Moses Lake man’s very bad day brightened by the service, commitment of first responders

MOSES LAKE — The sun had just crested the horizon July 8 when Moses Lake firefighters, already awake in the wee hours of the morning, heard the call piped into the station: structure fire at the Lakefront RV Park.

The RV’s owner, who asked to be identified only as Sid S., had woken up to a foul odor, thrown on his shorts and shoes and run outside to see his home was on fire. RVs are notorious for quickly igniting, and Sid’s was no exception.

“It amazed me how fast it spread,” Sid said in an interview. “I had to run back into the burning RV to get my phone so I could call 911.”

Within minutes of the 5:04 a.m. dispatch, Lt. Todd Eldred with the Moses Lake Fire Department and two other firefighters drove up in a fire engine, sirens blaring, followed by another two first responders in a medical transport.

As firefighters began to attack the fully engulfed RV, a few rounds of ammunition inside began to go off in the fire, Sid said, but the firefighters pressed on. To Sid, the first responders were bravely running into danger to protect what remained of his home and property — in an interview, Eldred responded that they were simply doing their jobs.

“You do have to take calculated risk, but usually knocking down the fire is going to be your best option,” Eldred said in an interview. “The ammunition didn’t seem like it was that big of a risk; there were a couple pops that went off. Through training and best practices, you take calculated risks to mitigate the situation.”

After a few minutes, Eldred recalled, they had begun to get a handle on the fire when a leaky propane tank reignited the blaze; and as they maneuvered around the hollowed out RV, they also had to contend with exposed live wires from a nearby post where the trailers hooked up to the power.

The firefighters kept the blaze from spreading to nearby trailers, but despite their best efforts Sid’s home was a total loss, and what little he owned that hadn’t caught fire was caked in the soot and char of everything else. Sid asked one of the firefighters on the scene if they knew of any organization that could help him, and the firefighter called the Red Cross.

Before the firefighters cleared the scene, a Red Cross representative had arrived with a disaster relief care package, filled with toiletries and other vital items.

An Army veteran who served from 1971-73 before his honorable discharge, Sid was eligible for emergency shelter in a hotel room through an organization affiliated with the VA, he said. But, he continued, he didn’t want to leave what little remained of his belongings in the burnt-out shell of his RV, where he was sure they would be stolen overnight. He slept in his truck that night under a red and white Red Cross blanket.

The next day, though, the police arrived.

They weren’t there on business. Moses Lake police Capt. Mike Williams was familiar with Sid, both as the resident who would sometimes sit downtown with a cardboard sign encouraging passerby to “smile,” and also as the man who had for a time hired Williams’ son to do yard work and other odd jobs around the trailer.

So when Williams heard about Sid’s RV, he and Chief Kevin Fuhr decided to drive down there, where they were met by Detective Adam Munro and Officer Matt Harum, who had been training in that area. Together, they rolled up their sleeves and got to work.

Sid, watching this, said he was mortified to see the officers wading through the stinking wreckage of his home.

“They’re in their uniform, and they’re going into this nasty, char-filled trailer,” Sid said. “But they did it anyway, and I’ll tell you what, it’s just a batch of good guys.”

The officers pulled everything salvageable or made of metal that could be scrapped and loaded it into Sid’s truck. Then Munro turned to Sid, who was wearing the only clothes that survived the fire, and asked him what size he was. Munro ran back to his home and grabbed some of his own clothes, bringing them back to Sid so that he’d had a couple of clean changes of clothes.

In interviews, both Eldred and Williams spoke modestly and matter-of-factly about the service they performed for Sid in early July — it was, after all, just another day on the job.

But for Sid, who watched most everything he owned go up like a match in a matter of minutes and whose life was turned upside down, the Moses Lake fire and police departments were a bright light on a dark day. In a cultural moment of tension and distrust between police and many of the communities they serve, Sid said he hoped that his story could help remind people that the police are a part of those communities.

“With everything that’s going on now, with people putting down police, they’re all being punished for the act of a few,” Sid said. “That just isn’t right.”

“I’ve never had so much kindness in my life shown to me,” he added. “They took it upon themselves to help me as much as they could.”