Fire destroys mobile home

Sat., July 30, 2005

Christopher Rodkey Staff writer

From her neighbor’s window, a weeping Stacy Beck looked out at the charred remains of her mobile home.

“It’s a complete loss, everything in it,” she said, overcome with emotion and trying to get through on the phone to her father in Montana. “I can’t believe this.”

Beck’s mobile home in the Mead Royale Park, 11612 N. Sheridan, caught fire Friday morning, and in minutes an entire lifetime of memories was reduced to smoldering ashes. From the darkened, air-conditioned kitchen of her neighbor’s home, she watched as firefighters methodically hauled those memories onto the grass of the front lawn.

A couch with no cushions. A chair with no seat. And right below the window, a trunk, in which a few colorful quilts and blankets survived.

“That’s a fifth-generation trunk,” Beck said. She lived alone and the home was uninsured.

Her black Lab, Bear, panted calmly at her feet, spared from the flames. Visitors from the community stopped by, offering condolences or items. One left a prepaid phone card with 500 minutes to use. Another gave her a pat on the shoulder and an offer to help.

“I don’t know, what do I do now?” she asked.

Masked firefighters sprayed foam and water into the house while smoke wafted above the nearby poplar trees. Beck was at a friend’s house when the blaze broke out, and said she had a premonition about the fire.

“I had a weird, weird feeling a few days ago, and when they walked in to tell me, I knew what they were going to say,” she said.

The item she treasures the most, the last photograph of her mother before she died a few years ago, hung in a picture frame on a wall now demolished.

The call for the fire came at 11:41 a.m., and when crews responded they found the mobile home engulfed in flames, said operations chief Mike VanHeel.

The fire spread to the brush and grass around the home and crews were digging a trail around the edges to keep the flames from spreading, he said.

The cause is unknown, and it’s unlikely investigators will ever know because of the intensity of the fire, said Capt. Dan Walsh of Fire District No. 9.

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