In the days following the fire that ravaged their house, during the night of Sunday January 14, Natacha did not immediately realize what she and her children had just gone through.
“I had lots of things to manage, I was on the phone all the time, whether with the insurance or relatives,” confides this mother.
Daily life eventually caught up with her: she had to return to her job as a logistics agent at Amazon, her four children, aged 14 to 22, returned to school or their respective training courses.
Also read “My daughters don’t even have a coat”: a family from Oise in distress after the fire in their house
At the end of January, the five left the hotel in Villers-Saint-Paul where the family had been living since the disaster to move into a small house, still in Cauffry, made available to them by the municipality.
“This allowed the children to continue their education,” thanks Natacha.
The first night is complicated.
“It was by calming down, it was only there that I understood everything we had lost, I had a repercussion,” she explains.
And to illustrate: “These are very stupid little things.
For example, I want to cook but I don't have the utensils I need.
One of my daughters is studying pastry making and she no longer has a mold, no longer a whisk, no longer a robot.
In fact, we have nothing left, nothing at all.
» After an initial clothing collection, an online fundraiser has just been launched by one of her colleagues, to help this family “recover from this terrible ordeal”.
“We won’t be in our house for at least a year”
“It's especially for my children, they no longer have clothes, no more personal effects... We're always a bit struggling, we live from day to day.
» Because everything burned during that evening.
After being woken up by the smell of burning plastic, the mother tries to turn on the light, but the electricity no longer works.
When she activates the flash on her cell phone, she sees smoke “coming out of the ground”: the ground floor is devoured by flames.
Cauffry, January 2024. In this alley, a house was ravaged by flames.
The family lost the vast majority of their belongings.
The firefighters called, Natacha and her children, some of whom were simply dressed in shorts or a t-shirt, left their home in disaster.
If the disaster is brought under control a few hours later, their house is now uninhabitable.
“The work has not yet started, we are still waiting for the Enedis experts to come to assess the damage,” she continues.
But we won't be in our house for at least a year.
»