This family is still living in a camper 16 months after the Denare Beach fire

Brooke Kindle was eight months pregnant when her family was forced to flee their Denair Beach home last year. Her daughter is now 16 months old and the family is still without a home. The Kindles are now prepping to spend this winter living in a camper parked inside a shop and Brooke joins us live. Good afternoon, Brooke. Hi there. So when did you first leave Denair Beach? On May 28th, we were evacuated with about two hours notice. May 28th of last year, obviously. yeah 2025 and what was that whole experience like well it's getting easier to talk about now but it was super traumatizing i actually found out um via snapchat video somebody was posting a snapchat of them watching the listening to the radio and that's how i found out that we were getting evacuated within two hours because we didn't really have a fire near where we were it was more on a surrounding town so we evacuated because there was a threat for a different town and we thought it was going to be difficult to um to leave like with the roads being shut down and everything so we didn't really pack as if our house was going to burn we just packed because our roads were going to shut down and obviously i needed to go because i was 34 weeks pregnant so yeah yeah and then what happened it was challenging what happened to your home well our house burned our pretty much our most of our town burned my parents lived next door um we watched on my tesla like about five days later after we had left um that's how we knew for sure was because my tesla got so hot in our driveway that it went offline all of our cameras were out because the power was gone so yeah but people that had power like their smoke alarms because you can still sometimes get messages about your smoke alarm so we kind of just like we're watching each person's smoke alarms go off in their house going up the road until my Tesla was one of the last things that was online because it's connected to the internet a different way so yeah and then And after that, I thought, okay, this obviously is terrible, but I'll look at it on the bright side. Every renovation I ever wanted to be done is going to be completed. And we're going to build a house that will fit our life. And, you know, maybe it's just going to be a hard couple of years or a hard, you know, I thought it was going to be a winter and then we're going to end up with a new house and this is just going to be kind of a blip. I never thought that it was going to be dragged out this much, but it's just kind of been the reality for me and a lot of other people living in Dinner Beach yeah so what has been going on the past year and a half well um i've moved six times um we've spent we spent the winter living in a one-bedroom cabin which we were really lucky to even find we lived in our camper until it was uh snowing and way too cold then somebody that i was just asking random people to see if they would let me live in their cabins so i found a cabin that we could live in paid a lot of money in propane to keep it warm and then as soon as the spring thaw happened we moved into a shop that we were building throughout the winter and we parked our camper in there and we're still living in the camper um it's a new camper because our old one burned but um yeah so we're living in there with the kids and it's easier than living outside with the camper we've kind of got it set up in a cool way uh we don't have a bathtub so for example my son we got him a little Costco hot tub for his birthday so the kids swim and we make the best of it we play hockey and listen to music and do our best to have a good time but yeah there's a lot of mud and it is really hard