Students recount hours after fire, what was lost in the blaze
Alison Stewart sat barefoot in the snow with just her laptop and camera as she watched her college home burn.
Fleeing her apartment at approximately 4 a.m. after coming home from a shuffle on Court Street to celebrate her roommate’s birthday, Stewart initially thought the fire would not reach her apartment and the cherished possessions stored away in her bedroom — among them a necklace from her great-grandmother.
{{tncms-asset app="editorial" id="61a35f46-6e06-11e4-a8f5-5b09461e11eb"}}
Then, the senior studying special education watched the flames slowly move toward her apartment. Soon, they would begin pouring out of the red roof that formed the frame of her bedroom.
“My apartment isn’t even there,” she said. “It’s totally fallen down to the next floor below us.”
Stewart is now at her home in Franklin, Ohio, taking a week off from school. When she returns to campus, she will move into a residence hall room provided by Ohio University.
“I’m kind of in shock,” she said. “I want to lay in my bed, and I realize I can’t do that.”
The Union Street fire burned through several apartments Sunday morning — displacing 40 students in all — and left many lives forever changed. Some students narrowly averted disaster while others lost many or all of their college belongings.
Rachel Portik, a senior studying nursing, still doesn’t know what she lost after fleeing her apartment at 41 S. Court St., a location with an entrance in the alleyway near the epicenter of the blaze.
Just after 4 a.m., she awoke to a screaming firefighter telling her to leave the building.
“None of our alarms were going off, but you could smell smoke,” Portik said. “When we came out the door, it was a wall of smoke and tons of firefighters running around.”
She spent much of Sunday unsure of the fate of her belongings, all left behind as she and her roommates rushed out of the apartment.
Later Sunday, she learned that the roof of her apartment had caught fire during the heart of the blaze.
She was staying in a hotel room paid for by OU on Sunday, and her parents had made the trip to Athens.
“I’m blind right now,” she said Sunday at roughly 8 a.m. in Baker University Center, where a safe haven for students was set up by the university. “No money. We didn’t grab anything. ... My baby blanket; he’s in there.”
Deanna Schaeffer was sound asleep in her apartment at 12 W. Union St. above Jack Neal Floral, one of the businesses most ravaged by the fire, when she heard a pounding on her door early Sunday morning.
“I thought someone was breaking in,” said Schaeffer, a senior studying communication.
Instead it was her upstairs neighbors yelling “fire” and “almost breaking the door down,” in an attempt to get her out of the building.
Schaeffer, who then awoke her roommate Kylie Gyurgyak, a senior studying media management, ran outside without shoes, thinking it was just another fire alarm.
The women spent about 45 minutes sitting outside the Uptown Grill, 11 W. Union St., watching their apartment smolder.
“Then all of a sudden (there were) about 40-foot flames,” Schaeffer said.
The roommates went to a friend’s house to find Schaeffer a pair of shoes before making their way to Baker by 5:30 a.m. They were met there by Jenny Hall-Jones, OU’s dean of students, who was consoling displaced residents and helping them find temporary housing.
Schaeffer was sipping a Tim Horton’s drink and munching on Timbits — donated by the restaurant — at 7:30 a.m. on the fourth floor of Baker.
Hall-Jones was collecting student contact information and trying to reach residents who were not home at the time of the fire. Only two of the six residents in Gyurgyak and Schaeffer’s apartment were there at the time of the fire.
Olivia Hitchcock contributed to this report.
@WillDrabold
dd195710@ohio.edu
