Matt Lara
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On April 2, 2012, Matt Lara who resides in the Paleface Lake Shores Development in Spicewood, Texas spoke with KUT News about his experience during the Central Texas wildfires.
Lara: The first moment was walking outside on Sunday of that Labor Day weekend and I was going to town to meet some friends for a beer, just a good Sunday, a day off and walked outside, and the light in the yard, the sunlight, was just really strange; it was just too – there was something too orange about it like all the blue had been cut out of it and I thought, maybe I’ve been staring at a computer screen too long or something, my eyes are messed up. And then I smelled the smoke and realized that there was a fire and went ahead and drove out to 71. I see my neighbor on the right and he’s kind of packing up and I saw his boat tied to his truck and I thought he was just taking the boat out and he kind of waves and I wave at him and I drive to the corner of 71 and Paleface and I see the fire and I pull over and I call him and say, “Hey, Dave, I think there’s a fire,” and he said, “Yeah, there’s a big fire. You need to come home and pack up and get ready to get out of here.”
KUT News: And what did he have in his boat?
Lara: He had – I mean all of the important household belongings, everything files and keepsakes and he had just loaded – used his boat basically as a trailer and he had a pickup, too, so he had the pickup loaded with some of the bigger stuff, pieces of furniture and what have you and then he had his boat with all the things that he could just run in and grab because the fire – he had a friend who lived up on Hainey Flat Road and that’s kind of where the origin of the fire was in Spicewood was right around there and his friend had called him and warned him and said you’ve got about 20 minutes, if that, to get your stuff.
KUT News: Did you notice what was in his boat? Were you driving by when you saw the boat?
Lara: It’s one of things that kind of hit me subconsciously. It didn’t hit me until I got all the way out to 71 that hey, he had stuff in his boat, it wasn’t just another day out on the lake and that’s when it occurred to me to probably call him and I put two and two together and realized that there was probably something wrong, really really wrong.
KUT News: So, what happened next?
Lara: I turned around. I came back home. I had my dog with me already and just went in the house and started grabbing all the things that were really important to me. I play music and I grabbed my accordions and guitar and pictures off the wall and files and all the things that I considered important. Loaded them up into the back of my pickup and then about that time, the Sheriff’s Department came through and drove through and they announced over the megaphone that there’s a fire coming, they said fire is imminent, evacuate now and loaded up, got out, checked on a couple of the neighbors on the way out and made sure they were leaving and drove out and went to a friend of mine’s house in Oak Hill to kind of wait and see what was going to happen next.
KUT News: And so, were there – so, what did you do at your friend’s house? Well, just continue on.
Lara: Okay, I took it easy for a little bit just kind of letting it soak in what was going on and also he’s a good friend of mine and I leave my dog with him a lot so I knew if I had to go back that was a safe place to leave my dog. It was also about 5:00 by then and I hadn’t eaten dinner so I ate dinner.
KUT News: Were you able to get any information?
Lara: I wasn’t – well, I hadn’t gotten any information yet and then I got a call from my friend Dave, the neighbor who was on the corner of the street who was loading up his boat and he said, we’re all in the parking lot at Pooty’s, would you – we’re just waiting here to see what happens and we can kind of see a little bit of the smoke and the fire and keep tabs on what’s going on and oh by the way. Our neighbor Chris stayed behind and he’s given us reports of the fire. He’s standing up on his roof, he’s watched the fire go past and I go, oh my gosh, well, I’m coming – I’ve got to be where you guys are at.
I want to be in the fray, I want to know what’s going on so finished eating real quick, left the dog there and drove back out to the Pooty’s parking lot and there are I guess 20 of my neighbors just sitting out there you know kind of tailgating basically, kind of with a look of shock on their face, but also they’re just – it’s a great community and so everybody was taking comfort in having those people around them, but they were also a little bothered that we had this neighbor who was still over there in the fire kind of watching things.
KUT News: Were you thinking he was crazy?
Lara: Yeah, everybody – well, we know him. He’s a great guy and he’s just one of those people who’s pretty much fearless, but we also knew that he had lived out there in the neighborhood for 20 years or so and knew – if anybody knew the lay of the land and how to be safe in that situation, it would be him and so we knew that he was taking the right precautions. I know if you talk to anybody who’s a professional firefighter they would say that’s – that personal property is not worth sacrificing for life, but he knew what chance he was taking so we went in there or I went back to Pooty’s and met up with the neighbors and decided that I would go in and try and meet up with him just to give him a hand cause I didn’t like the idea of him being in there by himself.
