Home destroyed by fire
Submitted by jcht2010 on
“Thank God I didn’t sleep in the bedroom,” said Shelly Graham.
If she had slept in her bed, she may not have smelled the smoke in time, or may not have been able to escape in time.
Graham’s home on CR 401 outside of Edna was destroyed by fire early Sunday morning.
Graham had been sleeping on her sofa because of suspicious happenings around her home, and the homes of her neighbors on Upper Cordele Road recently. Gunshots, suspicious vehicles, even dead animals had been common in recent weeks.
“We’ve been having people in my barn, people in the neighbors’ barns,” she said, “I’ve been sleeping on the couch so I could hear.”
Despite the strange occurrences, she said she believes the fire may have been electrical.
She stood outside the still-smoldering remnants of her home with her four rescued dogs, greeting friends and neighbors as they stopped by to check on her, as neighbors do, and recounted the moment she realized she needed to get out of her home.
“I woke up, and thought ‘what is that smell?’” she recalled. “I turned the light on and it was hazy. I could see the haze in the house.”
With her home and her freshly-awake brain in a fog, it took Graham a moment to realize what was happening.
“I was seeing yellow, and I thought ‘what’s that yellow?’” she said, “and then I realized ‘Oh my God, the house is on fire. [My dog] Shaggy sleeps inside with me and I just said ‘Oh my gosh Shaggy, let’s go.’”
She called 911 and loaded her dogs into her Jeep as four fire departments showed up to battle the flames.
Nick Strauss of the Edna Fire Department said that fires in the county are more difficult to fight than city fires.
“The biggest issue is the water supply because there are no hydrants out there,” he said. “They had three or four units that were steadily going back to the city and getting water, and they had a tank that folds out and holds a couple thousand gallons of water.”
Strauss said four engines and two tankers fought the blaze for about three hours, and by 7:20 a.m., they were just “hitting the hot spots and overhauling.”
“I can’t even think right now,” she said. “I’m just in shock. I’ve been feeling this way all day. We have insurance and all that, I just don’t know yet what I’m going to do.”
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