Little Pink House of Horrors-Best Pools, Yorktown

“Good thing for insurance.” That’s everyone’s initial response to the devastating fire we had. If that was only true. Unfortunately, the coverage we have is nowhere near the damage that occurred. Who would have known a chemical fire would cost over $100,000 to clean up? And why was there an emergency hazmat team here? What is contaminated soil? Who would think about all these things “if” a tragedy such as this would occur? If I had only known then what I know now, maybe the outcome wouldn’t have been such a dramatic experience.

On Friday, August 27, 2021, Best Pools in Yorktown, VA, suffered a horrendous fire. It ravaged through all of our warehouses, sales office, and storage facilities destroying not only the buildings, but all our inventory of pools, chemicals, maintenance equipment, accessories, display pools, and decades of collected parts, tools and heirlooms. According to our inventory, we lost over $500,000 worth of products. The front building, which is a landmark and known as “the pink house” who everyone knows and loves, survived the fire along with the business office. Fortunately, no lives were lost and no one was hurt.

Best Pools is a family owned business and has been serving the VA Peninsula and surrounding areas since 1985. We have a total of 15 employees and most of us have been here since the beginning. Even the seasonal workers return year after year, as many of you know. We have all dedicated our lives to this industry and would like to continue serving our community and customers for years to come although it will be challenging.

Being a small business and dealing with the COVID epidemic has made it more and more difficult to acquire materials and keep costs down so we are not forced to pass ridiculous prices on to our customers. We did have more inventory than usual because we were taking whatever our suppliers could get to us to be sure not to run out. We had already had that bad experience when COVID first started. But in the meantime, we had not thought about our insurance or coverages.

We are starting this GoFundMe to get help paying for the hazmat cleanup and contaminated materials and soil removal. Insurance is only paying $10,000 for this. We are asking for your help so we can move forward into 2022.

The amount of support we have received from everyone that walks through our door, as well as online, has been unbelievable and has kept us motivated to move forward. If it wasn’t for our community, I know we wouldn’t still be here. Special thanks to our firefighters and EMS who came from all over to save us - York County, Poquoson, Newport News, Hampton and Langley USAF. They are the best and be sure to thank them for their service when you see them! Your continued business is the best support we could ask for but if you are able to contribute to help us with this, it is greatly appreciated! Kind words and smiles are good too.