Friday, December 24, 1999
Fire displaces 55 families
Apartment residents fled flee blaze with little
Fire engulfs 65-unit apartment building.
(Michael Snyder photos)
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UNION TOWNSHIP - Gloria Bateman smelled smoke Thursday morning as she sat in her nightgown watching TV. She had just taken a shower.
“When I looked out the window, I thought it was fog,” said Miss Bateman, 48. “Then I saw the firetrucks. I saw flames shooting out a window about four apartments down from mine and reach up to the second floor.”
She threw on a coat, put on a pair of shoes and raced outside into the frigid morning air.
Once inside the apartment complex's clubhouse, her concerns turned to her two cats, Shakespeare and Mao.
Firefighters found Mao first. A little later, they handed her Shakespeare, a black cat with white markings.
Smiling, Miss Bateman cuddled Shakespeare.
“Things are looking much better now that my babies have been found,” she said.
While there were no serious injuries, 55 families saw their homes destroyed in a Thursday morning fire at Woodbridge on the Lakes apartments.
A neighbor of Miss Bateman searched for her own pet as firefighters continued to battle the blaze.
Liana Brock escaped from her apartment with her two young children, but she feared that her cat, Precious, was killed in the fire.
As she began to talk about her pet, she leaned on her father's shoulder and started crying.
For such residents, this holiday season suddenly became a time to grieve for what had been lost.
Enquirer reporters interviewed residents at the scene in the first hours after the fire. Here are some of their stories.
A firefighter rests against a fire vehicle.
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Of all the possessions she lost, the one that pained Tina Blackburn the most was the small black plastic box containing the ashes of her father, who died four years ago.
“I didn't know the fire would be that bad when I left my apartment,” she said. “I didn't take anything out with me.”
Ms. Blackburn, a 31-year-old waitress at a Bob Evans Restaurant, said the fire probably destroyed the Christmas gifts she had bought for her mother, who lives with her, and her two nieces. She had placed the gifts under her Christmas tree.
Ms. Blackburn was disappointed last Christmas because she was unable to afford to buy gifts for her two nieces.
“I wanted to make sure I got them something this year,” she said.
On nights when Tommie Hughes couldn't fall asleep, son Eric Peterman would pull out his keyboard. A self-taught musician, Eric played his mother's favorite classical pieces.
The keyboard was a casualty of Thursday's fire. So were all of Eric's recordings and a special computer program Ms. Hughes had bought for Christmas that would allow him to put his music on a disk and send to studios.
Smoke wakened Ms. Hughes, who rushed out with her boys, Eric and Terron, 13, She wore only a T-shirt. The boys had pants. No shoes, no jackets, no gloves.
Somebody, Ms. Hughes doesn't know who, gave her family clothes.
Literally in someone else's shoes, Ms. Hughes watched the ceiling cave in and flames lash out the windows of the apartment she moved into in August.
She stroked Minnie, a ferret bundled inside a borrowed coat. Mouse and Baby, the family's other two ferrets, didn't make it out.
The single mom had no insur ance. Her lips trembled, and tears spilled down her red-flushed cheeks.
“We lost it all. We lost it all.”
Within seconds, the smoke went from gray to black in the second-floor apartment of Joan Whittaker and Jason Schnitker. Ms. Whittaker started to panic. She dropped to the floor and crawled to the balcony. A firefighter helped her climb down a ladder.
Inside, seven guitars, including a handmade one, burned. Pictures and letters curled from the heat, then turned to ashes. Christmas presents went up in smoke.
But the couple counted small blessings. They were insured.
Then they realized they no longer had driver's licenses. Or Social Security cards. No credit cards or any other identification.
“We can start new with different names,” Mr. Schnitker said.
And he laughed. Because that was the only thing left to do.
Mohamed Dia, a citizen of the West African country of Mauritania, worried that the fire might have destroyed his immigration papers.
“Even if I reapply for new papers, it might take a while to get them back,” he said. “I don't know if I'll be able to work without them.”
Mr. Dia, a 32-year-old forklift operator who has lived in the United States for eight years, said that in his rush to get out of his apartment, he left behind a $500 paycheck and money orders from friends totaling more than $400.
But as he sat in the apartment complex's clubhouse with his cousin and his cousin's wife, he acknowledged that it could have been much worse.
“If we have life, we can get back what we had,” he said.
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