By Tim Stonesifer
The Evening Sun
HANOVER, Pa. — The ambulance driver reached down for his pager, buzzing and beckoning from his belt. There’s a structure fire with possible entrapment, it told him, 4964 Blue Hill Road, Manheim Township.
It’s best to get the elderly man in the back there to the hospital quickly then, the driver thought to himself, idling on York Street in Hanover. The ambulance might soon be needed to transport fire victims.
A moment passed. Then something clicked.
And Larry Rummel Jr. snatched up that pager again, staring at the words. Structure fire at 4964 Blue Hill Road - that’s my address, my house, he realized. Possible entrapment - that means my family’s in there, he thought.
“Oh, my God.”
So Rummel pressed down on the accelerator and took off - away from his burning home, rushing a sick man to the hospital.
That was an easy decision to make at the time, Rummel said Wednesday morning, five days after his boyhood home burned to the ground. As a career emergency responder, you’re trained to do the job in that moment no matter what, he said.
But time allows for perspective. And standing beside two red tricycles burnt black, their plastic seats melted down the metal like spent candles, Rummel said things are tough, here in the quiet aftermath.
Rummel, 40, who serves as Penn Township’s EMS supervisor, lives at that rural home with his parents, Larry Sr. and Ina, and his brother and two nephews. Larry Rummel Jr. said he often he stays at the fire house, but still comes home frequently to help out his mother and to care for his disabled father.
And when that page came through last week, Rummel said, all he could think was his family might trapped there in the flames. Ina Rummel was the first person to get a call from her son Friday afternoon, she said, and she picked up the phone on her way home from work at The Brethren Home Community that day only to have Larry Jr. tell her to pull over. The house is on fire, he told her quickly, and are you all right?
“I thought he was joking,” she said Wednesday, wiping a tear away. “I thought it was a joke.”
Perched on one good leg and crutches amid a backyard minefield of siding scraps, ruined tools and old tires, Larry Rummel Sr. said it turned out no one was at home at the time of the blaze. Rummel had gathered his other son, Tony, and Tony’s two boys around 1:30 that afternoon, he said, to get gas in the car and run some errands around town.
By the time the family heard about the fire - around 3 p.m. on their way back home - the house was really already lost.
And this week the reality of that loss was all too real, as an insurance inspector shoveled through piles of ruined possessions, crunching across a carpet of soggy clothes and fallen insulation. Family members watched as the man kicked away a bent box spring and pulled a scorched socket strip from what once was a back porch.
The fire was an accident, he told them, and appears to have been electrical.
That news came as little comfort to family members, who today are standing by for word from the insurance company and trying to figure out the next step. Hoping the bank will send new check books. Trying to get Larry Sr.'s diabetes medicine lined up.
Thinking what to tell Tony’s boys - Julian and Dustin - as they realize everything they had is gone.
“We’re at the motel until next Tuesday,” Ina Rummel said, “and then I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
But some of those same firefighters who fought the quick-moving blaze last week have already rallied around the family, and have begun a collection for the Rummels to help bridge the gap in the coming weeks and months. The Rummels say it will take an estimated five to six months just to get the site cleared and inspected, before they can think of building a new home.
And local firefighters say it’s asking very little for folks to step up and help a man who has helped so many. Larry Rummel Jr. is not only a career member at Penn Township Volunteer Emergency Services, but from the age of 16 has volunteered at local companies in Penn Township, Porters, Pleasant Hill and Thomasville.
“This guy’s been helping people out since he was a teenager,” Penn Township firefighter Jeff Parks said, “and now he needs some help.”
On Wednesday, that man stood quietly on a Blue Hill Road lawn with family, sirens now silent but the sour smell of fire still in the air. The wind rustled in scorched trees and a black vacuum lay upended beside a mound of dirty dresser drawers.
Perched in the living room, a robin sang his little song, then flapped away.
And over on York Street, fire officials said, a cardiac patient rushed to the hospital last Friday seems today to be doing better.
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