ROXBURY – An alert Roxbury teenager was credited by fire chiefs for waking and alerting his grandmother about a fire in their trailer early Thursday morning.
Both Maxine Farrar and her grandson Eric Hamel, 15, escaped the 4:30 a.m. blaze that extensively damaged the 12-by-70-foot trailer at 2125 Roxbury Road, also known as Route 17.
They took their Great Dane dog with them, but the family cat, which a firefighter rescued, ran back inside the burning trailer and perished, Byron fire Chief Wayne Hamel said early Thursday evening.
The teenager is Wayne Hamel’s nephew.
“Eric had just got out of bed when he smelled smoke, and he woke up his grandmother,” Wayne Hamel said.
They went to the front of the trailer, where the wood stove was located in an attached addition, saw the whole ceiling ablaze and ran down the hallway, he said.
Farrar called in the fire, then the pair and the dog ran out the back door.
“We arrived seconds after the windows had blown out. We didn’t have air packs, so we fought it from the outside and got a real quick knockdown,” Wayne Hamel said.
Roxbury firefighters arrived next, followed by mutual-aid partners Andover, Mexico and Rumford, with tankers and manpower, said Roxbury Chief Gordon Touchette early Thursday evening.
Wayne Hamel said Mexico firefighters, who are trained in and have self-contained breathing gear, attacked the fire inside the trailer.
“Byron done a real good job of stopping it,” Touchette said.
“There was a lot of heat inside. A television got melted, and it was a very smoky fire because of the insulation,” he added.
Mexico Fire Chief Gary Wentzell said that Byron firefighters had set up to attack the fire when Roxbury arrived. The fire was just over a mile from the Roxbury station.
Touchette said Wayne Hamel was just leaving for work when the call came in, so he got the firetruck there “in a hurry.”
“Byron got set up and Roxbury showed up. They both did a really, really good job of stopping that fire,” Wentzell said.
“They contained it and did everything correctly. It’s not very often you can save a trailer. We just did mop-up and ventilation work,” he added.
Hamel, Wentzell and Touchette said the fire originated in the wood stove area, but did not list a specific cause.
Because the 20-year-old trailer was insured, an investigator from the state Fire Marshal’s Office was called to the scene.
Everyone left by 8 a.m., but Byron and Roxbury were called to the scene again when hot spots flared up, Wayne Hamel said.
Farrar and Eric Hamel, Wayne Hamel added, would be looking for an apartment Friday. But, in the meantime, they were staying with a relative in Mexico.
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