KUT News: And so, others from your group were they also going to go with you?
Lara: They were waiting right then. A lot of the wives were telling the husbands they just simply could not go. They said it’s stupid, you’re silly, you’re crazy, you can’t do that and even Chris, the guy who was over there, his wife was saying – she was not terribly pleased with him for being over there, but she understood what he was doing and was happy that I wanted to go over there to check on him and so I asked him how do you get across because the neighborhood is closed off and he told me the route to get across the river from Old Ferry Road and so I drove over there and parked and looked across and kind of took it all in. You could see the fire up along the hillside or there in the river bed going up into the neighborhoods and it was kind of an eerie moment.
KUT News: I bet. Did you see anybody that you were trying to dodge or were you really out there from any firefighters and officials?
Lara: On the Old Ferry side of it, there was a park right there kind of on where the river bed is, of course, the river’s completely dry then and there was a bunch of people, just gawkers, onlookers or people maybe who had houses over there who were watching the fire so they were parked there. You would see a couple of sheriff’s cars here and there, but not a lot of emergency vehicles on that side of the river because the fire was all on the other side, but I did look and I noticed that the subdivision right next to us was really bad. They had a huge fire or the fire really really affected them the worst I think and I looked over and I could see smoke rising from our neighborhood, but I couldn’t see huge flames coming up, I could just see individual trees burning, but I could see my neighbor’s house where he was standing waiting for me and headed out across the river and could hear propane tanks exploding and I think I told somebody it looked like a scene out of Apocalypse Now; just like I say a really really eerie scene.
KUT News: So you reached Chris?
Lara: Yeah, I found Chris and he was at his house and I just said, well, what’s going on and he said come on, let’s load up. He had a golf cart. He said load up, I’ll show you, I’ll kind of take you around and show you what’s on fire, what’s been damaged, what’s left and he told me right away that two of our neighbors’ houses were gone already that the first wave of fire that had gone through, for whatever reason, just like a tornado, it had picked certain houses and skipped other ones so we had the neighbor’s house on the corner was completely engulfed in flames and then my next door neighbor’s house was completely engulfed in flames, but somehow or another my house was not so he had a little pressurized water sprayer that he was using to put out small fires and some buckets of water and we were just going back and forth with buckets of water from our neighbor’s hot tub because the fire had knocked out the electricity and we’re all on a well so we didn’t have any water pressure to speak of so we were just kind of using any standing water to put out fires with.
KUT News: And buckets?
Lara: And buckets, yeah.
KUT News: So, it was just the two of you?
Lara: It was just the two of us for a couple of hours and then finally a few of the other guys, the other neighbors broke loose and about two or three other guys came over and started helping us and we went around the neighborhood just keeping a constant bucket brigade going all night, just trying to find areas that we thought were going to catch fire again and travel back up through the neighborhood if we didn’t stay on them. One of the biggest spots we had a neighbor of ours on the far northside kind of where the fire had come through of the neighborhood and his deck kept lighting on fire and it was a lot of wood and we knew that if that caught fire, his house would catch fire and that whole side of the block would go so we spent a good portion of the time just going back and forth to that deck and making sure that it was put out because the whole little valley or cove beneath it was on fire.
KUT News: So, it would keep catching on fire again?
Lara: Yeah, it was really stubborn. We didn’t have – since we didn’t have water pressure, I mean you’re really putting kind of a band aid on the ax wound; you’re just doing a little bit here and there to keep it, but the wind kicks up and a burning tree falls on it again or something like that and it catches fire again in that area and so we would go around and check on other spots in the neighborhood that weren’t as bad and weren’t as critical and try to put out some of those hot spots and then go back to that. We did that until about 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning and the fire department showed back up again at that point and time. They were just simply overwhelmed with the massive amount of fires going on at that point and time.
KUT News: So, how many homes do you think you saved?
Lara: That’s really hard to say. I mean, we don’t know.
KUT News: Percentage wise or how big is your neighborhood?
