B4 fire from B1 “Your house is on fire!” he
yelled at House’s grandmother, Betty Stanley, who was in the kitchen and oblivious to the blaz- ing porch. As Stanley and House scram-
bled to respond, Alley found House’s 8-year-old daughter, Laila, just inside a side door, crying. He picked her up and carried her to the end of the driveway, telling her to run across the street. The fire had leapt from the
porch to the corner of the house. Alley reentered the house to
find Stanley dragging Taylor’s slender figure toward the door. He took Taylor from her, lifting her over his shoulder, as House entered the room, fire extinguish- er in hand. Together they all fled through
the side door. Flames licked the carport’s roof overhead. Laila stood waiting for them on Clinch’s porch across the street. Watching everything you own
get destroyed is a “surreal” feel- ing,House said. She’d bought the two-story,
four-bedroom house on Ever- green Drive five years earlier for one reason: It was nearly perfect for Taylor’s needs. The wooden ramp leading to
the front door made the house wheelchair accessible; the small pool in the back yardwasideal for the low-stress calisthenics and exercises Taylor’s physical condi- tion required; and Stanley could stay in the spare room, as she often did, to help care for Taylor. By the time fire engines from
Charles and Prince George’s counties arrived, the carport was fully engulfed and House’s van, parked within, was burning. Soon the fire spread to the first
and second floors. Sections of the roof began to collapse. House didn’t cry. With her daughters there, she couldn’t. But her neighbors did. Even the ones she didn’t know
by name “cried like they had lost their house,” she said. And that was whenHouse began to realize how “blessed” she was.
Outpouring of support Word of the fire spread quickly
through the community. While House and her daugh-
ters were being moved into a Marriott Residence Inn the fol- lowing day, displays of generosity and kindness began pouring in. Phil and Ina Shepard, who
lived down the street, wrote House a $500 check. Carol Leveille, the principal of
Mary B. Neal Elementary inWal- dorf, where Laila and Taylor at- tend school, put out the call for help to teachers, staff and par- ents. The response was immediate
and overwhelming, Leveille said. Bags of clothes, new and used,
were dropped off at the school. A clothing drive was organized for the following weekend at Re- deemed Christian Worship Cen- ter.
Leveille arranged for one of the
school’s buses to change its route and schedule, to ensure that the girls would have a ride to school from the hotel. Taylor’s instructional assistant
at school, Janeen Willinger, went store to store at the mall asking for gift certificates or donations. She called House from one store
JUANA ARIAS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Next-door neighbor Doug Alley used a trampoline to jump over a common fence to alert the family when he first spotted the fire. Everybody escaped unharmed, including the family dog.
to ask what the girls’ favorite colors were. The next day, she delivered two
stuffed bears — one purple and one pink—that were donated by Build-A-Bear. “They went from a room full of
toys to none,” House said of her daughters. When they got those bears, it was “like they won a million dollars.”
A life derailed House set a bulging blue folder
on the kitchen table of her sparse- ly furnished temporary home. She and the blue folder have become inseparable. Inside are the pages of her past: birth certificates, Social Se-
curity cards, hundreds of photos of water-damaged furniture, smoke-damaged toys, burnt exer- cise equipment. And there are pages of her
future: blueprints and specs for the new house, sticky notes and appointment reminders. And there are pages of her
present: medical cards; a parking ticket; phone numbers for insur- ance adjusters, construction companies and neighbors. House busied herself with
making ravioli for her daughters, who had just gotten home from school. Before the fire,Househadbeen
working part time and going to the College of SouthernMaryland
COURTESY OF WALDORF VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT
Soon after fire engines from Charles and PrinceGeorge’s counties arrived, the fire spread from the carport to the first and second floors. Almost everything the family owned was destroyed.
to get her nursing degree. “I’ve been taking care of people
my whole life,” she said. “That’s my gift.” It’s a career she’d still like to
pursue when normalcy returns. Fornow, her days are dedicated to filing damage claims, requesting extensions on their temporary housing and working with the construction company that is re- building her home. “And it’s hard to work full time
and take care of a child with a disability,” House said as she set the table. Destroyed in the fire was more
than $50,000 in specialized equipment that was used to help Taylor with her cerebral palsy.
Some of the equipment has been replaced. Some, caught up in the jumble of claims procedures, hasn’t. As a result, House or Stanley
has had to manually help Taylor through her daily exercises. She has struggled, physically and emotionally, since the fire,House said. Taylor and Laila were wearing
the same pink, camouflage-pat- terned T-shirts as they ate dinner. Much of the donated clothing came in pairs. Laila bit her nails as she
worked on math homework. House scolded her, and Laila quipped back. Stanley helped to feed Taylor, whose head hung as
JUANA ARIAS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
As 8-year-old Laila, right, finishes up her meal in the kitchen of the family’s temporary home,NobasheaHouse feeds 10-year-old daughter, Taylor, who has cerebral palsy.House said she bought the Evergreen Drive residence, which burned down onMother’s Day, for one reason: It fit Taylor’s needs.
she sat in her pink wheelchair. She’s often tired when she gets home from school. Despite her fatigue, Taylor
laughed at all her sister’s jokes and commentary. The girls still share a bedroom — most nights they evenshare thesamebed—as they wait for their house to be rebuilt. One of the best things about
their temporary home is that it’s only a fewblocks away from their old place, so keeping in touch with the neighbors is easy. Laila still plays with Alley’s daughter, Nina. House is able to visit Clinch and see the progress on her home, which is scheduled to be finished by the end of the year.
