San Francisco homeowner Erika Gemzer is nearly a week past her due date.

Instead of resting with her feet up, the expectant mother is in the middle of a six-month ordeal that has forced her to move out of her home, send hundreds of emails and swim in a sea of multicolored spreadsheets as she attempts to repair her home—which was destroyed after her upstairs Airbnb guests clogged her toilet and completely flooded the property.

READ MORE: San Francisco Airbnb Bookings Plunge as City Battles Bad Press

On Friday afternoon, she walked through the halls of her gutted home with floorboards torn up, dismantled drywall, and personal belongings stacked up in disarray. It’s become a familiar routine for her and her husband as they’ve dealt with a virtual army of contractors, plumbers and claims adjusters.

“When does it end? That’s the unknown I live with every day,” Gemzer said. “How long am I going to think about this and replay this moment in my life?”

Erika Gemzer inspects the walls of her AirBnb unit while offering a tour of her damaged home on Friday. | Source: Juliana Yamada for The Standard

Gemzer, who detailed her story in a viral Twitter thread, said that instead of offering aid, Airbnb has given her a monthslong runaround with an eventual offer of only around 10% of the financial losses she estimates the issue caused.

She added that the company’s AirCover policy, meant to provide “top to bottom protection” for hosts during catastrophic events, fails to live up to that promise.

READ MORE: Airbnb Profit Jumps as Bookings Increase, Rental Rates Hold Steady

“We offered to pay the loss of bookings, her insurance deductible and additional reimbursement as a gesture of goodwill – we have been in continuous contact with the Host, including speaking today, to continue to support her,” an Airbnb spokesperson said in a statement.

The two-unit Edwardian in the heart of the Mission District was a stretch for Gemzer and her husband to purchase in 2018, but it allowed them to set roots in the city. The decision to purchase was due in part to their ability to help offset the cost of the mortgage with rental income.

Erika Gemzer looks at photos of her friends and family in her sewage-damaged home. | Source: Juliana Yamada for The Standard

After the property’s long-term tenants moved out of the top-floor flat in fall 2021, the couple decided to rent out the unit on Airbnb to earn revenue while keeping the place open for visiting family members.

Other than the occasional broken appliance or repair, hosting on the platform went relatively smoothly until this past April when two visitors from Turkey booked to stay in the flat for a month.

Gemzer and her husband had just started telling close family they were pregnant with their first child in April when soon after they woke up to a dripping sound and discovered water flowing in through the ceiling and fixtures.

They alerted their upstairs Airbnb guests and when her husband went inside they found the unit vacant and water covering the floor. The source of the water became evident quite quickly as he saw a streaming toilet with fecal matter still in the bowl before he rapidly shut off the water on the building.

When they opened the door to their underground storage space and saw five inches of water flooding they started to understand their home was virtually uninhabitable.

“That’s when we realized just how much water had traversed the three floors,” Gemzer said. “Doing a quick water calculation, you’re like volumetrically, this is really, really bad.”

Since her social media post went viral, there have been some people who have taken aim at the guests, but Gemzer said she does not believe the guests intended for this level of damage.

“I don’t want them to be harassed,” Gemzer said. “It’s a crappy thing to do to abandon the clogged toilet, but there’s no way in their mind they thought they were going to ruin the house.”

The toilet in Erika Gemzer’s AirBnb, which she calls “The Murderer,” caused extensive water damage to her property. | Source: Juliana Yamada for The Standard

Gemzer estimated that around 50% of the square footage of the property received water damage from the flooding. The family called in a water remediation specialist who set up deafening dehumidifiers around the house.

Without any certainty about insurance coverage, Gemzer and her husband stayed among the ruined wallpaper and warped floorboards for a week, before ironically—decamping for an Airbnb with their chihuahua mix. Their orange tabby cat, however, wasn’t allowed, and the couple went back and forth daily to check on their pet.

Drying out the house took a total of seven weeks and cost a total of $130,000. When they were able to finally get a construction estimate, that total came in at just shy of a quarter of a million dollars.