Lara: There’s probably, there’s roughly 20 homes in that immediate portion of the neighborhood, but I mean I think we could definitely say we saved his. It would be speculation to say whether or not we saved the other ones in the neighborhood, but we were just trying to do what we could given the limited amount of resources that we had and when the fire department got there, they completely doused it and they really kept it from going back up again. They let us go get some sleep, a little bit.
KUT News: So, that was the worst of it? In your neighborhood since the fire department showed up?
Lara: Yeah, that was definitely, from what Chris said, he watched the fire come through from the roof of his house and he saw kind of – I asked him, what did it look like? Was it a wall of flames? He said pretty much this big wall of flame came through the neighborhood and that ignited everything and then after that it’s just what’s on fire is on fire and you have to just keep it from catching other things on fire. What was really sad is we came through the next day and more of the neighbors had started coming in across the river and we went over and checked on some other neighbors’ houses in the next subdivision and they – we saw quite a bit of damage had been done there, but I don’t know, maybe about a quarter of the houses or something in that neighborhood. Then later on that day, the fire kicked back up again and took probably an equal amount of houses again in that neighborhood.
KUT News: This was your adjoining?
Lara: This was an adjoining neighborhood that was one over. I think it’s the – it’s off of Paleface Shore Drive, Paleface Lake Shore Drive, I think. They were definitely hit the hardest out of that fire.
KUT News: So, I’m sure the fire department was working hard the second day. What did you see of the fire department?
Lara: What we saw – well, we saw them that night and then I went home or I didn’t go home. I wasn’t going to stay. None of us were going to stay in our homes just because we knew that if you fall asleep, the fire could kick back up and that’s taken – we’re already taken a bad chance. That would really be a bad risk to take so we had some great neighbors who were letting us stay across the street. I didn’t know that yet. I did later on, but that night I went and stayed at my office and slept on the floor for a few hours which was just about 15 miles or ten miles down the road. Slept till about 8:00 and got back up and met the neighbors again.
I think, by the time I had got there, the fire department had come through once and they came through with a brush truck, they sprayed things down and throughout the day they would come through periodically. You could tell they were getting more resources. They were fire trucks coming in from other towns and other localities and really doing a good job of staying on top of it. I think us being there was really a double edge sword for them. They really, at first, did not want us there. It’s just – like I said, it’s something silly to be in there protecting your property. You’ve got insurance or some people did, not everybody. But once they realized that we weren’t doing anything stupid, that we were going back across the river and playing it safe when we needed to.
I think they appreciated – they knew what was going on, they knew they couldn’t watch it all the time and so what we started doing is just putting out the small fires that we could, just little hot spots. We weren’t going to go in a home; we weren’t going to do anything that would really put us in danger like that. Other than that, we would call them and be their eyes and ears in that neighborhood so if we saw a big hot spot kicking back up, we would call them and they would send a truck over pretty quick.
KUT News: This is the Pedernales Fire Department?
Lara: Yeah, this was the Pedernales Fire Department. As I understood it, the Spicewood Volunteer Fire Department, which, oddly enough, we now have a neighbor that’s a member of the Spicewood VFD, but from what I understand, since we’re in Travis County, they weren’t able to come over and work with us. I think that was the Pedernales’ jurisdiction. I don’t know if that’s the right word for it.
KUT News: So, your house. Were you – you weren’t next door to Chris’ house, is that right?
Lara: No, I was kind of across the street one block over and diagonal to him, so I was, oh, about a half a block away from him.
KUT News: This is your house? We’ve put it up on the screen. You’re about a block away from – so when you got there, did it look like this?
Lara: That’s exactly what – that picture was taken the second I got there. What I found out is that Chris, I would have to say, saved my house. The house next door had already caught fire and was way beyond help. It was pretty sketchy. There was a large propane tank there that was probably open and so there was a lot of fire, there were a lot of things that were dangerous. Clearly, Chris couldn’t do anything for that house and in the picture the fire line comes right up to my house and I think he probably did a lot before I even got there to put that out and to keep it from reaching my house.
Then, when we got there, we found an old folding table that was leaning up against my fence and up against my house. I had used it to block the fence to keep the dog from getting out and they – one of the things that they tell you and we know this now about wildfire protection for your home is keep all debris away from your house. Well, this really illustrated that point because the table was on fire and leaning up against my house and had we not gone by, it would have gone ahead and caught this – I’ve got wood siding on the house. It would have caught the wood siding on fire and I probably would have lost the house.
