Clarendon

Sarah Pledge Dickson, LJI Journalist

After a fire destroyed the entire Clarendon home of Doug and Reuben Hodgins and the future home of their nephew Kyle Cockerell and his family, community members have rallied to support them as they get back on their feet. 

The latest in these community efforts is the upcoming benefit fundraiser, scheduled for this Saturday, Oct. 5, organized by Karissa Rutledge, a friend and neighbour of the Hodginses, who lived their whole lives on their family’s Herbie Road farm.

“We were woken up at 4 a.m. the morning of the fire and all we could do was sit there and cry and call our friends to check on them,” Rutledge said. “We felt useless, there was nothing we could do.”

Since the fire, now a month ago, Rutledge has figured out how to help the Hodginses, as well as their nephew Cockerell, his two young daughters Kinsley and Kierra, and his wife, Kelsey, who all recently moved back home from Alberta and were building an extension on the Hodgins home in which they planned to live. 

“If there’s one thing we know helps, it’s to bring people together to support one another,” Rutledge said, regarding the benefit she’s organized for this weekend.

The night before the fire, Kyle and his uncles were working hard to sand the floors so they’d be ready for staining the following morning. Around 3:30 a.m., Cockerell remembers being woken up by an Amber Alert notification. It was a few minutes later that he felt his phone vibrating. When he picked up, it was his uncle Reuben on the line.

“Reuben called me saying the smoke detectors were going off,” Cockerell said. “I just said, get out of the house.”

Reuben said that without their smoke detectors, they wouldn’t have made it out.

“We always change the batteries in our smoke detectors,” Reuben said. “Without the batteries, we wouldn’t have woken up. The noise was getting louder and louder.”

By the time Cockerell got there from the apartment where he was staying with his family in Shawville, approximately 12 minutes after he first got the call, the house was consumed.

“When I hit the highway, I could see flames coming up both ends,” Kyle said. “When I got here, the whole house was completely engulfed.”

It took the Shawville-Clarendon Fire Department several hours to put out the whole fire.

It has since been determined that the only thing that could have caused the fire was the hardwood sander. According to Cockerell, the insurance company said that it was the only thing in the house with an actual heat source, and the Hodgins’ case was not the first time one of them had caught on fire.

At the time of the fire, Cockerell said he and his family were almost ready to move in. After using reclaimed wood from an old farm, they had built a large addition to the home where Doug and Reuben have lived all their lives. The original building was converted into an in-law suite for the brothers and Cockerell had planned to move his family into the new addition.

The fire started in the new addition before spreading through the attic and into the in-law suite. It was only about 20 minutes after Cockerell woke up that the fire caused the ceilings and the roof to cave in. Their front porch is now a pile of timber waiting to get put back together. 

“All the material was either from the farm or the bush,” Cockerell said. “We’ll try to salvage what we can from the fire, but other people have already donated timber from their old barns.”

Now, Doug and Reuben are staying at their sister’s place near Ladysmith while the Cockerell family continues to live in the apartment they rented in Shawville as their base during construction.

In total, Cockerell estimates that the living space of the house was around 5,900 square feet. Now, even the foundation is a write-off.

Nevertheless, the family is still planning to rebuild their new home on this same site.

Cockerell is back at the farm every day, something he said hasn’t been easy.

“I still come here every day because we have a pony to feed and some other animals,” Kyle said. “But it’s hard because you can’t bring the kids here, not until it’s cleaned up.”

A benefit is scheduled for Saturday night at the Shawville Recreation Association to help raise funds to support the Hodginses and Cockerells as they rebuild their family home.

The event will also include a raffle for prizes, a pie auction, and a firepit around which the community can gather.

Cockerell said it’s been incredibly touching to see the community come out and support their family.

“The local neighbours, friends, family, like the Rutledges, they were here almost before the fire department,” he said. “And they’ve never really left.”

Cockerell said the community spirit was what brought him back to Shawville, his hometown, after living in Alberta for over 15 years.

“One of the big reasons we wanted to come back home is because it’s very few and far between that there’s a community that will rally this way,” Cockerell said. “If something bad happens to somebody, everybody’s there and that’s what we want our kids to grow up with.”