HENRICO COUNTY, Va. (WRIC) — A fire tore through a Highland Springs home in Henrico County, and two children and an adult who managed to escape with serious injuries are recovering in the hospital.
The home is considered a total loss as a result of the dangerous blaze. Charred remains and debris are all that’s left inside the shell of a home.
Firefighters are trained to jump into action to save lives first and property second. On Sunday, the scene of this particular house fire shook some of them to the core.
Henrico fire crews arrived at the home on Wren Road in the Highland Springs area just after 9 a.m. on April 2. Firefighters said they did what they could when they got on the scene.
There were four people inside. The two children and two adults had already made it out by the time they got there. Henrico Battalion Fire Chief Doug Reynolds said that when it comes to incidents like this one sometimes you have to split up resources.
“So that in itself is a major deal and then you have a major deal behind me, so you have to split your resources because the most important thing at that point, are the people,” Reynolds told 8News.
Reynolds said flames were bursting through the house’s windows. He also said that one of the people who made it out of the home went back inside to get a child that was still trapped inside the blazing home.
“It looks like it started in the center of the house. And for whatever reason, that fire really took off. It was a major fire when we got here,” Reynolds said. “And basically, as you can see all the windows had fire coming out of them when we arrived. It is kind of rare that we see that much fire by the time we get on scene, but sometimes those things happen.”
But it was the rescued children that rattled some of the firefighters. “For the ambulances that took them, the fire medic units they were dads that had kids roughly that same age,” Reynolds told 8News. “So, you know all of that stuff just made it a dynamic and stressful fire, to be honest with you.”
A neighbor said she heard the fire before she saw the flames, describing the hissing and popping noise the water made when it hit the fire. Reynolds said the blaze took about 45 minutes to put out.
“The fire has had time to what we call mature everything had started to be consumed in the rooms and all of that stuff burns very quick and burns very hot,” Reynolds said.
Chief Reynolds told 8News the home did not have a smoke detector. He also said after a fire like this one they usually go door to door in the neighborhood with smoke detectors making sure that other homes have them as well.
