More stories of heartbreak are emerging as evacuees are allowed to access their properties following the devastation left behind by the McDougall Creek wildfire.
Patrick Lacey was allowed to return to his Kelowna property on Sunday to confirm what he already knew, "it's just burnt metal and ash."
The Lacey family is starting from scratch for the second time now after their first house on Westside Road in Traders Cove was completely gutted by fire back in May of 2019.
Fast forward to today and the house they had just finished rebuilding after the first fire has also been completely destroyed by wildfire this time. "Similar to the first fire but a little bit less demo cleanup it looks like," Lacey says.
This is the second time the family has turned to GoFundMe to help them put their lives back together. Patrick Lacey was the owner-builder of his new property that he says he just finished before the fire took it away.
"We've been building since the house arrived in August of 2020. Around the same time, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. So I basically built from that point forward through the winter, I've been building nonstop since 2020. I was two months away from final inspection. We were getting ready to move in. Now, we're back to finding a trailer," Lacey says.
The Lacey family and their two children have been through a lot already but their challenges aren't finished yet.
"Unfortunately, because I'm an owner-builder, I'm not certified as a contractor. We couldn't get anything (insurance) extended beyond three months. And we looked everywhere. So yeah, we are without insurance, no content insurance, nothing.
"It seems surreal that it's actually happening again, because we fireproofed our property, we cleared everything. We should have just been working on the house trying to finish to get it insured, what a waste of time," Lacey says.
The family lost everything again and now they are looking for accommodation as they start the process from scratch.
"The first fire was electrical and we basically had terrible insurance because it's a rural property and it had low-amp service. We basically pieced everything together to build the second house and put everything we had from contents into buying the house package, and we're back at Ground Zero all over again," says Lacey.