KUT News: And you saw that when you got there?
Lara: Right, right and pushed it away and put out that area.
KUT News: Unbelievable. Golly.
Lara: There was also another really strange picture of – there was about a cord of wood, so a pile of wood that was about three feet tall by maybe seven or eight feet long. A big pile of wood that the previous owner had left there. It was really dry and rotten and the fire had come kind of through the open property. There is about 40 acres open behind us and the fire had gone through there and would kind of come in and like I say, take certain – took the two houses on the block and it came in and it caught that whole wood pile on file in the back of my yard and I think because Chris had put the grass out where it was burning from the pile towards my house; I think that kept it from taking the house, but that pile burned for two days until it was nothing, but just white ash about a inch tall.
KUT News: That’s a lot of buckets of water, don’t you think?
Lara: I mean at that point and time, it was shovels. One of the strange artifacts of the whole thing afterwards is I noticed there were two broken shovel handles sitting over on the corner of one of the blocks and I found out later that before I had gotten there, Chris was just beating the fire out with shovels and had actually been going at it so hard and so fast that I think he had broken actually a couple of shovel handles trying to furiously put out the fire. Here were these two broken burnt shovel handles laying there in the ground was –
KUT News: Was a testament
Lara: It’s a testament to it, yeah.
KUT News: So, you were able – he had already doused the woodpile?
Lara: Well, he wasn’t able to douse it; it was way more than you could put out. All he could do is stop it where the grass had burned. So, since the grass had already burnt in that area around the woodpile, it had nothing else to catch on file so it just sat there and burned for like I say about two days.
KUT News: Just an island burning?
Lara: Yeah, yeah.
KUT News: So, tell me that was Day 1 and then you were talking about Day 2. What happened after you were working – you went back on Day 2 got some sleep and came back Day 2. Then what happened after that?
Lara: Day 2, boy, it’s kind of a blur. Day 2, I picked up some breakfast tacos and brought them in. Everybody kind of ate a little bit and, like I said, more of the neighbors had come in by that point and we started to get a little bit more organized at that point and time. Our neighborhoods, a funny little neighborhood, everybody knows each other, it’s very friendly and they go around on their golf carts and they say hi to each other.
KUT News: I want to move there.
Lara: Oh, it’s nice. Nobody really plays golf; well a couple of people play golf there, that’s not true. But whether you play golf or not, people – I don’t have one, but it’s probably only a matter of time, but it’s just kind of a preferred mode of transportation so they use the golf carts as a means – since they couldn’t bring their cars over so the golf carts offered us a means of transportation around the neighborhood. We would just go around and constantly go around the circles in the neighborhood and over to the adjoining neighborhood and put out hot spots where we could. We drove in.
We had some neighbors who had a pottery studio over there. They had already lost – they had two studios and a house, I believe, and they already had lost one of the studios when we found some other little hot spots that were going up again threatening the other structures there. Fortunately, that had a big rainwater collection tank and so we were able to really really take, get a good bucket brigade going and take a lot of water and use it to put out that area. That was a huge lesson learned about keeping water on your property for something like that.
KUT News: Absolutely. Gosh. So, you continued to fight fires with other neighbors on Day 2 and then what happened after that?
Lara: And then after that, like I say, people got more and more organized and so we set up, our neighbors, Dave and Penny on the corner set up kind of a little triage station, a little command post with first aid supplies, waters, coolers, lists, a bulletin board right there on the corner so if there was any emergency services coming in that needed information, if there were neighbors coming in needing information or people out there helping that needed water, first aid, or supplies, we had a little station set up for them which was really incredible of Dave and Penny to do. But it worked out perfectly because it became that meeting point for everybody to come together and take stock of what was going on and discuss the situation.
KUT News: Were they allowing the residents back though at this point?
Lara: Not at that point, but like I say, they had – we had kind of reached an understanding with them that they knew that we weren’t going to go away so they were happy to work with us at that point and time and they would, we would, like I say, just keep in communication with them. The fire had really started dying down by that point and time and it was just hot spots. I don’t think it opened up till that next day and by the time it opened up that next day, I think it was on Tuesday or Wednesday, they started opening it back up. We established a checkpoint at the edge of the neighborhood because we had found out that one of our neighbors had already chased a looter off of his property and so we kept at least two people there at the entrance to the neighborhood almost for a solid 24 hours by taking shifts for at least the continuation of that week. We always had somebody out there.
