Washington County, Va., woman escapes trailer fire with three children

BRISTOL, Va. – Just after midnight Wednesday, Joe Hooker parked his truck in the narrow sliver of grass between his trailer and his neighbor’s. He got out, heard a strange beeping, then smelled the smoke pouring out of his neighbor’s roof, in the back corner of Tri City Trailer Park on Lee Highway.

A few minutes earlier, Stacy Compton woke to the sound of the plastic on her windows crackling. She noticed an eerie glow around the corner, just feet from where her 7-month-old baby slept.

By the time Hooker reached her front door, ready to pull them out, Compton had escaped with her baby and two children. She called 911.

“I told her, ‘go, go, run!’” Hooker said. “And tried to put out the blaze myself. They said I was a little bit nuts, a little bit crazy.”

Hooker crept into the trailer, took his jacket off and used it to beat the flames, which were by that time 3 feet tall and just getting bigger. His jacket melted into a butterfly-shaped clump of black plastic.

“I bee-lined, ran, jetted to the landlord’s around the corner to get a fire extinguisher,” he said. “But by the time I got back, it was too late. The whole place was engulfed in flames.”

When the Washington County Volunteer Fire Department arrived, minutes later, three-quarters of the trailer was on fire. Window blinds in the trailer next door started to melt.

“At that point, there really wasn’t a whole lot to save,” Chief Michael Morenings said. “We stopped it from getting the last quarter, and stopped it from catching the other trailers around it on fire. When there’s that much fire and that much heat, it doesn’t take much to spread.”

The fire is still under investigation, but Morenings suspects it began in a wall outlet in the living room where Compton had a space heater plugged in.

All that was left Wednesday afternoon was a blackened shell, with few items that still resembled what they once were: a broken computer monitor on the lawn, a charred bed frame, three Huffy bicycles with melted handlebars.

Compton’s trailer is surrounded: There’s a trailer just a few feet away on either side and more lined up behind, three rows deep.

Morenings said it takes a trailer about seven minutes to burn down, and older trailers, specifically, “have a lot going against them.”

Hooker, who lives in one, agreed.

“These old trailers are death traps,” he said. “It didn’t take eight minutes for all of this to happen. What if we hadn’t been here? There would have been a domino effect and all these trailers would have gone up.”

The owner and landlord of Tri City Trailer Park did not return Wednesday afternoon phone calls.

Compton was laid off from a hotel last June and couldn’t find a job. In September, she was evicted for nonpayment. She said she couldn’t find any other place to go, so she moved into the old, leaky trailer that costs $400 a month in rent, with electricity running upwards of $300 a month.

Since then, she’s been working with Becky Shuttle, who is with the Department of Social Services, to find safer, affordable housing.

Shuttle arrived at the smoldering trailer Wednesday afternoon, shaking, crying and armed with cell phone photos she took of the trailer before the fire: showing broken ceilings and light sockets with live wires sticking out.

“She deserves better than this, nobody deserves to live like this,” Shuttle said. “I’m angry that she had to go through this. I’m angry we couldn’t do something quicker for her. I’m angry she had to live here in the first place.”

Compton still wore the clothes she jumped out of bed in. She, and all of her kids, left barefoot. Neighbors poured out of their trailers offering blankets and sweaters.

“It was a good start, a very good start,” Compton said. “But you need a little more than optimism.”

Her 9-year-old son wears a size 10-12; her 8-year-old daughter fits an 8-10; and the baby is in 12-months.

To make a donation, contact the Mountain Empire Chapter of the American Red Cross at (276) 645-6650.

cgalofaro@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2531