By Tabitha Evans Moore | EDITOR & PUBLISHER

LYNCHBURG, Tenn. —Stone Lane, just off Highway 129 in the Booneville community, is almost impossible to find. Nestled less than a mile behind the Jack Daniel warehouses off Clark Road, it sits hidden in a sharp curve.

Moore County Sheriff’s Deputy Maygan Silavong says someone recently stole the road sign, adding confusion to a situation where every moment counted: a house fire at the home of a disabled widow in her 80s.

“If you ever go on there, you can’t even see it from the road,” she says.

Yet on Wednesday, November 4, with adrenaline pumping, a determined Silavong got lucky. She arrived first on scene, just in the nick of time to prevent what could have been a devastating total loss.

She wasn’t the only lucky break that morning. Nearly everything had to go right to save that house, and nearly everything did.

IN THE FIRST RESPONDER GAME, EVERY SECOND COUNTS

The call came in at 9:16 a.m. Silavong says she could tell by the tone of Moore County Communications Center Dispatcher Jordan Hall questions that there were mere minutes to spare.

“I just happened to be standing within earshot of dispatch,” she says. “I could hear the woman freaking out. I knew the dispatcher was asking the questions that it was gonna be a call for me, not an ambulance.”

When the caller said she was disabled and couldn’t get out of the house, Silavong grabbed the address and was out the door before the call had even been dispatched to anyone else.

“Thank God, because by the time everyone else showed up, the house would have been burned down,” Silavong says. “It was one of those perfect moments. We don’t get many of those.”

Serendipity did seem to be a factor that day. The firefighters missed the turn and the ambulance went the wrong way because Google maps places it somewhere on Highway 82, but GPS led Silavong straight to the address.

She says the drive was its own kind of chaos. The radio filled with chatter. Silavong rushed onsite — thoughts running 100 mph in her mind. She said she rehearsed what she’d do when she got there and tried to remember where the key fob that opens the back hatch was. It’s where her fire extinguisher is mounted.

“You got a million scenarios playing in your head,” she says. “And it’s never what you think you’re gonna do.”

There are three houses at the end of the gravel lane, and the house numbers don’t line up. Silavong had been headed for the wrong one. As she pulled up, Silavong spotted an 80-something woman standing outside, leaning on a walker and waving her down.

“Please, please put the fire out,” the woman told her.

Silavong tore everything out of the back of her patrol car to get to the extinguisher. When she asked where the fire was, the woman took off inside to show her. Silavong told her to stay outside. The woman told her she’d never find it on her own.

“I was pretty impressed with her,” Silavong says. “She got in there pretty fast.”

QUICK THIKING THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

Smoke was pouring out of a back room behind a utility room, so thick Silavong asked where the light switch was. It was already on.

“That’s how pitch black the smoke was,” she says.

In the corner, fire climbed the wall from the floor to the ceiling.

“I’m thinking, like, I don’t have enough extinguisher,” Silavong says.

She turned around and got the woman out of the house first. Then she went back in on a held breath, eyes stinging, and emptied the extinguisher until she couldn’t hold her breath any longer.

She went back in a couple more times to be sure. The last time, it was because she heard popping and was afraid the fire had flared back up.

“All I see is blackness,” she says, “so that was a good sign.”

It wasn’t Silavong’s first fire. In her early 20s, she was a wildland firefighter in California. But a house fire, she says, is a different animal.

“I never smelled something like that,” she says.

Silavong came out black from head to toe. Black soot covered her blonde hair. The paramedics who checked her out in the ambulance happened to be her own sister, Critical Care Medic Rheannon Gagnon, and brother-in-law, Paramedic Fire Fighter Kris Gagnon, who were working the truck that day. AEMT Jackie Burton and Critical Care Medic Zach Means were also onsite. We needed to pull those names from the official record. Maygan couldn’t recall. She says she was more worried about the woman.

At least one person felt impressed with Silavong’s response and initiative.

