Still living in a shop, Denare Beach family waits for insurance settlement

When her family was forced to evacuate their Denare Beach home due to a wildfire in 2025, Brooke Kindel was eight months pregnant.

This fall, her daughter, now 16 months old, and the rest of the five-member Kindel family are preparing to spend the winter living in a camper parked inside a shop.

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Kindel said reaching an agreement with her insurance company and finding contractors in a town that lost half its housing, all while caring for three young children, has proved to be an unasked-for learning experience.

“Everybody’s been celebrating holidays all around us, as we have as well, but we still haven’t felt any sense of normalcy really yet. It’s been a really long year and a half of trying to create routines and, you know, trying to help the kids understand what’s going on,” Kindel said.

When the family was evacuated from Denare Beach, 14-month-old Callie was about four weeks from being born. (Brooke Kindel/Submitted)

When the family was evacuated from Denare Beach, they had just two hours’ notice. Kindel said she did her best to manage the needs of two preschoolers and herself while helping her husband prepare to stay in the community to fight the fire. She said she missed some things she would have taken had she been more prepared.

“I couldn’t even think, and I’m a very level-headed person. So you just never know when things like this will happen to you,” she said.

Her advice is to make a list ahead of time of irreplaceable items and store it on a phone or somewhere else easily accessible.

“If you just know, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m going to grab X, Y and Z. These are my favourite things. I just want to make sure that I don’t forget those — my grandma’s fruit bowl, things like that,’” she said.

Before settling in the motorhome inside the shop, the family lived in four other places, including a one-room cabin.

Since the Wolf Fire destroyed large portions of Denare Beach, many residents have rebuilt or replaced their homes with ready-to-move buildings. Kindel, however, wants to replace the home she had, but with a few changes.

Finding a contractor proved nearly impossible. She said some builders are working in the community, but prices are about $500 per square foot. She said some prefabricated homes are waiting to cross the Saskatchewan border from Manitoba, but have been held up by Manitoba Hydro. Others have been ordered from as far away as Meadow Lake and have not yet arrived.

In northern communities, the building season is limited by weather, road restrictions and the minimum temperatures needed for concrete to cure.

Kindel said homes are still arriving in the community, including three ready-to-move houses this week.

“We’re still fighting with insurance and trying not to settle for anything less than, you know, what was within our policy,” she said.

A major factor in residents’ experiences has been which insurance company they use and how their policies are written.

The Kindels’ insurer is based in B.C., and Kindel said wildfires there in 2026 contributed to further delays. She said the company has up to two years to resolve the claim, and may extend that period.

They were also underinsured, she said. Their outbuildings were insured for $75,000, while an appraisal put their replacement value at $690,000. She said the amount allocated to replace their home also does not reflect the cost of building in a tight contractor market.

Kindel said her best advice is for everyone to read insurance policies very carefully and note where there might be deficiencies, as it would have saved her family some significant headaches.

While she waits, Kindel said her children bathe in a hot tub bought at Costco. She said her toddler learned to walk quickly because crawling on concrete was cold, and kitchen items sit on a workbench beneath power tools hanging from peg hooks.

“We’ve definitely made the best of the situation, but I won’t lie and say that it’s easy,” she said. “I mean, Callie had to learn how to walk on concrete floors. Every time my kids go to someone else’s house — because most of our family is displaced and all living in these strange places as well — anytime they go somewhere normal, they’re like, ‘Look at these cupboards,’ because they haven’t seen cupboard drawers.”

One bright spot involved her son Jackson and Lucy, the cat he received as a Christmas gift two years earlier. Kindel said the pet ran away during the evacuation, but was found five months later.

Lucy had been left behind out of necessity. Kindel said her husband, Kyle, stayed to help fight the fire and had only about half an hour to leave when he was forced to evacuate.

“There were a couple of sightings of her, but we never could find her. And then, when it got really cold, we found her in an abandoned ATCO trailer and trapped her,” Kindel said.

When the cage door opened, she said Lucy jumped straight into Jackson’s arms.