Stephanie Davidson is relieved she didn't stick around to see the restoration project she'd devoted years to go up in flames.
"I'm glad I don't have the sound in my ears or sight in my mind," said Davidson. "What I see is what I'd created."
She's thankful, too, that she didn't run back inside to grab one last thing. By the time Davidson pulled her car over and came to a stop in Rangiora, her home, centred around a 134-year-old church, would have been an inferno.
Davidson was one of three Loburn residents to lose their homes to wildfire on Friday, January 19.
"There's more than that, too," Davidson reflected. "There's a lot more hedges, fences, sheds, barns, vehicles — a lot more damage than just three homes."
Her property was the most well-known and easy to spot from the main road linking Loburn with Rangiora.
In 2012, she bought the deconsecrated St Andrew's Presbyterian Church and, over several years, worked to install a kitchen and living area inside, linked, via a covered walkway, to a modern, two-storey dwelling and garage.
The project wasn't without challenges. There were issues with workmanship and the builder engaged by Davidson was found to have breached the Fair Trading Act. When her story was broadcast local tradespeople and businesses rallied to help complete the build.
'Wonderfully supportive'
Now, locals are rallying again to support her and others who've lost their homes, as fire investigators work to establish where and how the blaze began.
"The locals have been wonderfully supportive, and they're sad," said Davidson. "They're sad about their wee church. I've had a number of people come to me over the years ... stopped me in the garden ... 'hey, I went to church here as a child and I'm 70 now' ... it's a loss for us all."
All that remains on site now, three weeks after the blaze, is a pile of bent and buckled corrugated iron and slabs of exterior plaster.
Mostly everything else is unrecognisable, though Davidson spotted the springs of her bed in the rubble. She pondered that on the day of the fire. She might well have been lying on her bed, upstairs, having a break from the heat, if she hadn't arranged to host a neighbour for a cuppa that afternoon.
Davidson had gone down to open the gate when she first spotted a "mushroom cloud of smoke" in the distance. She raced inside to call emergency services and to shut her internal doors, before taking off in her vehicle. By the time she reached her entrance gate, flames were licking at the perimeter hedge.
'It was all smoke'
The Karikaas Cheese factory is located directly opposite Davidson's property.
Co-owner, Di Hawkins, had seen the fire racing along the road and ran inside to dial 111. When she returned 30 seconds later, the situation had worsened.
"I could no longer see anything ... it was all smoke, clouds and clouds of black smoke. I thought we might lose the house to be fair."
Hawkins and her husband worked alongside volunteer fire crews to successfully steer the flames away from their home and factory. She said the ground where the fire raged is still radiating heat and they've been warned that they are vulnerable for a while yet.
Both Hawkins and Davidson are grateful to the volunteer brigades who converged on Loburn from all over North Canterbury, and grateful to the communities who support them.
"It's their families, it's their employers, it's their clients," said Davidson. "It's everybody who allows them to do their job."
"They were just simply outstanding," added Hawkins. "I can't say enough about the job they did."
It was Hawkins' birthday two days after the fire, "and it was the best present that I was still here."
Davidson is still coming to terms with all that's been lost but is confident in how she reacted in the heat of the moment.
"In hindsight, there's nothing else I could have done," said Davidson, with a word of advice for others.
"Don't try and grab that box of memories, don't do it, just have a plan.
"Have a good think about the realities of what could happen. When I saw that smoke I didn't think my house was going to go on fire, I didn't know that," she said.
"I just thought, there's a fire, get out."
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