Nederland community comes together after Colorado shopping center fire: "Friends turn into family"

In Nederland on Thursday, neighbors stood by caution tape as they saw their central shopping center turned to ash. An early morning fire destroyed the Caribou Village Shopping Center, with more than a dozen local businesses. 

Julia Fritschel lives right behind the center.

"It's devastating. It truly is, there were at least 20 independent small businesses that were in that shopping centre where people worked, where people congregated, and it's just gone in less than 24 hours, here yesterday, gone today," she said.

The local grocery store and community hub, Carousel of Happiness, were largely spared, but most everything else is gone. Fritschel says she woke up on Thursday to evacuation orders.

"This morning, at 4 a.m. I got a knock on my door from the police…" she said, "All I could see was, like, 40 feet of flames, and as I was driving down the canyon, ash was flying off my car. It was scary, apocalyptic... genuinely, the craziest thing I have ever witnessed in my life."

Fritschel spent the night with family down the canyon, but her first stop back in town wasn't to check on her house; instead, she checked on everyone else.

"We own and run Decent Bagel here in town, and we decided this is the perfect opportunity as a community to come together. So we came back up and opened up. First thing we did was bake three dozen bagels to bring to our first responders," Fritschel said.

And they weren't the only ones, as other local businesses carried in pizza boxes and beverages to first responders.

Local brewery, the Knotted Root, also jumped into action as they hosted a community fundraiser the very same day. Neighbor Dan Vollmer brought everyone together, but the community was already stepping up. 

"When you live in such a tight-knit community, everyone is just your neighbors turn into your friends, and your friends turn into family pretty quick," Vollmer said.

Even as smoke continued to rise, his online fundraiser for the center got close to $100,000 and was growing. Vollmer said as soon as he heard neighbors were all okay this morning, he already had 50 calls and texts from folks looking for ways to help.

"Half of our businesses were in that shopping center. You know, close to five to 10% of the workforce in town is there on any given day. And so it's, it's going to be hard to get through things, but I know that what we do better than anything else is figure it out," Vollmer said.

And with this much support, there's no doubt in Fritschel's mind that the community will rebuild.

"I think that this unfortunate thing has the opportunity to be a phoenix moment. We could have something better come from the ashes. I think that our community can rebuild to be better and stronger," Fritschel said.