Help when you find yourself homeless
Saturday, August 11, 2007 started out as a typical weekend day-to-get-things-done on the Vetter farm east
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Only son Kolton, 8, was home, so when Melissa headed to Jamestown to pick up some additional sheetrock, she thought she could make the trip a multi-purpose one. She and Kolton decided to sneak in a little back-to-school shopping. The shopping went well, but the trip home was one Michelle will never forget.
“I got a phone call telling me my house was on fire,” she says. “And as Kolton and I drove home, I kept telling myself, ‘It can’t be that bad.’”
But, sooner than she’d like, Melissa saw that, indeed, it was ‘that bad’—and worse.
“As soon as I rounded the curve on Highway 20, I freaked out,” she says. “You just never think anything like this is going to happen.”
Mike was astonished by how quickly their 4,500 square feet home burned to the ground.
“I was south of the farm fixing fence when I saw smoke in the yard,” he says. “It looked like it was coming from a small barrel fire, and my first thought was that Melissa was burning garbage. I remember thinking, ‘When is she going to get that sheetrock so I can get back to working on the house?”
With a hill obstructing his view of the house itself, Mike noticed the smoke looming larger and larger over the farmyard. “I got on my 4-wheeler to take a look,” he says. “By the time I came around the hill and got into the yard, flames were barreling through the windows. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing or hearing.”
After calling 9-1-1 on his cell phone, Mike scurried to shut off the gas and move the family’s vehicles away from the inferno. In an attempt to retrieve his family’s belongings, he tried crawling in a window. “By that time, the fire was roaring—like a helicopter was overhead,” he said. “You just can’t imagine how loud it was, and I will never forget the smell.”
By the time fire trucks arrived, the house—and an unattached garage alongside it that housed $15,000 of uninsured construction materials the Vetters intended to use on the addition they were building—was reduced to a pile of rubble. “All I managed to do was reach in our daughter’s bedroom window and retrieve several photo albums.and a yearbook,” he recalls. “And most of the photo albums were empty.”
Compassionate communities that care
Within a few minutes on that August day, the Vetters found themselves homeless with just the shirts on their backs. But not for long.
“We are not ‘from’ this area—I grew up in Moorhead and Mike was raised in Esmond,” says Melissa. “And so we had no family here to turn to.”
But the Vetters found that didn’t mean they were alone. “It was unbelievable how the community stepped forward,” says Mike. “By the end of the day, we had five places offered to us.”
Throughout the next week, the Vetter family stayed with the Kent and Vonnie Van Ray family. “They insisted that we would stay there until we sorted things out, and I can tell you that helped us so much. They have daughters the same ages as ours, and the kids felt like we were on vacation.”
In the meantime, a Pingree couple who had never met the Vetters hurriedly moved out of their farmhouse so that the wayward family would have a home.
“Bob and Nora Moran had bought a home in Jamestown, and were planning to move sometime,” says Mike. “But when they heard about the fire, they hurried to move out so we could move in.”
But the kindness didn’t end with the Van Rays or Morans. People of the Pingree-Buchanan area pitched in to host a September fundraiser. “Almost 300 people showed up for that, and each class at the school presented us with a huge care package,” says Melissa.. “One class gave us kitchen items, another gave us things for our living room, bathrooms, and so on.”
The Vetters say they are so grateful for all the support—including a $1,200 donation from Operation Round Up.
“The communities of Jamestown and Carrington—and especially the Pingree-Buchanan community—were phenomenal,” says Michelle. “We’ve had so much support. Even a package from Texas that contained brand new toys for Kolton. It is just humbling to know how much people care.”
“We’ve been blessed, really,” says Mike. “This was a disaster, obviously, but we’ve got our kids and the rest we can put back together.”