“She didn’t just knock it down. She put it out,” says John LaCook with the Moore County Volunteer Fire Department Chief Engineer and the Jack Daniel Fire Brigade Assistant Chief. Asked whether Silavong saved the woman’s house, he didn’t hesitate: “100%.”

THREE VOLUNTEERS ON A WEEKDAY MORNING

Here’s the part of the story that isn’t luck.

While Silavong was inside, the fire department was fighting more than the missing sign. Trucks drove right past the turn and had to come back around, and MCSD Lieutenant Dustin White stayed at the turn to flag it for everyone coming behind him. But the bigger problem was the clock. At 9:30 on a weekday morning, most of the volunteers who make up the county’s fire department are at their day jobs.

“During the daytime, we have a shortage of firefighters,” LaCook says.

Only three volunteers made the call. Knowing they’d be shorthanded, LaCook requested mutual aid from Mulberry and Lincoln County as soon as the tone dropped. None arrived. Public Safety Director Jason Deal said the Fayetteville EMA/Fire Chief notified him that he was on his way.

“They have same issue we have, no volunteers during day time,” he says.

LaCook, Matthew Lendley and Hunter Crabtree put on air packs because heavy smoke was still coming from the house. They went in with a thermal imaging camera and tore out sheetrock to make sure the fire hadn’t gotten into the walls or the attic.

With so few people, nobody was left outside to run the pump.

“Every rule as a firefighter is pretty much broken at that point in time, just due to lack of manpower,” LaCook says.

THE WET STUFF ON THE RED STUFF

Then, from outside, LaCook watched the smoke turn from gray to black.

Firefighters call it reading smoke. Heavy, dark gray or black smoke means an active fire. When the crew inside hits the base of the fire, the smoke changes color, and the person outside knows they’re “putting the wet stuff on the red stuff,” LaCook says.

Black smoke at that point meant he might be about to lose the house, with three people on scene. He called a second alarm for more Moore County firefighters, because he didn’t have enough people to safely keep a crew inside and a rescue team ready to go in after them.

As more help arrived, the crew realized the black smoke was only smoke trapped in the house, being pushed out as they ventilated. The fire had never spread past the room where Silavong put it out.

It started with an electrical appliance sitting on top of a desk.

“Do I recommend that type of extinguishment for an untrained police officer? No,” LaCook says. “Did Maygan save the day? Yes.”

The damage was mostly some sheetrock firefighters pulled out to check the walls, plus heavy smoke damage throughout the house. There was no water damage. LaCook says you could see his footprints in the soot on the floor. The home will need a thorough cleaning, paint and some sheetrock work.

The homeowner had insurance, and a neighbor Terry Hart called Farm Bureau from the scene to get a cleanup crew on the way. Deal also worked with the Red Cross to make sure she had help, and she stayed with neighbors that night.

EVEN THE EXTINGUISHER WAS LUCK

The extinguisher that saved the house might not have been in that patrol car at all.

According to a Facebook post from retired Fire Chief Mark Neal, local Barbara Patton gave $2,000 to put fire extinguishers in every patrol car in the county. LaCook says Patton has family in the fire service and has always backed the department. Sheriff Tyler Hatfield also purchased additional ones from the department’s equipment budget after a fatal wreck on Cobb Hollow Road.

“At the end of the day, we should have already had extinguishers in these vehicles, but there is a cost behind it,” he says. Now, when one is used, it gets refilled and a spare goes back in the car.

Silavong doesn’t think what she did was anything special.

“I know this is gonna be so cliché,” she says. “You just do your job. You just do what you gotta do. I didn’t think about anything. I had to go put the fire out, because it was me and her, and that was it. We were out in the middle of nowhere.”

On November 4, “me and her” was enough. A deputy happened to be standing near dispatch, a GPS happened to work, and a neighbor happened to have paid for an extinguisher. On the next weekday morning out in the middle of nowhere, luck may not show up. •

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