While the bulk of these costs are being shouldered by her homeowners insurance, Gemzer said she hopes Airbnb will help her pay for a number of costs, including revenue from lost bookings, insurance premiums, mortgage payments for her inhabitable home, additional water damage demolition not covered by insurance, and the gap between the approved amount for repairs and the actual cost charged by her contractors.

Light beams in through an exposed ceiling in Erika Gemzer’s home. | Source: Juliana Yamada for The Standard

Left without a permanent home, the couple moved from short-term rental to short-term rental before signing a seven-month lease at a house a few blocks away. Repairs, which are expected to take another half year, have yet to be started.

The process with Airbnb first required Genzer to ask the guests to foot the bill, which was unsuccessful. The company then assigned someone to her case and eventually connected her with a third-party adjuster who asked for additional documentation over the course of weeks in an effort to determine liability.

“We take Aircover requests incredibly seriously, including in this case, where we tried to send a third-party investigator to review the damage, but the Host declined, stating that her homeowners insurance company was supporting her with the damage as well as temporary accommodation,” an Airbnb spokesperson said in a statement.

The Standard viewed dozens of emails between Genzer and the third-party investigator Crawford & Company who eventually would send a plumber to diagnose the issue.

“I was continuing to spend hours and hours and hours a week justifying what had happened,” Gemzer said. “Literally our house was empty at this point, we had to beg them to leave the toilet, which was uninstalled and sitting on the ground upside down.”

The damage left torn-up floors and baseboards in the rental flat. | Source: Juliana Yamada for The Standard

The plumber snaked the line and found baby wipes and paper towels lodged in the pipes, but was unable to comprehensively determine the cause of the flooding.

“The cause of the problem was from abuse of drain and toilet internal parts not functioning properly,” the plumbing report stated.

The issue was caused by a combination of the toilet bowl clogging, the wipes and paper in the pipe and the float valve in the tank allowing the toilet to continue to run and flood the home.

Unable to gain traction through the normal process, Gemzer was able to connect with a former Airbnb employee who told her about how to find someone inside the company that could elevate the case internally.

But Gemzer said Airbnb required her to get individual quotes for items prior to being told if it would be covered by the company’s policy, meaning a continual hamster wheel of finding a vendor, getting a quote and sending it to Airbnb before being told if it’s covered.

Over the course of her entire communication with Airbnb, Gemzer said she never was able to speak to someone over the phone. After her post went viral, Gemzer said an executive called her husband, but she has yet to hear directly from the company.

Instead of having hosts just rely on their limited policy, Gemzer said she hopes that Airbnb could partner with other short-term rental insurance providers to offer negotiated rates for additional protection, and educate hosts on the limits of their baseline coverage.

“I just want to stop the bleeding and know that the mountains of financial losses are not going to continue to mount,” Gemzer said. “You advertise that we got your back when things go really wrong, but you don’t and you know that you don’t.”

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ONEustin, Texas is gripped by the gentrification that destroyed San Francisco, and it feels like my duty as a filmmaker to document it. I think you have to be a stubborn, headstrong, cranky bastard to make films. As a failed comedian who had to find another way to deal with everyday life, filmmaking and photography have kept my sanity, and our latest film explores the changes I am seeing in my local community.

Items found and kept in a shrine in an East Austin newspaper warehouse. Photo: Patrick Otisike Bresnan / The Guardian

I lived in San Francisco in the 90s when Big Tech was incubated, and I believed that the coming democratization of technology would unite us and make the world a better place. The anticipation was incredible. What we didn’t see as 20-year-old punks enjoying themselves in the SF Mission District was the complete inundation of affordable neighborhoods with technicians and real estate developers. Housing had become an act of gladiatorial combat, in which cash was the most powerful weapon.

During the pandemic, Austin appeared to have become the number one city that people moved to on the LinkedIn social work platform. Like San Francisco 20 years ago, people come to Austin to work in the tech industry and bask in the strange pseudo-liberal culture the city is known for. Homes now regularly sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars above asking price. This coincided with the construction of a Google Tower downtown, Facebook ordered 2 square meters of office space, and Tesla relocated its headquarters to Austin.

