BRISTOL, Va. – Fire gutted a trailer here Monday afternoon, leaving a family, already down on its luck, with no home, no clothes – not even a pair of shoes.
“We could feel the heat, it burnt our backs,” said Christina Davidson, who recently moved into the trailer on Bristol View Drive with her boyfriend and his two children. “I was still in my pajamas, barefooted. We panicked, just ran out and didn’t take anything. Now everything that wasn’t burned is black with smoke and soot.”
Davidson said she and her boyfriend, Jackie Ervin, are both out of work and have no fall-back plan to speak of.
They’d been sick and were recuperating in the living room with 4-year-old son, Kaden, when fire came roaring out of Kaden’s back bedroom. She said 5-year-old Tessa was at school.
Authorities said the blaze is still under investigation, but suspect is was an electrical fire that originated in the boy’s bedroom.
The family was in and out of neighbors’ homes all afternoon, hoping to salvage what they could from the trailer. At the end of the day, all they turned up were the car keys and everything in the refrigerator, although, Davidson added, they had nowhere to put the food.
Davidson grew up in Bristol, but moved a decade ago to Smithville, Tenn., where she met Ervin. They and the children moved back to Bristol last month and were putting up new wallpaper in hopes of buying the trailer.
“I’ve been gone for 10 years, I don’t know anybody I used to know anymore,” she said. “But all the neighbors came out, and acted like they’ve known us for years. They’ve been really generous so far.”
Ervin ran out of the house in nothing but a pair of blue jeans. By late afternoon, neighbors had given him a shirt and shoes that were just a little too big. Four-year-old Kaden was still barefoot.
The American Red Cross put the family up for three nights at a motel, but they don’t know where they’ll go come Thursday.
“It really hits home when you see the school bus pull up and a cute little girl with ponytails and eyes as big as silver dollars get out,” said Bristol Virginia Fire Chief J.C. Bolling. “That’s the human side of it that a lot of people don’t see. Sure, we had a trailer that burned down, but we also had a family displaced.”
Bolling said the call came in around 1 p.m. and the department was there within minutes. But fire doubles in size every two or three minutes, he said, and trailers, with little structural integrity, are especially hard to save.
The early winter is one of their busiest seasons, Bolling said, attributing much of their workload to unattended electrical heaters. He warned of the importance of smoke detectors, and even offered to come by to install or check one out.
“You think a fire’s never going to happen,” Davidson said. “It’s horrible, we have nothing. I have no clue what we’re going to do. But thank God the kids are OK.”
cgalofaro@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2531
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