As a former McComb resident walked through the rubble of her home in Colorado, she noticed that not a single scrap of wood was left.
“That was how hot it was,” Cindy Cooper-Maluschka said of the Waldo Canyon fire.
Cooper-Maluschka grew up in McComb and graduated from Parklane Academy in 1983. She moved away in 1993 and her father, Jimmy Cooper followed in 2009.
She now lives in Colorado Springs, Colo., where her home used to be in the Mountain Shadows community until a swift-moving fire changed everything this summer.
Cooper-Maluschka and her husband Mark and 6-year-old daughter Amber were “just hanging out and playing” when they got word that there was a wildfire burning in Waldo Canyon, she said.
After the fire reached the nearby community of Cedar Heights, authorities began to evacuate Mountain Shadows.
“We weren’t even in the evacuation,” she said. “We went ahead and evacuated.”
The family packed up sentimental valuables, and while Cooper-Maluschka said they didn’t get a lot of stuff out, they got “more than most people did.”
They went to live with her father four miles away in Pleasant Valley.
Soon afterward, she and her husband returned to their home to get some work done, she said.
“We were still not on evacuation,” Cooper-Maluschka said.
Then at about 1 p.m., their side of town finally fell under the evacuation orders.
Cooper-Maluschka and her husband watched the evening news to check up on the fire and got a shock they will never forget.
“Halfway through the press conference they said, ‘Mountain Shadows evacuate immediately,’ ” she said. “Something had changed.”
She went to look outside to see what was going on. “When I opened the garage door, I felt the heat,”she said. “When you looked up our street you saw mountain and I saw the fire.”
She called to her husband from downstairs, “We have to get out. We have to get out now.”
They grabbed clothes and computers — about all they could get, she said. “My husband did go back and get the goldfish.”
As they fled the house, winds swirled and smoke and ash made it dark, Cooper-Maluschka said said.
“It was like one of these scenes from an end-of-the-world movie,” she said.
Afterwards, they found out that the particular fire that hit their home was deemed the “fire of a lifetime” because of the way the weather had affected how quickly it moved.
Two people in her
neighborhood died.
Many of the houses that burned weren’t under evacuation orders until that day, she said. “When we went on mandatory evacuation, the mountain was on fire.”
The couple made it out safe. They returned to her father’s house but felt it would just be safer to leave the area for a while. They spent about a week in a hotel, she said.
As it turns out, burn scarring from the wildfire has left the area vulnerable to flash floods capable of popping up after a quarter inch of rain.
Soon, a photo from the Denver Post surfaced and it showed the Mountain Shadows community. Cooper-Maluschka’s home was gone.
“I expected them all to be gone,” she said. The loss of her home, while saddening, was not a total surprise.
“The odd thing was, that is what I expected. I didn’t see how it couldn’t be.
The house on each side of us is perfect, the house in front of us is destroyed and the house behind us is completely destroyed,” she said.
Everything was gone. The fire was so hot that many metals melted.
“There was only one item out of the house that somebody found that is perfect. It is a piece of pottery,” she said, referring to a McCarty Pottery rabbit figurine. There were other pieces of pottery that survived, but the glass shelf they were sitting on melted to them.
With everything gone, the family has to restart.
“The first time we went into a Target or a Walmart, we were completely overwhelmed,” she said. “We had to leave.”
The family wants to stay in the same location because that is where home is — and not just for them.
There are deer, rabbits and hummingbirds that had come to know the family’s home and had made their way back after the fire, she said. The family wants that home back.
Through the tragedy, Cooper-Maluschka found a new appreciation for the emergency crews that worked the fire.
“To me it is unbelievable that the firefighters got in there and saved houses,” she said. “On my neighbor’s sidewalk you can see the black from the firefighters’ boots. Their boots were melting.”
Cooper-Maluschka couldn’t comprehend the courage it takes to stand in the flames and fight.
“When I saw that fire, every ounce of my being said, ‘flee,’ ” she said.
