matter where your strengths are, everybody has a strength that they can bring to the table,” she said. Voorheis-Mathews began her own company in 2018. The barn was critical. It gave her space to rehearse, train, and host small events. “We all chipped in for our own costumes and brought our own apparatuses. It was very grassroots at the beginning,” she said. “And we sold out that first show. So, it was really exciting.” When the Marshall Fire swept through their neighborhood, it took the barn with it. Voorheis-Mathews’ rig, silks, and custom trapeze burned too. Her friends and members of the aerial community donated replacements to Voorheis-Mathews within weeks of the fire. A DIFFERENT KIND OF FIRE The Marshall Fire wasn’t we’re building more in riskier places. “Most of the houses that get lost due to wildfire were lost in grasslands or shrublands,” Suding said. “It’s not as risky, the fires are more intense in a forest, but just the amount of houses and their proximity to grasslands throughout the whole West means that it’s almost about 80% of all buildings destroyed in the last several decades were lost due to grassland fires,” Suding said. REBUILDING Voorheis-Mathews and her husband split much of the responsibility for managing the rebuild. But Mathews was generally the one who worked directly with the contractors. Mathews worked as a project manager, and he was just a tragedy for VoorheisMathews and her husband; it burned more than 1,000 homes in a matter of hours. The fire was a warning for Colorado and now seems like a prescient warning to communities around the United States. In the years since, deadly wildfires have ravaged neighborhoods in Maui and Southern California. Like Marshall, these fires didn’t ignite in forests but in grasslands and shrublands, then spread fast into inhabited areas. Residents often had just minutes to escape during the fires in Hawaii, California, and Colorado as the flames spread, destroying structures and resulting in significant loss of humans and domestic animals. For Dr. Katharine Suding, a distinguished professor of grassland ecology at the University of Colorado Boulder, these events reflect a disturbing shift. “The number of homes is increasing in what we call the wildland-urban interface,” she said. “In Colorado, it’s increased by about 10% over the last couple of decades. So uniquely gifted for the task, but even he wasn’t ready for the complex insurance and bureaucratic hurdles of rebuilding after a natural disaster. From the start, the process was convoluted, inconsistent, and emotionally draining. Government support was minimal. Legal assistance was disorganized. Contractors were difficult to trust, and some flat-out stole money from fire victims. On top of everything, they were racing against the clock: their insurance coverage for temporary housing lasted only two years. If they didn’t finish rebuilding in time, they’d have nowhere to live. They would have to pay out of pocket for a hotel room or apartment, an expense they couldn’t muster with everything going toward the rebuild. “We were trying to get it done before the insurance stopped paying for the apartment, but there were so many setbacks,” Mathews said. “The fear of being left without a home twice, once by fire, again by red tape, was a constant source of stress. They chose to oversee the entire construction process themselves while hiring a contractor to manage the actual building. All of it was on top of Mathews’ demanding full-time job. He said it felt like juggling two jobs at once, and the stress took a toll on his health and marriage. But they overcame the relational challenges by each leaning into their strengths. “I think the way that we divided and conquered worked well for our marriage. We each took on what we could take on, and tried not to dump that on the other person,” Mathews said. Compounding everything, they discovered they were significantly underinsured, despite having reviewed their coverage less than a year before the fire. They used the insurance payout meant for personal belongings to cover construction and overcome the financial shortfall. The choice meant they went without replacing much of what they lost inside the home. “We could use our personal property insurance to bridge the gap, but it meant we would have to replace all of our stuff on our own. We thought we could make that work by buying back a little over time,” Mathews said. Mathews also said it may take the rest of their lives to fully recover what was lost. According to Mathews, he was deeply frustrated with the government’s response, especially from FEMA, which he felt offered almost no meaningful support. FEMA gave the couple and other Marshall fire victims $11,000, he said, describing the total assistance they received after losing their home. Other new regulations made the rebuild harder and more expensive. In 2018, Boulder County imposed new building requirements, like mandatory sprinkler and solar systems, that added tens of thousands of dollars in extra costs to already underinsured families. These rules added more than $50,000 to the construction at a time when rebuilding wasn’t guaranteed, Mathews said. “It was just a nightmare dealing with the banks and dealing with the insurance company. And [Boulder County] FLEETWOOD MATHEWS AND FALLON VOORHEIS-MATHEWS RELAX WITH THEIR DOG OUTSIDE OF THEIR NEW HOME. | PHOTO BY RUDY ORTEGA September 2025 DENVER VOICE 11
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