Bear goes to check out the newspaper at 3 a.m. on Christmas Day. Photo: Patrick Otisike Bresnan / The Guardian

The real human impact of this influx of highly paid and economically mobile workers is being felt in the form of a housing shortage. I’ve had this in mind since 2010 when I did a master’s degree in sustainability in the University of Texas architecture program with a focus on affordable housing. What I found so daunting about architecture school was the focus on sustainability in designing luxury homes and buildings that the majority of people could not afford or achieve. I understand sustainability more as the ability to preserve historical residents than through the design of energy-efficient buildings. By 2014 I had concentrated my energies again on an equally brutal career: filmmaking. I believe that through visual storytelling we can communicate social needs and try to maintain communities on the forefront of gentrification.

Bear sorting newspapers on Christmas Eve. Photo: Patrick Otisike Bresnan / The Guardian

In my new documentary, Happiness is a Journey, which I made with my film partner Ivete Lucas, we try to connect audiences with people who have very little power or ability to withstand the changing cityscape of Austin. The experimental split-screen documentary accompanies warehouse workers through the night as they process newspapers for delivery the night before Christmas. Your warehouse is on one of the most valuable pieces of land in the southern United States, a place with massive redevelopment plans. The physical newspapers they pack and deliver will expire in three years.

Our main protagonist in the film, Eddie “Bear” Lopez, lives less than a mile from the East Austin warehouse in a house he has called home for 60 years. Some of his colleagues have suffered from insomnia, some have been delivering papers since they were young, others are mothers who work the night shift to feed their children, or men who have been in prison looking for a return to work. While most of the people are huddled in their houses trying to sleep in anticipation of Christmas morning, bears and the like crawl to get their papers out of the camp before 3 a.m.

A mother and child at the East Austin newspaper warehouse. Composition: Patrick Otisike Bresnan / The Guardian

What we want to preserve in this film are the daily routines of the invisible working class in a city that will soon be priceless to them. Just as I’ve seen gentrification change the Bay Area, it changes Austin, and this film is an act of sustainability. We need to recognize the vulnerable people who make up our city and put a face to them before it is too late and they are forced to leave.

Happiness is a Journey is out today in the Guardian. Check out more Guardian documentation here. Sign up for the Guardian Documentaries newsletter here to be the first to hear about new releases and exclusive events.

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EL DORADO NATIONAL FOREST (CBS SF) – The Caldor fire that burns in the Sierra Nevada has now exceeded 100,000 acres and firefighters have been working to prevent flames from reaching the devastated town of Grizzly Flats again.

Cal Fire said the wildfire has burned 106,562 acres, or nearly 170 square miles, in the El Dorado National Forest since it began east of Omo Ranch and south of Grizzly Flats township on Aug. 14. A five percent containment was reported on Monday.

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At a press conference for the California governor’s Office of Emergency Services Monday afternoon, officials announced that two Galt police officers were seriously injured in a head-on collision on Highway 99 early Sunday morning while trying to help in the Caldor Fire. Two other civilians were injured in the fire last week.

As of Monday, at least 403 homes had been destroyed by the fire and more than 17,000 homes and other buildings were threatened. Six commercial properties were destroyed along with 148 other smaller structures, Cal Fire said. The cause has not yet been clarified.

Downhill winds, low temperatures, and moderate overnight humidity helped slow the fire from spreading.

Operations chief Tim Ernst said Monday the toughest area of ​​the fire continues to be around where it originated, with the flames continuing to storm towards Grizzly Flats, where dozens of homes were burned in the wildfire last week.

“To solve this problem, we are installing a lot of emergency lines and bulldozers, and last night we did a long fire operation to remove some of the fuel from the fire,” said Ernst. “But the fire continues to challenge us in this area.”

A firefighter prepares to fight an active fire on a hilltop during the Caldor Fire in Kyburz, Calif., Sunday, August 22, 2021. (David Odisho / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

After jumping on US Highway 50 over the weekend, Ernst said there was no extensive fire growth past Highway 50 overnight and the crews on the northern edge of the fire were busy with extensive building defense and preparation.