KUT News: So, they’d be coming at all hours of the night looting?
Lara: You know, we really didn’t see that much. We would see a lot of people, just gawkers, people coming by, but we did have one or two instances where there were people that were definitely there to loot. I think the one neighbor said that he saw somebody come onto his property and drive past in a white pickup and he waves him down and they keep going right past him. He finally gets his 12 gauge out of the back of his pickup and fires a shot off up in the air just for the sound of it. He’s definitely not firing at them and they stopped, of course, and he goes over there and asks them what they’re doing. They tried to make up some story about being with the fire department, but it was clear they weren’t. They had copper pipe and bathroom fixtures and looted material in the back of their pickup. He told them where they could go. I think they left pretty quickly.
KUT News: And would your neighbors know everybody in your neighborhood ’cause it’s that small?
Lara: That’s true. Yeah, we know pretty much everybody coming through there and we would pretty diligently if somebody came in and we didn’t recognize them, we would ask them who they were there to see and what they were for. If they said, hey, I’m just here to see the aftermath; we would turn them back around and tell them the people here are trying to recover from their loss. We need to watch for looters. We really need to keep down the unnecessary people in the neighborhood.
KUT News: So Day 3 and 4, were you still fighting fires?
Lara: Fighting fires definitely all the way to the end of the week and it was really interesting because we would go back across the river and stay at our friend’s house who were gracious enough to let us all stay over there. Just wonderful people. They kept us fed and comfortable and gave us a place to rest and would actually come back over there and help us out. I remember at one point and time we find, okay, we’ve got most of the hot spots taken care of. We go back over, get a little rest, get a bite to eat and say, you know, something – let’s go over and check on it and we’d go back across and there’s this huge tree just, I mean, flaming like something biblical. By itself in the middle of –
KUT News: Other trees?
Lara: About to catch this whole field on fire and we go oh my gosh, thank goodness we came over. Another one of those instances where that one tree would have caught the field on fire and would have caught the block on fire and thank goodness we came across site and put it out.
KUT News: Well, and luckily – well, no injuries were caused by this vigilante –
Lara: Correct. Right, right, right.
KUT News: Ad hock fire department in your neighborhood, you all, but also you were able to find a way to get back in. I’m wondering if – there must have be many that roads were blocked, there was no way they could have gotten in.
Lara: Right, and actually the Sheriff’s Department was, like I say, I definitely understand why they would not want people over there and realize that it’s pretty silly what we did. We knew our neighborhood, we knew what was at stake, especially once we realized what was going on with the hot spots and that somebody needed to keep an eye on it. We were glad we did, but the Sheriff’s Department started watching for people going back across the river in golf carts, in ATV vehicles. We were able to get across because our neighbors lived across the river and it was easy to get across on foot from their house. But, yeah, they definitely didn’t want people crossing over at that point and time.
KUT News: So, how long – so, by the end of the week the fires were out like Friday. It started on Sunday.
Lara: And mostly out by Friday. Even though I want to say into that next weekend there was somebody found a fire in the cove down below us there were some fires in the cove. It had started back up again. Some of these hot spots that you would find there would be tree roots burning under the ground or piles of old leaves that had been under the ground that had just started burning and would be down underneath there smoldering and then the wind would kick up and anytime that wind would kick up you knew that a hot spot would catch again. You kind of had to go around and start looking for those columns of smoke.
KUT News: When did you get to spend the night in your own home?
Lara: I think the first, I’m trying to remember, it was probably right around that Friday, I think that I finally did. It was at the end of that week. I started needing to go back into work by the end of the week. I’d taken most of that week off to just be there with my neighbors, to check on things, to help people out, to do whatever we needed to do. We just had kind of formed this kind of co-dependence on each other where we had gotten really used to being around each other. It’s interesting, I had gotten to know my neighbors a little bit before that. I was definitely the new guy in the neighborhood, but that whole experience just really brought us very close together and kind of gave us, made us all feel like a family, more so than just neighbors.
KUT News: And that’s a bond that will you know – that’s a strong bond.
Lara: Oh, yeah. It’d be hard to move away from that neighborhood now after all of that.
KUT News: How about those who lost their homes? What are they going to do? Do you know?