And there are always text mes-
sages from Clinch about the work on the house when she can’t. “I’m there if she needs some-
body to talk to,”Clinch said, “or to throw things at on a bad day.” There are days when Laila
turns cartwheels and handstands for her smiling sister. And there are days when Laila and Taylor cry, pleading, “Mommy, I want to go home.” Those are the days when the blue folder feels like it weighs a metric ton. But House tries not to complain. It’s that positive attitude that
makes otherswantto help,Clinch said.
“She’s 30, and she’s lost every-
thing,” Clinch said. She paused for a moment and then shook her head. “But she hasn’t. She’s got her daughters. And she’s got us.”
rottn@washpost.com
Price tag of financial security just keeps rising, study concludes security from B1
set aside savings for college edu- cation or a down payment on a house. Utilities include a land-line
phone, but not a cellphone. At least one car was consid-
ered a necessity in the suburbs, but it was assumed District resi- dents would take public trans- portation, shaving $220 or more frommonthly expenses. Fairfax County was the most
expensive in every category, fol- lowed by Montgomery County. The District cost the least for childless singles, but as soon as a child entered the picture, Prince George’s County became the cheapest place to live. In most instances, the biggest
monthly expense for working couples with two or more off- spring was child care, ahead of housing and taxes. In WOW’s analysis, single
mothers are particularly squeezed. In most jurisdictions, the median income for working women who are raising children alone is well beneath WOW’s economic security figure. In many of the tables, two working parents earning the minimum wage of $7.25 an hourwould each have to work one full-time and one part-time job to reach finan- cial security.
Cost of living Wider Opportunities for Women’s Basic Economic Security Tables Index (BEST) is a best-practices guide for workers seeking financial stability. Tere are BEST tables for more than 400 family types, including one- or two-worker families with up to six children, and those households with or without health insurance.
D.C.
Housing Utilities Food
Transportation
Personal and household Health care
Emergency savings Retirement savings Taxes
Tax credits
Monthly total (per worker) Annual total Hourly wage
Homeownership savings
$814 162 301 210 344 148 93 87
513 -34
$2,638 $31,656 $14.99 $440
PRINCE GEORGE’S
$958 171 271 471 378 145 119 109 782 -34
$3,370
$40,440 $19.15 $264
ALEXANDRIA $1,154
129 271 440 419 147 124 128 709 -34
$3,486 $41,832 $19.81 $379
SOURCE: Wider Opportunities for Women; Center for Social Development, Washington University *Benefits include unemployment insurance and employment-based health insurance and retirement plans.
6For additional BEST tables, go
towww.wowonline.org In the two years since the
recession officially began, the number of families earning un- der $25,000 in Washington has crept up in every bracket.
“We’re facing a growing gap
between the top and bottom, with increasing unemployment and job losses and peoplemaking less than they did a couple years
ago,” said Audrey Singer, a de- mographer with the Brookings Institution. “There’s been a lot of concern about how people can make endsmeet in a region such
ARLINGTON COUNTY
$1,222 128 271 429 437 147 128 136 741 -34
$3,605 $43,260 $20.48 $449
MONTGOMERY COUNTY
$1,210 186 294 453 456 145 140 144 951 -34
$3,945 $47,340 $22.41 $345
FAIRFAX COUNTY
$1,356 164 301 438 491 147 143 156 878 -34
$4,040 $48,480 $22.95 $428
THE WASHINGTON POST
as this one, which has been fairly buffeted during the recession.” By most measures, however,
many Washingtonians are well out of financial fear territory. With a median household in- come of $85,000, according to the latest census data, and an unemployment rate well below the national average, the Wash- ington region is considered the most affluent in the country. It is also among the costliest. The Council for Community
and Economic Research, an Ar- lington County-based organiza- tion that calculates cost-of-living indexes, estimates it costs about 40 percentmore to live here than it does in cities closer to the average, such as Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Dover, Del. It lists Washington as the 11th
most expensive place to live in the country, just above Oakland, Calif., and behind Nassau Coun- ty, adjacent to New York City. “Though we’ll never be ac-
cused of being a low-cost area,we do reasonably well compared to other major metropolitan re- gions in the U.S.,” said Matt Erskine, senior vice president at the GreaterWashington Board of Trade. He cited another index that
lists the region as the seventh most expensive in the nation and 66th internationally.
Because Washington is a rela-
tively costly place, even the high- est estimates of how much a family needs to earn are conser- vative, said Kuriansky. Montgomery County uses
WOW’s formula in gathering in- formation for its biannual report on how much income is needed to be “self-sufficient” and live in the county without government assistance. Its last report, in 2008, said
almost $80,000 was necessary for two adults with one infant and one schoolchild. Today,WOW’s new report esti-
mates, that family would need $104,00, including $7,500 for savings. The study’s release coincides
with the impending election of a newmayor in theDistrict and his inauguration in January. The group urged the new ad-
ministration to focus more re- sources on programs like job training and financial literacy, and it wants residents of the region to use the cost-of-living tables as amodel for saving. “We believe we’re offering not
just numbers but a road map for what we can do in the District to enable more residents to be able to move toward more economic security and less anxiety,” Kuri- ansky said.
morelloc@washpost.com
EZ SU
KLMNO
MONDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2010 Outpouring of support after fire ravages Waldorf family’s home
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