. You've been listening to The Current Podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.

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