On the western edge, a significant amount of work has been done around the Jenkinson Reservoir and Sly Park area to connect the existing fire lines, Ernst said. The eastern tip of the fire continues to be a challenge, as daily winds from the southwest push the fire in an easterly direction.

CONTINUE READING: Woman driving on Interstate 80 in Vallejo. shot

More of the southern perimeter was expected to be contained later Monday.

Melissa Gustafson was among the residents of the area who were forced to flee their home. She and her family of seven had to leave their room at the Best Western in Placerville that weekend and stay with relatives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Her bill was several hundred dollars and it was paid by a good Samaritan.

“A lady behind me (in the checkout line) was (with) Cal Fire and told me she would take my bill for me,” said Gustafson, fighting back tears. “I was just so happy! We have nothing. What do you do when you have nothing? “

CALDOR FIRE: Information on incidents, evacuations, maps

Current mandatory evacuations include:

• Grizzly Flats: The areas on Grizzly Flats Road east of Kendra Way in Grizzly Flats Proper. The Diamond Railroad Grade, Old School House, Sweeney Road, Caldor Road, and Steely Ridge areas.
• Grizzly Flats Road east of Four Corners in Somerset in Grizzly Flats Proper.
• The areas of Myers Lane, Varmet Ridge Road, Rodwell Canyon Road, Snowbird Lane, and Mehwald Lane.
• East of Sly Park Road between Highway 50 and the Mormon Emigrant Trail to Ice House Road. These include the Pacific House and Fresh Pond communities.
• North of Highway 50, east of Forebay Road to Ice House Road.
• Junction of Perry Creek and Hawk Haven, the east side of Fairplay Road from Perry Creek South to Cedarville Road. These include Slug Gulch, Omo Ranch, and all roads away from Slug Gulch and Omo Ranch.
• All streets of Omo Ranch from Cedarville Road to Hwy 88.
• The area between Highway 88 and the Mormon Emigrant Trail
• South of Highway 50 from Snows Road to Ice House Road.
• Between Highway 50 and Slab Creek from Snows Road to Ice House Road.
• South of Highway 50 from Ice House Road to Silver Fork Road. This also includes the community of Kyburz.
• North of Highway 50 from Ice House Road to Silver Fork Road with the Ice House Reservoir, Union Valley Reservoir and Loon Lake.
• Silver Fork Road in Kyburz east to Twin Bridges.
• North and south in a line extending from Twin Bridges to the Placer County Line and south to the Amador County Line.
• Areas south of Farnham Ridge Road and east of Bridgeport School Road to the Amador County Line.

Evacuations Warnings for El Dorado County and Amador County along with Road closures You will find here.

The Caldor Fire, along with other forest fires in Northern California, has caused the USDA Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest region to temporarily close nine National Forests. From Sunday, August 21st, these parks and the streets and paths in them will be closed to visitors until September 6th.

MORE NEWS: 9 National Forests in Northern California closed for Labor Day due to forest fires and drought

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When she returned Monday from her property on the windy Maacama Ridge Road in the hills east of Healdsburg, Pamela Page remembered the lunches her father held at their home. Menus with homemade guacamole, a spicy crab dip with jalapeno and gazpacho.

Page’s family and neighbors gathered around a long table and made ham and fig sandwiches from the fruit they had picked from the trees their father had planted. Your neighbor would bring a fig cake.

Today there are only concrete walls and a stone chimney.

Page walked around the estate on Monday to review the damage from the devastating Kincade Fire, and a flurry of memories returned. The long table was gone. The trees were burned. And the vineyards that surrounded their property burned before Page’s family had planned the harvest.

On Monday, the fire was 77,758 acres and 80% contained. It destroyed 374 buildings, including 174 houses, and damaged 60 buildings, including 34 houses.

“They are sometimes shocked and … then we laugh a little and then there is a super sadness,” said Page, 56. “I think there is also a little anger. I had that the other day. How could that happen to such a nice person? It is sad.”

