Glad to hear you were able to safely control it and have a plan. As someone who rides similarly sized bikes, I hear you on the difficulty of finding replacement forks. Nashbar, when they were still a thing, used to sell a carbon fork (with steel steerer) that went up to 240 mm and was my go-to, but it had rather long threads (so it could be used with a variety of sizes of frames). I still have a search for them on eBay but haven't seen one pop up in years.