By Christy Jankowski
Commercial-News
GEORGETOWN, Ill. — Quick thinking by the Georgetown Ambulance crew and police officers got a mom and her baby out safely while a trailer was engulfed in flames next door.
Rusty Berry, the Georgetown Fire Chief, said that around 1:55 p.m. on Friday, his crew was alerted to a trailer on fire at 107 E. 16th St. in Georgetown.
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Berry said on his way to the fire, “Once I saw the smoke myself. When I was coming out of Westville, I called for Catlin. And then I dropped the box alarm.” Berry added that doing so gets more mutual aid to help put the fire out.
Tanya Cheesman, EMS assistant coordinator with Georgetown Ambulance, said they are automatically dispatched when there is a fire. She said when they arrived, it was obvious the fire had already destroyed quite a bit.
“The fully engulfed trailer was pretty much a goner,” Cheesman said. “There was no way that we could even get to it to see if there was anybody inside who may have been a trap, because there were flames coming out on four sides.”
However, immediately, first responders noticed that while the house next door to the one on fire was not, the flames were getting very close.
She noted the siding of the house was melting from the heat. With only two front doors facing the fire and no rear exit, escape routes were limited.
A man appeared, looking for people inside. That’s when both Cheesman and her EMT colleague, Amey Morgan, learned a woman and a baby were still trapped in the house.
“They [the mom] put the baby in a baby carrier, and they tried to get her out the kitchen window at first, but that was too small for the carrier,” she said. “And the mom tried to use the bedroom window as a means of escape, but she could not open it.”
“She tried, and it wasn’t opening,” Cheesman said. “So that’s why they went around to the kitchen, a smaller window, to get the baby out that way. That didn’t happen.”
Cheesman and Morgan remained calm.
“So then I told them to go back around to the bedroom window, and we would just bust it in,” Cheesman aid. “So police, pretty much with their fists, started busting in the glass.”
But Cheesman has other plans.
“Let’s take this toy that’s lying on the ground and start busting through the glass. So that’s what I did.”
Once the glass was broken enough, she said, “That’s when she passed the baby through, and the mother got out as well.”
She said she thinks the baby was somewhere around 1-year-old. Morgan added that the Georgetown Police officers were a huge help.
“There were several officers who were there as soon as we got there,” Morgan said, adding that she thinks the toy they used to break the glass was a scooter.
“We broke the window, and then the Georgetown Police actually came in and finished getting all the glass out as she was handing the baby to my partner and me,” Morgan added. “And then she got out right after that.”
Chief Berry added that while the whole event is something they train for, it certainly is not something they deal with daily.
“It’s pretty huge. As I said, that’s something that you don’t see every day,” Berry said about the dramatic rescue. And they were fighting the fire and rescuing people in sub-zero temperatures with ice and snow coating the roads and everything.
“We work hand in hand, you know, we’re a district, and it’s, it’s pretty good,” Berry said. “The mutual aid that we have on both sides of us is great.”
Berry said fire departments from Chrisman, Caitlin, Westville and Sidell responded, along with the Georgetown Fire Dept., ambulance, and police responded to the fire.
There is no known cause for the fire. Berry said it is currently under investigation and has displaced the family in the trailer that caught on fire, which took around 2 hours to put out on Friday afternoon. The other family was able to return to their home with siding damage from the fire next door.
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