The community is rallying to support a Ramara Township couple who lost their home in a house fire earlier this week, just days after the mortgage had been paid off.
At 8:30 p.m. on Monday, the township fire department received a call about a structure fire on Concession Road 12, and arrived to find the home “fully involved” in flames.
At the height of the battle, 39 fire personnel were on the scene, managing to get the fire under control “fairly quickly,” said Fire Chief Tony Stong. However, they faced lingering issues with hot spots created in the home due to its steel roof.
“The hard part with any steel roof building is it acts like an oven holding the heat in,” Stong told OrilliaMatters. “Every fire is challenging, but we were there for a while putting out hot spots.”
Although the source of the fire has yet to be determined conclusively, Stong said the fire is “not suspicious in nature” and began near a wood stove inside the home. The home is a “total loss” following the fire, he said.
The owners of the home did not have insurance.
The lone occupant at the time of the blaze, Jim Philip, managed to escape the home with just the clothes on his back, while his partner, Diana Knapp, was at work in Washago.
Knapp said she received a call from a neighbour about the blaze.
“I finished what I was doing as quickly as I could, and locked up and left and then got home,” Knapp told OrilliaMatters. “As I was driving up my road, I could see the flames coming out of the roof.”
Knapp said there was previously insurance on the home, but it had lapsed.
The couple worked to pay off the mortgage and settle the estate of Philip’s late wife – who passed away in 2015 – which included the home.
“She passed away, so it's his home. I've been with him for five years,” she said. “It’s a long story, but just to get it all put into his name. It's been a while because life happens.”
Knapp and Philip were working towards getting everything in order before the house caught fire on Monday.
“Just in the past week, Jim had just paid off the mortgage, and then the next thing we were going to do because we were trying to get probate done, get everything in order,” she said. “I said 'OK, next we have to get insurance on the house.' But before we actually got the insurance, the house burned down.”
Since Monday night's devastating fire, Knapp said the couple has received an “enormous” amount of support from community members.
A GoFundMe campaign has been launched, garnering more than $4,000 in its first days online, and community members are organizing a charity dance at the Udney Hall on March 9 to benefit the couple. Among acts of kindness, family friend Jennifer Fisher helped the couple wash clothes they were able to recover from the ravaged home.
“There's no words, I can't believe that people would be so giving. I mean, Jim himself, like it brings him to tears,” Knapp said. “We just thank everybody because we've been going through a lot in the past few months.
“For the community to reach out to us so enormously, it's just amazing," she said.
For now, the couple is staying in a friend’s home, which has a basement apartment, while they figure out what they are going to do next.
“We're not sure what we're going to do from there. We're going to maybe get a mobile home or something and put it on the property and because it's going to take a while to rebuild,” Knapp said. “It's weird, because even though the house is pretty much gone, it's still home, right? You still want to be on your own property.”
Members of the area’s arts community say that Philips has been a longtime supporter of the arts.
“He is a super supportive guy, really championing everybody on social media in the art community,” said Anna Proctor. “It's a terrible thing that happened and I feel really badly for him.”
Sculptor Marg Gurr said Philips, whose late wife was also a sculptor, purchases and supplies stone for numerous local artists.
“I’ve known Jim for 15, close to 20 years,” she said. “We met at an arts event in their area … and Jim started to get involved in purchasing and supplying stone to a lot of the artists in this area.”
“He’s just a really nice guy. Jim would give you the shirt off his back without even asking why.”
