ย VIDEO: A tragedy at an apartment complex in Hot Springs gave two men the opportunity to jump into action and help on Monday night. Christian Wallace and Richard Stanley are still processing what happened at the Burchwood Harbor apartment complex after a fire engulfed an apartment building.
“I had looked over my balcony rail and I saw two women standing here putting their hands over their faces, and they were screaming,” Wallace described. A normal evening on the porch quickly turned into a scary situation. “I had looked over the rail and noticed that the trees were even orange, and there were probably 40-foot flames, and I had knocked on the window. My wife was sitting on the couch, and I said, call the fire department. There’s a fire,” he added.
Without hesitation, Wallace ran outside, and he wasn’t alone. “When I heard something about fire, I just kind of took off out the bathroom door, grabbed a flashlight and bailed,” explained Richard Stanley, a friend and neighbor of Wallace. Both Wallace and Stanley quickly realized that the apartment next to theirs was on fire. “We both froze for a minute and was like, okay, is this really what we’re gonna do? And then we just went in,” Wallace said.ย
The two braved the flames and started helping others escape. “I was on the secondary floor, and he got two couples out, and then I had ended up getting a couple out on the secondary floor. He ran all the way down to the bottom floor and knocked on the door. They came out, knocked on another door, no one answered,” Wallace said.ย
“Somebody hollered out something about kids being in there. I just kind of snapped, and I just ran over there, I went, and you got to go all the way through their living room, and there was a hallway that took a right, and they were hunkered down in the hallway where they really weren’t in smoke,” Stanley added.
Hot Springs fire officials say that a lightning strike caused the fire at the complex. Unfortunately, the building was left unsalvageable and 21 people were displaced. “We ended up within an hour accounting for everybody. Two went to the hospital with minor burns. The rest were either awoken by the fire and got out or were not present,” explained Fire Marshal Addison Dunn with the Hot Springs Fire Department.
Families returned to what was left on Tuesday morning, and one family explained that they had returned to search for their dog. Neighbors and strangers all showed up looking for ways to help. As for Stanley and Wallace, they explained that they’ve already had some help. “Don’t thank me. Thank God, because I wasn’t doing none of that, none of that was controlled by my head,” Stanley said. The Red Cross also showed up to assist on Tuesday morning.