Lara: So, we’ve got two of our – well, I’ve got two of my immediate neighbors on my block that lost their homes. We’ve got several neighbors on Red Rangus, which is the street that runs perpendicular to us that lost their homes and everybody is in some process of rebuilding right now. My immediate next door neighbor; they did not have insurance. They owned the home outright. Did not have insurance on it and so they were really devastated, of course, by the fire and by the loss. We helped them – spent some time that next week helping them pick up and helping them clean up their site and pick through rubble. I mean, it’s just crazy seeing an entire house reduced to no more than a six inch high rubble pile. We just took everything down.
We went through and we would pick through and basically do what a looter would do, but we’re doing it for the homeowner. We’re going through and looking for any copper wire that’s left so you can recycle the copper wire, anything that has any possible monetary value that could be used towards the rebuilding of the home. So, we spent a couple of days doing that. Now, the really incredible part of the whole story is that several of our neighbors, everybody for the most part in the neighborhood, helped out in some way or another, but there were a couple of really bright and shining stars.
Two neighbors, our one neighbor Katie and then our neighbor Mark that just jumped in there and started organizing people and started getting together with the different aide organizations and the different churches and following through and making sure that these people that didn’t have insurance and these people that needed help got the necessary resources. So, they kind of became the <inaudible 32:34> for the neighborhood in connecting the people who needed help with the help available and now, as a result, speaking at least for my immediate next door neighbor; he’s had one church donate the foundation, another donate the lumber, he’s had people donate windows, electrical. He now has a house up basically. He’s got the walls are up, the windows are halfway in, the roof is on, I think he’s going to start doing the interior of the house pretty soon. Absolutely incredible. The man’s a carpenter so he’s been a lot of this with his own two hands, him and his brother-in-law and then neighbors stop by and help occasionally when they’ve got time on the weekends. These church groups stop by. It’s just really incredible to see the outpouring of help.
KUT News: Now, that’s just a whole another aspect of it, isn’t it?
Lara: Yeah.
KUT News: So, what have you all – what have you learned? Are you preparing for the next, this next summer?
Lara: Absolutely.
KUT News: What are you all doing or what are you doing?
Lara: You know, there’s been some interesting things in the neighborhood. The neighborhood got a fire truck which –
KUT News: Went out and bought a fire truck?
Lara: Yeah, yep, we have a neighbor that helped us out with that. That was his big contribution to the neighborhood. Really, legally and in the common sense, we’re not a volunteer fire department. We’re aware of that. We’re not going to use that to go in and put houses out and fight fires, but we did realize that we needed something to hold water and something with a water pump on it so at least if there were some of these hot spots for the next time this happened, we at least had some way of getting water to where it needed to be and so that was kind of the benefit of having that truck cause it’s got a 1,000 gallon tank and a pump on it.
But along with that, I think some of the more practical things are we’ve started, I said earlier, keeping the brush away from our homes. Several people in the neighborhood have started doing rainwater collection on their homes so if that does happen again, there’s available water right there on the home site or nearby. That’s one thing I plan to do as soon as I’ve got the finances available to do it is get a rainwater collection tank on the house because we’re on a municipal utility district, Spicewood’s already, of course, gone through – been affected by the drought, lost water and portions of it had wells dry up so this is something we’re very aware of, the need for water storage for two fold.
KUT News: Absolutely. What else would you like to share about your experience?
Lara: Let’s see. I think the – I think the biggest thing is just really remembering that it’s not over yet. I think even a year into it there’s still going to be people out there who need help and to remember that there’s still people out there like my neighbor Mark and my neighbor Katie who are working all the time, constantly, to help these people out and to find resources for them so I think with any disaster like this, just because the fire’s gone and people are in the process of rebuilding, you just always have to remember that the impact lasts quite a bit longer than that and if you – when it comes to helping people out, keep doing it, if you feel like it. I’m very lucky, very very fortunate and I’m not a person who needs help; I’m a person who’s fortunate enough to get to help, but there’s definitely people in the neighborhood that, both in Spicewood and in Bastrop and anybody affected by the fires that still need that help.
KUT News: And to have to grieve and be in shock and have to deal with insurance and lack of insurance and paperwork and to have to do all of that all in this year. Unbelievable.
Lara: Yeah, it is, it is. There’s – you also realize how resilient people are and the amazing ability to overcome and know that it will work out.
KUT News: Well thank you, Matt.
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