DRAYTON – After picking up her three children from the local youth centre on the evening of Jan. 4, Deanne Schnarr was greeted with the disturbing site of the street in front of her home filled with fire trucks.
“Disbelief” was her first reaction, she told the Advertiser in a Jan. 10 telephone interview.
“You don’t think that that’s going to happen to you, right? We saw the fire trucks and my son said, ‘It looks like they’re in front of our house,’” she recalled.
The safety of the family’s two dogs was an immediate concern.
“My neighbours, actually, they’re the ones who noticed the fire … they had rang the doorbell a few times and they heard that the dogs were there. They let the firefighters know that they were in there … and they got the dogs out right away.”
Schnarr said the family arrived home 20 to 25 minutes after the firefighters arrived on the scene.
“They asked me if anybody was in the house and I said no, then as soon as they knew that nobody was in the house, then they stopped trying to go into the house.”
Mapleton Fire Chief Rick Richardson said it was fortunate no one was home when the fire broke out at the Wellington Street residence just after 8pm.
The chief said the neighbours who reported the fire noticed a glow from the roof peak and heard smoke alarms sounding.
“People really need to make sure their smoke detectors are working,” Schnarr observed.
Firefighters from Mapleton Fire Rescue’s Drayton and Moorefield stations responded to the blaze and firefighters from Wellington North Fire Service’s Arthur station were also called in.
While most of the firefighters had been released from the scene by 3:30am, Richardson said a small crew stayed on the scene with a tanker truck until 7:30am “in case anything flared up.”
Richardson said firefighters found the dogs in the garage, which was not burning but did contain some smoke when firefighters arrived.
While the building is still standing, Richardson said the home was destroyed.
“The house will be taken down I’m sure,” he said, adding all the home’s contents were lost.
“All the computers, TVs, kitchen table – everything’s all black and smokey,” he told the Advertiser.
The cause of the fire was still undetermined as of Jan. 9, but Richardson said it is not considered suspicious.
Richardson noted the family was reunited with its dogs in a “pet-friendly” hotel and the pets have since been taken in by a Drayton-area family, which plans to keep them until the Schnarr family is resettled.
Deanne Schnarr and her family returned home to find their house on fire on Jan. 4. The blaze completely destroyed the home and contents. Submitted photo
Carol Mabey, organizer of a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for the Schnarrs, told the Advertiser in an email the family is still in a hotel and is hoping to find a long-term rental in the area until their home is rebuilt.
“Unfortunately, there is not much that can be saved from the house,” Mabey states in a post on the GoFundMe page.
Schnarr said she is currently driving her children to school from the hotel.
Community members have been quick to respond and donated clothes to replace some of what was lost, said Schnarr.
“They told us that basically everything in the house is a loss. Even the stuff in the garage, they’re not sure that anything can be salvaged,” she said.
“It’s just really, really heavy smoke damage in the garage.”
Schnarr said the family is looking for rental housing “anywhere from Guelph all the way to Drayton.”
She said school officials have advised them that under the circumstances her children can continue going to their own school regardless of where they are living, “to keep things as normal as possible for them.
“It’s a lot of added expense, but it’s probably the best thing for them,” she noted.
Schnarr said many people have offered to donate items for the family, “but it’s just hard right now because we don’t have any space for anything.”
For the time being, she said gift cards or donations through GoFundMe are probably the easiest ways to help, noting the family currently has to eat all their meals out “because we don’t have anywhere to cook.
“We don’t really know what we need at this point and we kind of go day by day and all of a sudden you realize, ‘Oh, shoot, we need to go buy this right now.’
“You don’t realize how much stuff you use on a daily basis until you go to grab it and you realize … I don’t have it.”
While the family has insurance coverage, Schnarr said she has realized, “it’s not just like it magically appears, like you magically have money from insurance. It takes time.”
The GoFundMe campaign, which as of Jan. 10 had raised over $7,500 toward a $30,000 goal, can be found at https://gofund.me/2697c281.
