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    Bob Tom Reed and Allison Smith with Madonna Kimball of My Neighbor’s Keeper. SUBMITTED PHOTO

Neighbors rally to help victims of fire

Allison Smith put her hound dogs outside in a pen they have near the porch the morning of February 20. Due to the harsh weather, they had added some blankets and a heat lamp for the dogs as the federally declared disastrous weather required. She walked to the edge of her property to see if the roads were passable. She wasn’t the only one. She ran into some of her neighbors in the farthest corners of Rolling Oaks. Then she saw something strange as she looked back up her driveway. It looked like smoke was drifting up from the area of her home.

“I was walking back up pretty leisurely, and then I saw huge, huge flames,” Smith said.

Wimberley Fire Chief Carrol Czichos said that he believes the heat lamp is likely what caused the fire. It is a story all too common in the winter months.

Smith’s phone was inside. She ran back to the neighbors to have them call 9-1-1. Her partner, Bob Tom Reed, was sleeping inside. The room he was in was on the side of the house furthest from the start of the fire.

“He started smelling smoke and he managed to open the door to a hallway full of smoke,” Smith said. “He was able to get to the upstair’s back door.”

But this wasn’t just a normal back door. They had planned on adding a back deck upstairs. Since it hadn’t been completed yet, Bob Tom was concerned that there wasn’t an appropriate exit upstairs. So, just in case of an emergency, he nailed a few pieces of a twoinch by four-inch lumber to the wall that would act as an impromptu fire-escape ladder. On Saturday, the 76-year-old was glad he had the foresight for such an exit as his toes narrowly gripped the two-by-four on his climb down from the second story.

Bob Tom, Allison and the dogs were safe. As of Mon day, they were not yet sure if their cat made it out of the fire.

But even as the building was still burning, neighbors began to offer help. Smith likened it to a quote from Mr. Rogers.

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news,” Rogers said to his television neighbors, “my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

And she seemed to find plenty of them.

“People from the neighborhood have just shown up to help out tremendously,” Smith said. “It brought me to tears because of the incredible response of human beings. It is overwhelming.”

Neighbors started a Go-FundMe page (https://gofund.me/cb8a570b) which had raised tens of thousands of dollars by the time of press. Clothes started pouring in after a request on Facebook. Local nonprofit My Neighbor’s Keeper was on scene with a check to help get them enough funds for immediate needs.

As the scene cleared and the fire turned to ash, it came time to sift through the wreckage in hopes of finding any morsel of a memory.

“I’ve been through another fire,” Smith said. “When I was 18 years old. We lived way out in the country. We had gone off that day to college, and when we came back the house was burned to the ground – ashes.”

Fifty years ago, she found her grandmother’s engagement ring in the remains of her burned down home. On Monday, she began the process once again.

“It was a little tiny diamond, and the only diamond I have,” she said. “The sunlight was just beginning to shine above the trees and I saw a flicker. The sun caught that diamond down in the ashes.”

Standing at the foot of what used to be her home, with her grandmother’s engagement ring in hand and tears welling up in her eyes, she was surrounded by neighbors sifting through the ashes. She laughed at her final thought.

“Mr. Rogers was right.”

Wimberley View

P.O. Box 49
Wimberley, TX 78676
Phone: 512-847-2202
Fax: 512-847-9054