Kings Run Road home deemed a total loss after evening fire

BEVERLY -- A home on Kings Run Road was deemed a total loss after a fire on Sunday evening.

At approximately 7:37 p.m., 911 dispatchers received a call about a house fire on Kings Run Road, off the Beverly Five Lane just south of Roy's RV Supercenter.

The Beverly Volunteer Fire Department was first to arrive at the scene and took the lead battling the blaze, which took place at the home of Joe and Sue Blankenship.

"When we arrived at the house it was fully engulfed, fire on all four sides of the home," Beverly Fire Department assistant chief Robbie Moyer told The Inter-Mountain. "Unfortunately, everything was a total loss as a result. Because of how bad the damage was, it was undetermined what caused the fire."

Joe Blankenship told The Inter-Mountain Monday that the fire started in a back room of the house, and said he believes a battery charger may have caused the blaze.

"I think it started back in the room I work in all the time and with a battery I had on charge," he said. "The fire department wasn't able to determine that because of the damage that was done. But they know where the fire started and it started in the room where the battery was being charged."

Blankenship said he was at the local movie theatre when the blaze broke out, and only his wife Sue was home at the time. He said his grandson Joey also lives at the residence and was at church at the time of the fire. 

Blankenship said he was thankful Sue made it out of the house safely and that the fire didn't start later in the night.

"It went up quickly and Sue got out of the house as soon as it started," he said. "The house was over 100 years old and there was a lot of wood there… The main thing is that we are alive and nobody was hurt. If it would have happened three or four hours later, they may have been dragging the three of us out, probably."

Blankenship said all of the couple's possessions were lost in the fire, including decades of photographs he had taken while working as an award-winning photographer for The Inter-Mountain.

"All the photographs I took for The Inter-Mountain that I had saved are gone," he said. "They dated all the way back to the 1980s. A lot of them were negatives, but I also had some on disks, and on my computer… We lost everything that was inside."

Sue Blankenship is an account representative for The Inter-Mountain.

The Elkins Fire Department, Huttonsville-Mill Creek Volunteer Fire Department, Coalton Volunteer Fire Department and Randolph County Emergency Squad assisted on the scene.

"It was a pretty big fire that took us around three hours to get out," Moyer said. "We had to shuttle some water in and call for additional assistance. It was an older house that was all wood. Nobody was hurt because of the fire and that's always what you hope for."

A GoFundMe page has been created to help the Blankenship family. As of Monday afternoon, the page had raised $3,960. Those wishing to donate can go to tinyurl.com/5b3wujmt.

"There have been a lot of people reaching out to us," Blankenship said. "We really appreciate it and are just very fortunate that everybody made it out of the house."