‘Absolute devastation’: Fire destroyed their homes. Now they must rebuild their lives from scratch

Leah Liouzis still wakes up in the middle of the night and doesn’t know where she is. Most of the time, she can’t fall back to sleep.

It’s been a month since a fire in the unit below her family’s Epsom apartment left Leah, her nine-year-old son and her fiancé without a long-term place to call home.

They’ve been staying with her mom in Alton and have signed a month-to-month lease on a vacant house for sale in Loudon belonging to the grandparents of a friend. As she gets the house ready to live in, albeit temporarily, Liouzis regularly opens the garage, where her family’s rescued belongings currently reside, to air out the still-thick residue of smoke clinging to everything.

“You feel very, very misplaced,” she said. “You feel like you don’t have a home. You don’t have your things. It’s been absolute devastation for our family.”

From pots and pans, stuffed animals, clothing, furniture, and everyday nick-knacks, Liouzis needs to find ways to replace the objects that once made up her life, all while mourning her cat, Cooter, who died in the blaze.

Morgan McInerney and her 19-year-old son, Blake, face the same daunting task.

In Franklin, the charred remains of their apartment, which caught fire at the start of the month, stand as a reminder that in addition to losing most everything they owned, including their birth certificates, they could have lost each other.

“I probably should have been more grateful for the things that we did have before the fire,” Blake said. “But there’s definitely things to be grateful for. Like myself, I’m grateful for my family and my animals, and that’s kind of really all that I need, because after that, you can see how quickly everything can be taken away.”

Both families had only lived in their apartments for around a year. These fires have uprooted their lives and their sense of belonging.

Their stories are more common than one might think. In 2024, fire departments across the state responded to a total of 1296 residential fires. Data from the State Fire Marshal’s Office indicates a growing number of fires over the past five years. The most frequent causes include heating, cooking and electricity.

In the weeks since losing their homes, Leah and her family, similar to Morgan and Blake, have started piecing together their next steps while navigating the often overwhelming uncertainty of the unknown.

Epsom, June 20

Thick, dark smoke billowed in the nighttime air. Water ran in a river down the street.

Leah Liouzis had never seen so many firetrucks in her life. She bolted out of the car where the road was blocked off half a mile from her apartment and ran past the row of houses until she got to the one surrounded by emergency vehicles, flashing lights and more smoke than she thought possible.

Her mind jumped to every worst-case scenario she could conjure while panicking that she had accidentally left her curling iron on before leaving for work. The loudest thought in her head was the one filled with intense worry for her two cats, Otis and Cooter.

It was a Friday night. She had been at work at the Lower East Side Pub in Barnstead when her fiancé, Ken, who was helping out as a temporary bartender, got a call about the fire. They both rushed back to Epsom, where they had moved after the home they had been renting for eight years in Concord was sold.

She found her cats in a nearby ambulance. A firefighter handed her Cooter, wrapped in a towel. She caressed his brown and white fur, wet from the water used to douse the flames — then she registered that her companion of fourteen years wasn’t breathing.

“We say everything’s replaceable, but not Cooter,” Leah said, her voice thick with emotion. “I know he was getting older, but he was in great shape. For him to go out like that, it wasn’t fair.”

Her other cat, Otis, required respiratory treatment at the emergency animal hospital in Concord, where he stayed for several nights. One of the veterinarians covered the cremation costs for Cooter, a kindness that still makes Leah cry. Leaving the animal hospital in the middle of the night, she and Ken drove to her mother’s house in Alton, where their son had already been staying for the week.

Leah sat in silence for over an hour that night, letting the sobs wrack her body. Then, she tried her best to get some sleep so she would have energy to meet the coming day.

Franklin, July 1

Before heading to the gym on a Tuesday evening, Blake McInerney glanced out the window of the second-floor apartment he shared with his mother and his girlfriend. That’s when he noticed the smoke, which he initially mistook for fog.

“Within a split second, the light gray turned into dark black, and then you could start seeing the orange of fire climbing up the windowsill,” he said.

He called 911, rushed to put his two cats in a crate, slipped a leash on his dog, Boston, and opened the front door to exit. A wall of smoke from the flames climbing up the porch rushed into his face, preventing his escape.

“I’m stuck inside,” he kept repeating to the 911 operator, his voice rising in panic.

Blake fled with the animals to the back of the apartment, searching for windows not filled by air conditioning units. He found one in his mom’s bedroom and busted through the screen onto a small, slanted roof landing. A group of spectators stood below, some filming, which greatly disturbed Blake, who began screaming for help.

From the crowd below, a man named Mark Bowen scaled the back porch to help Blake lower his cats to safety. As Blake passed off the cats to Bowen, Boston got spooked, bolting away from the window. Blake initially refused to leave without his dog, but Bowen convinced him the firefighters would ensure Boston got out safely.

“Everything is burning. Everything’s going to burn, and she’s inside,” he repeated, looking up at the window where he had last seen Boston.