Mandatory evacuation orders for the fire areas were lifted on Saturday and residents have since returned to review their property and search the rubble before leaving. Some people, whose houses survived, plugged in generators and returned. But many others chose to stay elsewhere because of the lack of electricity.

Along Chalk Hill Road, which runs from Windsor to Healdsburg, many of the houses survived the flames. But nestled between burned vineyards, ruined plots were visible through the sparse trees.

The fire broke out in a rural area in northern Sonoma County on October 23 and spread rapidly, propelled by gusty winds. Cal Fire officials expect the Kincade fire to be fully contained by Thursday.

Many residents stayed in their homes until mandatory evacuation orders were issued on October 26. Within 24 hours, the hills around Chalk Hill glowed red in flames. Both sides of the road were on fire and the embers fell into the vineyards. Firemen were parked at each apartment building, ready for a vigorous fight against the fire if it came near houses – a fight that was largely successful. Fences and driveways were burned, but for many the blackened floor ended right outside their front door.

In Windsor, many residents returned to their normal routines on Monday. Shops and restaurants were open. The Panda Express on Hembree Lane was full of people having lunch. At the AT&T store across from the parking lot, three workers were sitting and asking each other if they needed to evacuate.

But in the neighborhoods east of town, where the fire raged less than a week ago, the only visible workers repairing burned phone lines were.

Page’s estate, attached to a winery, was intended as a retirement for her parents when they bought it in the 1980s. But after 35 years it had become a work of love.

Her father, Seaver Page, 86, a retired oncologist, built two houses, tended rows of vineyards, and planted fig and avocado trees. The house was a safe haven for Page, a single mother who lives in Cloverdale. She often brought her son and daughter, now in her twenties, with her to play in the creek, ride a quad, and spend Christmas with her grandparents.

Nearly eight miles from the Page property, another house in the 9400 block on Chalk Hill Road had burned down. Between the white, ashy rubble sat an iron rooster and a stone Buddha. The brick foundation and the chimney were still there, albeit slightly charred.

“Thank you very much! 1st Responder You’re great,” read a white sign with drawings of fire engines, helicopters and airplanes attached to a number of mailboxes.

Dozens of PG&E workers parked along Chalk Hill, replacing the power poles that had burned in the flame. The crews also cut down burned trees. The fire department worked to keep the fire out of residential buildings, even though some barns and outbuildings had been destroyed.

“It’s just so different along Chalk Hill Road,” says Annie Holden, a neighbor. “There used to be so many trees.”

Holden was evacuated on October 26, but returned on Saturday to find her red-painted house on Chalk Hill still standing. They stayed with friends in Santa Rosa and watched the news in horror while video footage showed their neighborhood on fire.

Holden and her husband didn’t know if their home had survived until they called the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office and got a video of their standing property.

“We thought the house was gone,” she said. “It was amazing.”

The only damage was in their yard, although it appeared the firefighters stopped the fire just before it reached their well. Her mailbox had melted slightly, but a charred edition of the Healdsburg Tribune, a weekly newspaper, had largely survived.

Your neighbors weren’t so lucky. A lot near the intersection of Chalk Hill and Highway 128 had burned down. The property was surrounded by a row of trees that had become completely bare.

“You wouldn’t have known there was a house there because of the trees, but now the trees are empty,” said Holden.

Less than a mile away, off Murphy Road, Vicky Robinson was watering the front yard. The hills around her house were blackened from the fire, but the only damage to her house was the stench of smoke that still wafted from room to room.

Robinson, 56, had been evacuated about a week ago, but her husband stayed behind. He wanted to save her house when the fire got closer. But at 3:00 am on October 27th, as gale winds howled through the area, he left after seeing the hills around her house ablaze and the embers “coming across the street.”

“The firefighters were amazing,” said Robinson, pointing to the houses to the left of their house. “I can’t believe what they did. All these houses, they burned in the courtyards, the fire burned all the way to their door, but the houses were saved.

“We’re just so grateful,” she added.

Sarah Ravani is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SarRavani

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