Berwick mobile destroyed by fire

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

Settling her talkative kids for an afternoon nap, soon-to-be- four Kenzie Thornhill asked her mom, Heather, “Mommy, is that house on fire?”

“I said , ‘No,’ but then - with a statement like that, I though I better look,” Heather Thornhill said.

Out the window, the family could see the next door mobile home on Berwick’s Douglas Avenue burning.

“I grabbed the phone and ran out fast,” Heather said, where neighbours wee already congregating..

The November 29 fire broke out just after 2 p.m., with firefighters getting a 911 call at 2:17 p.m. for “smoke coming from a mobile,” Berwick and District Fire department spokesman Brian Taylor relayed from the pager call to 54 Douglas Avenue.

Firefighters from Berwick and Waterville responded to the call down the narrow residential street, and were still clearing up four hours later.

“I went over and banged on the door,” said a neighbour from across the street, Gene Keyes. “Nobody was home.”

He watched as fire trucks, a power utility vehicle and police cars filled the street.

Keyes is the secretary for the street’s Neighbourhood Watch group, and said the woman who lived in the destroyed mobile was the past president of the association.

“I think we will be pitching in with the neighbours to help her out.”

Two cats escaped the fire, one out and about earlier and the other getting out as firefighters entered the home.

Thornhill says her children, Kenzie and Jamin, two; were not upset by the fire after the initial concern for their neighbour and their own home, so close by.

“The police man and the fire man were coming quickly - Mommy called them,’ Kenzie said. “They’ll have a new house and move.”