Blake called his mom, sobbing. By the time she made it back to their street, firefighters had rescued Boston and extinguished most of the blaze, which had also consumed Blake’s car and motorcycle. Morgan and Blake stood side-by-side, staring at the remnants of their home.

This was their first shared apartment, their “fresh start,” as Morgan called it. After years of struggling with addiction, she went into treatment in 2023 and, as of last year, moved to Franklin with Blake and secured a stable job at a recovery facility.

Watching the flames, the smoke and the firefighters, Morgan thought to herself, “This cannot be happening right now.”

The aftermath

For Blake and Morgan, just as for Leah, Ken and their son, locating an alternative place to live became the immediate priority.

Without any family in the area, Blake and Morgan stayed with the parents of Blake’s girlfriend for the first few nights. Finding an apartment that would rent to them on such short notice proved difficult, especially with Morgan having an eviction on her record.

Lakeshore Estates in Laconia became their saving grace. Within a few days, they secured a two-bedroom apartment, back in the town in which both mother and son had lived for years before moving to Franklin.

The first few nights in their new Laconia apartment, Morgan slept on a mattress topper on the floor, with Blake on an air mattress.

“Just the fact that we were in a home together kind of made it homey in itself,” he said.

But even then, the list of to-dos loomed large — obtain furniture, replace clothing, find a car to replace Blake’s burnt one, get a new laptop so Blake could keep up with his studies. They tackled everything together, one step at a time.

In the aftermath of the Epsom fire, Leah, too, found the seemingly endless stream of tasks to be exhausting. She still wakes up in the early hours of the morning, her mind racing, and can’t fall back asleep again. Once she and Ken signed a temporary lease on a Loudon house, she set about preparing for the move while staying with her mother in Alton.

Neither family had renters’ insurance — Leah’s had expired in April, whereas Blake and Morgan had not been able to afford it in the first place. The lack of financial compensation meant that everything they had to replace came out of pocket.

Leah returned to her apartment several times to salvage what she could. When she first set foot in her former home a few days after fire — which had begun in her downstairs neighbor’s dryer — she could not look away from the black soot coating everything. Rather than burning, the space had sustained smoke and water damage.

“You’re in such a state of like, ‘What do I grab? What do I take while I have a couple of minutes?’ she said. “It was hot. It was just smoky and very hard to breathe. So you got disoriented in there.”

She took her family’s cooking utensils, social security cards, jewelry, photo albums and clothing — even though her loved ones told her she wouldn’t be able to get the smell out, she still wanted to try.

“I can’t think too hard of what I didn’t grab, because it will kill me,” Leah said.

‘That love got us through’

From GoFundMe pages and workplace fundraisers to gift cards and donations, the sense of support in both Epsom and Franklin has proven immense.

“I always kind of had a negative view on Franklin, and I guess seeing how well they pulled together was really impressive,” Blake said. “It was really cool to see how everybody kind of came together to help out.”

Thrift Clothes Closet opened its doors and let his family take what they needed. Archways, the recovery facility where Morgan started working two weeks before the fire, held a fundraiser and gave her the proceeds. Walmart, Blake’s employer, offered him a gift card and helped him apply for additional funding.

He’s glad to be back in Laconia, where he’s spent most of his life but will “definitely hold some praise for Franklin now.”

Even with mother and son splitting the rent, they find themselves stretched thin financially. Blake and Morgan are slowly filling their new space and taking comfort in what little they saved from Franklin — their old dog’s ashes, Blake’s leather jacket and his baby blanket. He’s getting ready to begin at the Fire Academy in Concord next month in hopes of becoming a firefighter himself. Still, the smell of a burning grill or even cigarette smoke transports Blake back to being trapped on the second floor of his burning home.

The family doesn’t yet know the cause of the fire and can’t get the blackened remains of their apartment out of their heads.

“Seeing how bad it was, I was like, holy crap I could have died in there,” Blake said. “At least the dog got out, because the floors and the ceilings had started caving from the way that the fire was going.”

In and around Epsom, friends and strangers alike have reached out to Leah. She’s still working her way through the hundreds of messages she’s received.

“We definitely felt the love — absolutely felt the love — and that love got us through,” she said.

She took two weeks off work at the Lower East Side Pub, which held a dunk tank fundraiser for her family during Bike Week. Now, back at her job, she’s prioritizing caring for her son and getting her family settled at their temporary Loudon house.

Her son keeps telling her that he doesn’t want to move again. Every time he mentions it, her heart twinges. She just wants him — and her whole family — to feel safe. They’ve begun hunting for a multi-family home to share with Leah’s mother and sister.

“I want a place right now that I can rest my head and know that I don’t have to leave anytime soon,” said Leah, who can’t register her son for school yet because she doesn’t know where her family will be. He loved Epsom Central School but doesn’t know if he’ll be able to return.

As she navigates these uncharted waters, Leah longs for a sense of normalcy.

“I’m just not sure what that is yet,” she said.

Rachel Wachman can be reached at rwachman@cmonitor.com