Kristi Lewton and Stephanie Meredith - fire loss, round 2!

Double whammy! Don't take us gambling!

Many of you know that we lost a house we'd owned for only 4 months in the Bobcat Fire in 2020. We have now just lost our commuter rental and everything in it in the Eaton Fire. We lived in that rental for almost 9 years, which is longer than we've ever lived anywhere, and it was full of the things you'd expect from 9 years of living in a place.

We are fortunate in two ways. We do have personal property insurance, and we recently purchased a home far outside the city in which we can stay until we can set up another feasible commuting situation. But based on our replacement expenditures so far (Kristi had to immediately replace all her field gear for an impending work trip), we now expect that we are going to be short. This is because we kept most of our most valuable things and items that we only had one of in our rental because that was the "safe" place--field gear, field clothing, work clothing, work from home equipment, personal effects, and luggage are good examples.

We declined a gofundme in the wake of our 2020 fire loss. We felt we did not have sufficient need to solicit help. But we later regretted that decision and still do--partly because we underestimated our need, but mostly because we realized that we refused to allow most of our friends and colleagues to help us in the only way they could.

We don't want to have regrets about our 2025 fire loss. There is enough to deal with already, and regret should be avoided. Thus, if you are inclined to give, we will gratefully accept your assistance this time.

Also note that we will keep detailed records for replacement expenses over the next calendar year (this is not our first fire rodeo). We will use donated funds to cover any insurance shortfall for replacement of necessary personal property. If we find that we have funds from donations in excess of what we need to replace our belongings, we will donate the remainder to organizations helping with disaster recovery such as United Policyholders (a non-profit organization that was a tremendous resource to us during our recovery from the Bobcat Fire, uphelp.org).