Fire scorches deck in UM trailer park

Melody Sias
Dm Senior Staff writer

The right combination of circumstances can create trouble -- or solve it, as one University of Mississippi student learned early this morning.

Mark Dew, a senior sociology and anthropology major, put a deer shoulder in the smoker on his deck and went to bed Tuesday night. A gas can was a foot away.

Less than one hour after midnight, he heard a "whoosh" and awakened to find a blaze at his front door. No one was hurt and damage was limited to the front porch.

"I guess dinner is ruined tomorrow," Dew said.

His neighbor Kelvin Nichols said the flames reached the trees overhead. Nichols alerted others in University Trailer Park. "I heard something crackling and I looked out the window and I saw a blaze," Nichols said. He thought the trailer behind Dew's was burning, he said, so he immediately ran out.

As Dew fought the fire with a hand-held extinguisher, a pizza deliverer stopped to say fire fighters and police officers were on the way.

"I had it just about out by the time they got out here," Dew said.

Dew said his parents' house burned when he was in high school.

"That's the reason I got so much fire stuff around," Dew said.

As he was saying that the fire fighters arrived quickly, Dew interrupted himself to yell to the fire fighters as they got into their trucks, "Gentlemen, y'all did a great job!"

They received the call at 12:48 a.m.

Fire Chief Jerry Johnson said the fire started after charcoal fell from the smoker onto the deck. The gas can caused the fire to spread quickly, he said. "You're lucky," Johnson told Dew. Johnson estimated the damage to be no more than $2,000, including furniture.

Johnson put the gas can in a fire truck to dispose of it.

The department makes few calls to the trailer park, Johnson said.

Sanford Carson, who lives four or five trailers behind Dew, said few fires occur in the park. "This is the biggest action we've had in a while," Carson said.